Lecturing graphing: What features of lectures contribute to student difficulties in learning to interpret graph?

Some studies suggest that individuals having completed undergraduate science programs are often poorly prepared to use graphs in ways typical of their disciplines. Science and technology studies have identified competency in graphing as being of central importance to the practice of a scientific discipline. Given the centrality of graphing to the practice of science, an important aspect of becoming enculturated into the practices of a scientific discipline is being able to use and interpret graphs in ways that are typical to that discipline. For example, competency in this usage is important to reading, interpreting and understanding journal articles in a discipline. Undergraduate science students spend a considerable amount of time in lectures where graphical representations play a major role in the presentation of subject matter. To gain an understanding of the use of graphs in lectures and how this use contributes to student understanding, this paper provides a microanalysis of graph use in lectures drawn from artifacts compiled from videotaping all lectures and seminars in a thirteen week ecology course. This analysis focused on both the text and the geestural references made in the reading of a graph in an ecology lecture. We conclude that the common ground existing amongst scientists that help them reach an agreed upon interpretation of a graph is missing from the present lectures and then discuss the constraints this places on students, learning about graphs in lectures.     

The Use of Curry Teaching Simulations in Professional Training

Summary

This article describes how a teacher changed her method of teaching after acquiring knowledge about graphing calculators in a Professional development program. It describes one particular unit on understanding variables and graph interpretation taught in a seventh-grade science and math class. The use of graphing calculators proved to be effective in increasing student understanding of relationships between variables, graphing, and experimental design. The teacher in our project also found graphing calculators to be effective tools for teaching constructively. Our study implies that math and science teaching can be improved through the use of graphing calculators.     

‘The way I understood it,it wasn’t meant to be understood’ – when 6th grade reads Franz Kafka

In recent years, literacy problematics and different concepts (Cooperative Learning, Learning Styles) have taken up much of the school’s literature teaching. It has pushed discussions of the professional content into the background. This article takes up the content discussion for renewed debate, but now also with the aim of discussing the literary texts one can present to children in school. The research questions posed are: Which texts can justifiably be presented to children as part of teaching in school? What will happen if 10 to 12-year-old Danish school pupils are presented with classical and canonized texts by authors like Kafka, Proust and Dostoyevsky? How will they react? How will they read the texts? The point of departure for the article is an observational and interview study of a Danish 6th grade’s reading and analysis of classical and canonized adult literature. The study takes its starting point in three concepts rooted in theory, i.e. unpredictability, defamiliarization and entitlement, which are subsequently used to get to grips with the empirical part of the study. The article does not attempt to depict a hard-and-fast picture of all children being equally enthusiastic about the new texts. Instead it presents a picture of a class in which lively literary conversations are conducted. And irrespective of whether the child is one of those who enjoys the texts, whether the children are irritated, challenged or provoked by them, they are never experienced as trivial or irrelevant.     

Triadic interaction in clinical task-based interviews with mathematics teachers

A clinical task-based interview can be seen as a situation where the interviewer–interviewee interaction on a task is regulated by a system of explicit and implicit norms, values, and rules. This paper describes how documenting and mapping triadic interaction among the interviewer, the interviewee, and the knowledge negotiated can be used to increase procedural replicability of the interview and accuracy of drawn conclusions about the interviewee’s thinking process. Excerpts from interviews with 25 inservice mathematics teachers working on a task to make up a problem whose solution requires division of two fractions are discussed. The excerpts illustrate the relationship between methodological decisions taken by the interviewer during the interview and the applicability of the interview output to the research questions. A divergent analysis of the interviews with these teachers, which spanned over two years and were conducted by four interviewers, is used to offer a framework for analyzing data collected in clinical task-based interviews.     

Modes of discourse about education, peace and human rights in the 1974 UNESCO Recommendation

How do culturally, politically, and economically different actors define education in the UNESCO 1974 Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Co-operation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms? This exploration of the document aims to increase understanding of the work of organizations such as UNESCO, as well as stimulating new attention to the area of education for international understanding, peace, and human rights. The text of the Recommendation is analysed discursively, and five repertoires are identified: instruction, principled, factual, stand-taking, and adjusting, as well as a wider discourse of rationality. Repertoires construct positions for the speaker, here the General Conference of UNESCO, and for those to whom the Recommendation is addressed (member states). The adjusting discourse, in which member states are given opportunities to define alternative modes of implementation, is especially important. Identifying the modes of discourse used in the document helps to explain implicit aspects of the normative texts drafted by UNESCO and by international organizations generally. This analysis also provides a basis for reflection on the interaction between international organizations, education policy makers, and educators in this area.     

Making it REAL: Using Informational Picture Books in Preschool Classrooms

This article addresses the importance and benefits of integrating informational texts into read alouds in preschool classrooms through an instructional approach entitled REAL Time. Teachers use the REAL Time framework to pair complex storybooks with one or more informational texts in order to develop children’s understanding of key vocabulary and important real world concepts. Teachers are then encouraged to plan curricular experiences for children that deepen and extend their understanding. Such experiences help the teacher link children’s content knowledge across texts and learning experiences. While implementing REAL Time, teachers draw attention to text features and functions of informational texts in ways that build children’s understanding of print.     

Electronic Textbooks: Antecedents of Students’ Adoption and Learning Outcomes

Faculty and students are increasingly faced with the opportunity to use electronic versions of textbooks (e‐texts). Despite the advantages of e‐texts and recent advances in technology, evidence suggests that students are still reluctant to adopt and use e‐texts. This situation leads us to investigate two research questions: What factors contribute to students’ acceptance of e‐texts? Are there differences between hardcopy texts and e‐texts when it comes to course grade? We draw on a variety of perspectives (i.e., psychology, management information systems, economics, environmental studies) to build a framework that allows us to determine the motivations of students for adopting e‐texts, and the learning outcomes of e‐text adoption. Data was collected via a survey administered in the business school of a metropolitan university with approximately 20,000 students, located in the western United States. Results suggest that perceived ease‐of‐use and the price of e‐texts relative to hardcopy texts are two key motivators in e‐text adoption, while perceived usefulness, Internet self‐efficacy and environmental concerns are not significant motivators. However, there was no significant difference in the grades of e‐text adopters compared to hardcopy adopters. We conclude this paper by discussing the implications of our findings for educators.     

Beyond the Bullet Points: Teaching the Bible in Norwegian Upper Secondary Religious Education

Abstract

This qualitative study examines semi-structured interviews with four Norwegian teachers to explore how they teach biblical texts in upper secondary religious education (RE). The theoretical framework combines one model from biblical hermeneutics with one from RE. The former differentiates between the worlds behind, in, and in front of the biblical text, the latter between the universal, common religious, and religion-specific dimensions of religious narratives. Chief findings: All teachers utilize examples from the reception history of the biblical texts; they thus extend Ricoeur’s notion of the world in front of the text. The common religious aspects of biblical texts are mostly overlooked.     

Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes: Children’s Picturebooks About Death and Dying

This article explores children’s picturebooks about death and grieving by considering both psychological and literary aspects. Two questions frame this analysis: How can picturebooks, particularly written for young children, support children’s grief when someone dies? How do the illustrations and text of picture books express and convey the aesthetic and emotional experience of loss? Using both psychological research on children’s grief reactions and literary analysis of picturebooks, this paper reviews picturebooks that have been published on the topic of death from 2001 to 2011 and then closely analyzes three books that span a range of topics and approaches to death. Findings indicate that children’s picturebooks convey important psychological and cultural issues through text and illustrations. Furthermore, understanding some of the psychological and literary features of children’s picturebooks that address death and grieving can help educators to provide support and understanding for children when they experience loss.     

Scaffolding Preservice Teachers' Evaluation of Children's Science Literature: Attention to Science-Focused Genres and Use

The use of an inquiry framework to support the development of learners' scientific literacy has been supported by research on learning in science and advocated by the major science standards and policy documents. To fully engage in inquiry, however, a wide range of tools, including both activities and texts, must be employed. The successful integration of text materials requires the selection of suitable texts. This, in turn, requires an in-depth understanding of the types of science books available and their potential uses within an inquiry framework. To support preservice teachers' development of these understandings, I examined the criteria they typically employ when evaluating texts in contextualized and uncontextualized settings. In these settings, students attended primarily to visual characteristics of texts or exhibited their limited understandings of science content and text use. These results were used to develop an evaluation framework that emphasizes use in inquiry over other typical evaluation criteria.     

如何了解和掌握采访对象的心理

新闻采访是新闻工作为新闻报道所进行的调查研究过程，如何了解和掌握采访对象的心理尤为重要，笔从年龄，性别，化水平及所从事的职业等方面试图进行分析，以求获得最佳采访效果。     

三个平面看译文——评《傲慢与偏见》的两个译本

从语义分析的准确性、篇章结构的连贯性和风格移植的贴切性三个方面,比较两个译本,再现原文的得失成败。由此说明,在翻译中来自语义、句法和语用三个平面的全面移植才能使译本最大限度地接近和重现原文。     

Web-Based Training of Metacognitive Strategies for Text Comprehension: Focus on Poor Comprehenders

Metacognitive reading strategies were trained and practiced using interactive Web-based tools. Twenty middle school poor reading comprehenders were trained in two metacognitive strategies using a Web-based application called 3D-Readers. The training texts were science-oriented and merged the narrative and expository genres. Results from a within-subjects design answered two main experimental questions: (1) Were greater comprehension gains demonstrated after reading experimental texts with embedded verbal (generate questions) and visual (create a model) strategies compared to control texts? (2) Did the embedded strategies affect elective rereading of the texts? The data answered both questions in the affirmative. Comprehension, as assessed with constructed answers, was significantly higher in the experimental condition, thus demonstrating the efficacy of training verbal and visual strategies in a Web-based environment. In addition, participants elected to reread more often in the experimental condition (as assessed with number of clicks to “ScrollBack” through the text), thus demonstrating the efficacy of strategy training on text reprocessing. Interestingly, the poorer comprehenders altered their rereading behavior the most. Implications for Web-based instructional applications are discussed.     

Understanding of graphs in social science undergraduate students: selection and interpretation of graphs

How do university students understand the graphs that they read in their textbooks? How does their knowledge regarding the content and their statistical training influence this understanding? Does the kind of task demand also influence this understanding? To answer these questions, we asked a group of psychology students and a group of economics students to choose the most suitable graph for presenting the results of different psychological research studies (reports) (selection task) or to explain in words the results of the same reports shown by means of their graphic representations only (interpretation task). The results showed there were very few differences between groups. Most of the students were able to relate textual information to the adequate graph, but also revealed significant shortcomings and mistakes in their understanding of important syntactic aspects of graphs. They also interpreted the graphs correctly but their interpretation had different levels of complexity, which were not always optimal. We also identified significant differences regarding the difficulty of the reports and the kinds of misinterpretations of graphs. The two tasks thus revealed different pictures of students’ skills in reading and interpreting graphs and, consequently, how the characteristics of task demands influence their performance.     

学术英语语篇衔接手段研究综述

衔接是二语语篇产出中多维度语篇构建和二语语篇质量相关分析的焦点问题。本文从衔接的界定入手,分析了现有的学术英语语篇产出中衔接手段的研究内容和视角、研究方法和理论框架。最后,提出了学术英语语篇中衔接手段研究的走向和趋势,为未来学者进行衔接研究的有益尝试提供了理据。     

The Language of the Geography Text‐book: an historical appraisal

Graphic elicitation, i.e. asking participants to draw, is an interview technique used to focus the interviewee on the given topic or gain extra meaning not covered verbally as part of the interview. This study analyses two interview contexts which included visual elicitation. It describes a successful example in which the researcher maintained control over the mode of the planned research task (diagram) as well as another example in which slippage occurred between the mode of the planned research task (drawing) and the resulting artefact (diagram). Through this analysis, strategies for maintaining researcher control over the mode of elicitation are identified, increasing our understanding about the theory and practice of both drawings and diagrams as two different modes of visual elicitation. The paper concludes that the required control does not necessarily comprise an increase in task structure (directing participants as to how to draw). Moreover, the subject and purpose of the task are equally important. Successful researcher control then comprises a careful balance between all the three aspects of purpose, structure and subject.     

Learning difficulties related to graphing: A hermeneutic phenomenological perspective

In this paper, we illustrate the use of auto/biographical materials as part of a research process concerned with problematic aspects of learning science. Drawing on an extended study of graphing among university students and research scientists, and on the auto/biographical of and interview data with one of the authors, we point out some of the sources of difficulties of coming to understand graphs and graphing.     

An investigation of the relationship between logical thinking structures and the ability to construct and interpret line graphs

This study investigates the relationship between logical thinking structures and the ability to construct and interpret line graphs. Seventy-two subjects in 7th, 9th, and 11th grades were administered individual Piagetian tasks to assess five specific mental structures: (Euclidean spatial structures) (a) Placement and Displacement of Objects (maintaining horizontal and vertical reference frames) and (b) One–One Multiplication of Placement and Displacement Relations (coordinate systems); (c) Multiplicative Measurement; (d) Multiplicative Seriation; and (e) Proportional Reasoning. Graphing abilities were assessed by having the subjects construct and interpret numerous graphs of varying content and difficulty. To minimize the researcher's guesses about interpretation, each subject's answers and reasons were subsequently explored during a clinical interview. The results indicate significant relationships of logical thinking to graphing ability. Multiplicative seriation, multiplicative measurement, and Euclidean spatial structures positively influenced graphing abilities. Subjects who showed evidence of proportional reasoning did significantly better on many graphing situations including choosing the part of the graph with the greatest “rate of change.” Locating points on a graph without a grid was significantly related to horizontal/vertical frames of reference. Students who did not possess the logical thinking structures were more likely to be dependent upon, and influenced by, perceptual cues and less able to interpret or construct graphs correctly.