The Importance of Epistemic Cognition in Student-Centred Learning

To infer the sophistication ofepistemic thinking in a sample of undergraduatestudents, 25 participants completed afree-response task in which they were asked togive reasons for their agreement ordisagreement with a small number of beliefsabout the role of tutorials and of tutors ingaining knowledge. Responses were analysedaccording to King and Kitchener's (1994) stagesof reasoning, revealing that the justificationsoffered were either at the stages ofpre-reflective or quasi-reflective thinkingwith none exhibiting reflective thinking. Thefindings have two main pedagogicalimplications: first that good teaching beunderstood not as a set of performance skillswhich may only be opportunistically related tostudents' extant conceptualisations but as thelocus through which students confront their ownepistemic beliefs. A second implication isthat to extend students' reasoning, teachingpractices must focus explicitly on thedifficult issue of what counts as evidence.     

Smithsonian Team Flickr: a library,archives, and museums collaboration in web 2.0 space

The Flickr Commons was created as a forum for institutions to share their rich photographic collections with the emerging Web 2.0 audience of Flickr; the Smithsonian Institution was the fourth member of the Commons. The Smithsonian effort was a direct collaborative effort of the libraries, archives, museums, and information technology staff that generated new pathways for collaboration between these units. As the world’s largest museum complex, these Smithsonian units serve as a microcosm for collaboration in the information age. The Flickr Commons project provided insights into how the knowledge, skills, and abilities of libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) can converge in the Web 2.0 environment to provide collection access to new, and in some cases unknown, audiences. Simultaneously, by putting “LAM” content into an environment that allows for direct interaction by these audiences, the knowledge of the content for holding institutions is enriched. By exposing Smithsonian content within the Flickr environment, the Institution is learning what content is desired by the Web 2.0 world, how to bring crowd-sourcing into professionally curated collections, and how to bring diverse institutional skills together in a collaborative project.     

On the drivers of eco-innovations: Empirical evidence from the UK

The environmental economics literature emphasises the key role that environmental regulations play in stimulating eco-innovations. Innovation literature, on the other hand, underlines other important determinants of eco-innovations, mainly the supply-side factors such as firms’ organisational capabilities and demand-side mechanisms, such as customer requirements and societal requirements on corporate social responsibility (CSR). This paper brings together the views of these different disciplines and provides empirical insights on the drivers of eco-innovations based on a novel dataset of 1566 UK firms that responded to the Government Survey of Environmental Protection Expenditure by Industry in 2006. By applying the Heckman selection model, our findings indicate that demand factors affect the decision of the firm to undertake eco-innovations whilst these factors exhibit no impact upon the level of investments in eco-innovations. Hence, we suggest that firms initiate eco-innovations in order to satisfy the minimum customer and societal requirements, yet, increased investments in eco-innovations are stimulated by other factors such as cost savings, firms’ organisational capabilities, and stricter regulations. Based on a quantile regression analysis, the paper offers interesting insights for policy makers, by showing that the stringency of environmental regulations affects eco-innovations of the less innovative firms differently from those of the more innovative firms.     

The relationships among some components of student-centred inquiry methods and students' perceptions of the outcomes of biology teaching

Conclusions The results of this study suggest that an analytic approach to classroom research is worth pursuing. It was found possible to identify and measure components of “student-centred inquiry” teaching which were not highly intercorrelated. It was also found that these components were differentially related to student outcomes. It would be desirable to establish whether the same relationships hold in different educational situations or when different measures are used. In particular, the relationships between teacher-pupil relationships and affective outcomes and between student decision making and cognitive process outcomes seem worthy of further investigation. This paper is based on work done at The Ohio State University in partial fulfilment of requirements for the Ph.D. Particular acknowledgement is given to the author's advisor, Dr Robert W. Howe, for his encouragement and guidance.     

Facilitating Self-Regulation in Higher Education Through Self-Report

For the purpose of examining a tool to enable students in higher education to systematically reflect on their own self-regulation, a modified version of the Martinez-Pons Scale of Self-Regulation was used in a cohort study of 75 first-year undergraduate students in a Scottish University. Statistical analyses of the data revealed that, consequent to the intervention, participants reported greater use of self-regulatory behaviour. The reported change is explored through the lenses of expertise, pedagogy and personal epistemology. While this study cannot explain the detail of this reported change, its purpose was nevertheless met insofar as a structured self-recording instrument, to focus and inform students on the nature and effectiveness of their current learning behaviour, could be a useful and readily-available pedagogic tool for higher education tutors who wish some support in their practice.     

Pedagogical literacy: What it means and what it allows

In the context of literacy being understood as an evolving concept, this article argues that a particular form of literacy, pedagogical literacy, is an important cognitive tool for a developed conceptualisation of pedagogical content knowledge and that, by extension, being pedagogically literate is an integral feature of being a professional teacher. Pedagogical literacy is a reflexive concept in which reading and writing (through a knowledge-transforming model) about pedagogical content knowledge is the essential means through which the teacher's pedagogical reasoning develops.     

The psychological dimension of transformation in teacher learning

Against a background which recognises pedagogical content knowledge as the distinctive element of teacher competence/expertise, this theoretical essay argues for its central construct – that of transformation – to be understood by teachers and teacher educators in psychological terms (as was originally proposed by Dewey). Transformation requires teachers to fashion disciplinary knowledge such that it is accessible to the learner. It is argued that for transformation to happen, teacher thinking must include a sophisticated grasp of cognition and metacognition if teachers are to be characterised as competent, let alone expert. This article is written within a context of considerable social and academic scrutiny in the UK of the form and content of professional teacher preparation and development. In recent years, the contribution of psychological knowledge to teacher education has been filtered through procedural lenses of how best to ‘manage classrooms’, ‘assess learning’, ‘build confidence’ or whatever without a matched concern for psychological constructs through which such issues might be interpreted; thus, leaving teachers vulnerable in their professional understandings of learning and its complexities. That society now requires high-level cognitive engagement amongst its participants places cognitive and metacognitive demands on teachers which can only be met if they themselves are conceptually equipped.     

Wikidata: Recruiting the Crowd to Power Access to Digital Archives

The web is the first stop for information seekers. As holders of the world’s cultural artifacts, cultural heritage organizations possess important information about the world throughout history. However, much of this is “locked down” unless information seekers make the effort to visit institutional websites. As a sector, we haven’t yet made our resources and scholarship accessible in the online spaces that knowledge seekers frequent.

When Wikipedia launched in 2001, no one could have predicted its place today as the largest and most-used crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the world. As Wikipedia and its sister projects have taken the place as the gateway to the World Wide Web, cultural heritage organizations need to reconcile its place in the online information space. With the emergence of Wikidata, the central storage for structured data of Wikimedia sister projects, in 2012, cultural heritage organizations have the opportunity to “get on the ground floor” of leveraging their data in a free and open repository. This paper will look at how cultural heritage organizations can work with Wikidata, positioning themselves to become a more useful and accessible knowledge resource to the world.