Advancing knowledge of the teaching profession through web‐based assignments

Abstract

An Introduction to Teaching course was strategically developed to allow university students of many backgrounds to access, synthesize, and evaluate the teaching profession as a possible career. The authors planned a multi‐layered course that included Web‐based assignments, required and suggested readings, targeted writing assignments, and field experiences. In this study, student perceptions of the usefulness and effectiveness of the Web‐based assignments were investigated.

A survey was administered to 92 students across three course sections. Most students (85%) were positive about Web‐based research, despite some difficulty with completing the assignments. Reasons for their difficulty included lack of knowledge, incompatible software, and outdated address information. Students reported that the Web‐based assignments were one effective way to learn about the teaching profession but that more contextual projects, such as field work and writing ethnographies, were more powerful learning took. The authors examined the construction of the course for possible reasons for this perception and suggested ways to enliven the Web assignments to make them more interactive.     

美国大学工程顶点课程的设计及启示——基于美国工程教育协会2005年调查的分析

2005年美国工程教育协会的调查结果表明,美国大学根据学生的知、情、意、行四方面设计工程顶点课程,它不仅整合了学生过去学习的知识,还让学生把先前所学知识和技能应用于实践中,帮助学生理解理论和实践的相关性.围绕课程与项目的结合,美国大学工程顶点设计课程形成了自己独特的教学模式、教学方法、教学组织、教学评价目标和手段.美国大学工程顶点设计课程的成功离不开教师、资金、项目、设计流程的保障.美国大学工程顶点课程的设计经验对我国培养高质量工程人才具有重要的借鉴意义.     

The impact of diversity,prior academic achievement and goal orientation on learning performance in group capstone projects

ABSTRACT

Capstone projects are common in undergraduate programmes, providing students with a culminating educational experience designed to draw on the knowledge and skills accumulated over the course of their studies. While there are many benefits to capstone projects, they are not without challenges. In particular, when these projects are conducted in groups, forming groups to optimise the learning outcomes and managing group dynamics can be challenging. In this article, we report on the analysis of data collected from 346 undergraduate business students who completed capstone projects at a Hong Kong university. Measures included students’ learning goal (mastery and performance), satisfaction with their supervisor and group diversity in relation to gender, prior academic achievement, self-report nationality and programme of study. Analysis of this data in conjunction with student grades for the project was conducted to inform improvements in design and delivery of the capstone subject to improve students’ learning outcomes. The results showed that for groups consisting of three students, group diversity in respect to prior academic achievement as measured by grade point average (GPA) is positively related to the grade achieved in the capstone project. However, diversity in respect to the nationalities in the group was related to poorer performance. Furthermore, the more teacher-focused the group supervisor’s approach was, the worse the grade achieved for the project. The results suggest that groups made up of students of different nationalities tend to have lower grades compared to homogeneous groups. In contrast, having a group with a mix of GPAs can result in higher grades on the project. While these findings have informed our understanding of group performance on capstone projects, work is needed to fully understand what underlies the diversity effects identified which will be explored with future cohorts.     

Teaching the Self

Abstract

Teaching a business program capstone class presents a double challenge, requiring the educator to integrate different functional areas of business and evaluate student learning. This paper discusses concept maps as an active learning assessment tool in teaching a strategic management capstone course. Concept maps are used to meaningfully depict knowledge and present illustrations of relationships between concepts in a particular course. This study reviews 54 individual and 19 group concept maps collected over three semesters. The analysis affirms that concept maps are a powerful pedagogical tool that requires students to reflect on the knowledge gained during a course.     

顶点课程在高等职业教育实践中的应用

顶点课程是美国高校为高年级学生,特别是为临近毕业的学生开设的一种综合性课程,使学生反思和整合所学知识技能,帮助学生成功过渡到职业生涯。通过案例分析探讨了美国大学顶点课程的内涵,介绍顶点课程的设计、实施和评价的效果,试图为我国高等职业教育教学提供一种实践的途径和方法。     

An Exploratory Study of Minority Students’ Technology Usage and Perceptions of Technology: Nontraditional Adult Students in Technology-Based Environments

Abstract

The study examines nontraditional, African-American adult students’ use of technologies and their perceptions toward this in technology-based environments. Technology perceptions included computer self-efficacy, Internet self-efficacy, user attitude, and computer anxiety. The effects of student characteristics on these factors and the relationships between these factors were examined throughout this study. Participants included minority students who participated in face-to-face or online undergraduate courses offered in continuing education. A quantitative approach was undertaken to analyze the collected data. Results indicated that nontraditional minority students utilized basic software tools more frequently than the advanced ones, suggesting that many of them may lack the knowledge or skills for advanced technologies. Age, hours spent online, and previous online course experiences influenced students’ technology perceptions. Gender did not have an impact on technology perceptions. Internet self-efficacy was affected by most of the student characteristics variables. Computer self-efficacy was found to be a good predictor for both user attitude and computer anxiety. (Keywords: technology usage, technology perceptions, student characteristics, computer and Internet self-efficacy, minority students)     

A desktop publishing course: An alternative to internships for rural universities

Technical writing programs housed in geographically isolated universities face great challenges in regard to getting students career‐related work experience. A course in desktop publishing can provide students at rural schools with experience equivalent to internships. In the desktop publishing course I taught at Murray State University, in addition to learning principles of layout and design, students faced many challenges like those that will confront them in the workplace. They worked on projects that entailed real financial constraints and deadlines; they were required to modify their work after receiving reviews from several different individuals. In addition to providing students with experience, the course provided benefits to the university in terms of services and public relations.     

Pedagogical intersectionality: exploring content,technology, and student-centered learning through a problem based/project based approach

ABSTRACT

A narrative case study exploring the course design and implementation of a capstone undergraduate course for future teachers taught with a lens of pedagogical intersectionality, an integration of K-12 history-social science content, advocating for students, and technology. Four undergraduate students’ perspectives on the taught concepts of culturally sustaining pedagogies, universal design for learning and social justice through multimodal approaches resulting in the creation and facilitation of a digital one-day lesson (DODL) that incorporates course tenets and use of technology. Data was collected from course surveys, reflections, DODL lesson plan, and DODL Post microteaching reflections. Themes generated from the data sources were personal learning experiences, cultural respect and acknowledgement, pedagogical growing pains, fatigue, and synthesis occurring in DODL. Collaborators responded to student comments and reflected on course design and goals to foster independent learning of course tenets. Future research will involve additional analysis of subsequent sections of the course based on feedback and reflective modifications learned through this project.     

The Ecological Message of the Outdoor Magazines

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine (a) college students' attitudes and complexity of thinking about the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and (b) the effects of environment-based coursework on students' attitudes and thinking. Using self-report questionnaires in a pretest-posttest design, the authors examined attitudes in terms of their direction, extremity, ambivalence, and importance. Complexity of thinking was measured as integrative complexity. Results suggested that college students (N = 205) who had moderate and ambivalent attitudes toward the ESA wrote significantly more integratively complex essays about the issue than did students who had unambivalent attitudes. Students' integratively complex thinking was not related to the direction of their attitudes toward the ESA or its personal importance to them. Students who were enrolled in an environment-based, university-wide writing course showed a significantly greater increase in integratively complex thinking about the ESA than did students enrolled in a nonenvironment-based, university-wide writing course.     

Development of software to support argumentative reading and writing by means of creating a graphic organizer from an electronic text

This paper describes the development of a software program that supports argumentative reading and writing, especially for novice students. The software helps readers create a graphic organizer from the text as a knowledge map while they are reading and use their prior knowledge to build their own opinion as new information while they think about writing their essays. Readers using this software can read a text, underline important words or sentences, pick up and dynamically cite the underlined portions of the text onto a knowledge map as quotation nodes, illustrate a knowledge map by linking the nodes, and later write their opinion as an essay while viewing the knowledge map; thus, the software bridges argumentative reading and writing. Sixty-three freshman and sophomore students with no prior argumentative reading and writing education participated in a design case study to evaluate the software in classrooms. Thirty-four students were assigned to a class in which each student developed a knowledge map after underlining and/or highlighting a text with the software, while twenty-nine students were assigned to a class in which they simply wrote their essays after underlining and/or highlighting the text without creating knowledge maps. After receiving an instruction regarding a simplified Toulmin’s model followed by instructions for the software usage in argumentative reading and writing along with reading one training text, the students read the target text and developed their essays. The results revealed that students who drew a knowledge map based on the underlining and/or highlighting of the target text developed more argumentative essays than those who did not draw maps. Further analyses revealed that developing knowledge maps fostered an ability to capture the target text’s argument, and linking students’ ideas to the text’s argument directly on the knowledge map helped students develop more constructive essays. Accordingly, we discussed additional necessary scaffolds, such as automatic argument detection and collaborative learning functions, for improving the students’ use of appropriate reading and writing strategies.

     

Conceptual change in natural resource management students’ ecological literacy*

Conceptual change in undergraduate capstone courses provides unique opportunities to examine how students draw from multiple courses and experiences to resolve conceptual confusion. We examined how senior-level natural resource management students revised their conceptions of ‘ecosystem’ throughout their capstone course. The concept of ecosystem is complicated by a lack of shared meaning across disciplines. Our grounded theory study analyzed student coursework and pre/post interviews. It was informed by socio-cultural and conceptual change theories and used an ecological literacy metric to examine how students’ conceptualizations of the relationships between natural, ecosystem, human, and human artifact influenced their conceptions of ecosystems. Students who did not describe ecosystems as natural struggled less with integrating human society into ecosystems than their peers that did. We conclude that it is important to explicitly create shared meaning of key conceptions at the start of a capstone course to facilitate shared meaning-making and desired conceptual change during the course.     

Research,writing, and racial identity: Cross‐disciplinary connections for multicultural education

Abstract

This paper describes a classroom‐based research study designed to determine how students in an undergraduate multicultural education course experience difficult and emotional content about racism. Samples of students’ reflective writing were used as sources of data, and Janet Helms’ theory of racial identity development served as the framework for analysis. Findings suggest that coursework in multicultural education can influence white students’ racial identities. In addition, the experiences of one white student are highlighted as she grappled with issues of white privilege and multicultural teaching. This study illustrates how reflective writing in combination with teaching practices informed by psychological theory helped to expand students’ understanding of racism while facilitating the development of their racial identities.     

Do secondary school-leaving English examination results predict university students’ academic writing performance? A latent profile analysis

Abstract

Secondary school-leaving English examination results are often regarded as indicators of students’ competence to study in English-medium universities, which is usually demonstrated through source-based academic writing. In English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) contexts, many English-medium universities require local undergraduates to enrol in an academic writing course, unless they received outstanding English results in secondary school-leaving examinations. This study investigates the relationship between ESL undergraduates’ secondary school-leaving English examination results and their academic writing performance through latent profile analysis. Results show that students can be grouped into four classes of academic writing performer (AWP), namely Complex-AWP, High-AWP, Medium-AWP and Low-AWP. Surprisingly, the Complex-AWP group had the highest means in structure, argument and language, but the lowest in citation. Secondary school-leaving English examination results can generally predict students’ class membership in language, argumentation and, to some extent, structure, but not citation. An important implication is that students with high English proficiency do not necessarily do well in all aspects of academic writing. This study can inform university senior management on how to set policies about who needs an academic writing course and provide appropriate training in various aspects of academic writing for university students with diverse English proficiency.     

It threw me for a loop!: Preservice teachers’ reactions to issues‐centered social studies in the primary grades

Abstract

There is a strong theoretical base supporting the use of issues‐centered social studies. Even so, little information exists regarding its implementation at the elementary level. This reflective inquiry examines preservice teachers’ responses to my methods course, which was designed to promote issues‐centered social studies in the primary grades. The obstacles that we all encountered are discussed as well as a call for research focused on the design and implementation of issues‐centered social studies and its influence on teaching and learning in elementary classrooms. © 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

Customising Microsoft Office to develop a tutorial learning environment

Powerful applications such as Microsoft Office's Excel and Word are widely used to perform common tasks in the workplace and in education. Scripting within these applications allows unanticipated user requirements to be addressed. We show that such extensibility, intended to support office automation‐type applications, is well suited to the creation of learning activities and learning environments. We have developed a range of tutorial activities using Excel and Word in introductory mathematics, writing and economics courses. These tutorials have the dual purpose of teaching academic concepts and practical computer literacy skills. The software architecture of our learning environment includes a database‐supported back‐end to automatically record students’ responses, which allows for greater control over what students do. Additionally, this allows one to automate common procedures to improve usability and feedback automation to support learning. We have been applying our ideas for the last six years and currently 1,500 students are using the environment. We suggest that this pragmatic solution can provide a high degree of interactivity and flexibility in a range of learning contexts that represents a cost‐effective alternative for use alongside traditional approaches.     

Writing4practice in engineering courses: Implementation and assessment approaches

In this article, we analyze a two‐semester effort to integrate writing instruction into a multi‐disciplinary sophomore engineering design course in Northern Arizona University's College of Engineering and Technology. Specifically, we describe the programmatic implementation and assessment approach to evaluate whether student writing improved over the course of the semester. After discussing the reasons for taking a writing‐intensive approach to engineering, we analyze the results of a pre‐and post‐test administered over the span of an academic semester. Although the outcome of our assessment did not show significant improvement, we argue that writing instruction is important for increasing students’ overall learning skills. We conclude by pointing out several benefits and disadvantages of trying to assess writing improvement over two one‐semester periods.     

Implementing Student‐Centered Learning Practices in a Large Enrollment,Introductory Food Science and Human Nutrition Course

Informed by the latest research on how people learn, effective teachers address both aspects of the teaching–learning equation—they engage students in the course material by implementing best teaching practices and they prepare students for learning by sharing best learning practices. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of student‐centered learning practices on students’ perceptions of their ability to learn, specifically in a large enrollment, introductory food science and human nutrition course. Featured student‐centered learning practices included required assignments, optional study tools, and supplemental learning resources. A mixed method survey instrument with 5‐point Likert scales and qualitative, open‐ended questions was used to determine students’ (1) use of optional study tools and supplemental learning resources; (2) perceptions as to the quality and impact of required assignments, optional study tools, and supplemental learning resources to enhance their ability to learn; (3) perceptions as to the usefulness of required assignments, optional study tools, and supplemental learning resources to help them perform better in this course; and (4) overall satisfaction, as a learner, in this course. Overall, students identified study guides (developed using Bloom's taxonomy action verbs) (Mean = 4.34), microthemes (Mean = 4.27), and quizzes (Mean = 4.11) as the most beneficial resources to enhance their learning of the course material. Overall, 85% of students said they were extremely or very satisfied as learners in the course and nearly 75% of the students said the student‐centered learning practices should be offered to future FSHN 101 students.     

Using Online Studio Groups to Improve Writing Competency: A Pilot Study in a Quality Improvement Methods Course

Communication skills are a significant contributor to an individual's success in the workplace. Unfortunately, students often have trouble expressing their ideas in written form and the poor quality of students’ written work often impedes the learning process. This pilot study investigates the use of online writing studios within a quality improvement methods course and the impact of this intervention on students’ writing competency and perceptions about the writing process. The impact of this approach on student performance is evaluated within and across semesters using comparative statistical analyses. Results show that students who participated in online writing studios performed better (i.e., at least one rubric level higher) on their final written assignments for the course compared to students who did not, and that this approach is associated with improved students’ perceptions about the writing process. This research suggests that the use of online writing studios within a content‐specific course can incrementally improve students’ writing competency over the course of one semester, and can positively affect the learning of written communication skills and change students’ perceptions about various aspects of the writing process.     

Teaching the Concept of Desert Ecosystem

Summaries

English

In order to test the possibilities of the desert as an educational resource for ecosystem study a development programme was started at the Institute for Desert Research in Israel in 1972. The objectives of the investigation were:

(1) To study the structure and function of a loessial plain and rocky hill‐top ecosystem in the Negev desert highlands.

(2) To develop an ecology course for teaching the concept of the desert ecosystem. The course should demonstrate the structure, function and methodology of desert‐ecosystem investigation.

(3) To evaluate the ability of high school, teachers’ training college and university students for modelling and analysing desert ecosystems.

The investigation showed that the teaching of a field‐oriented ecology course in a relatively simple ecosystem improves students’ understanding of principles and concepts of system ecology and assists them in the use of investigatory systems approach. Participants were able to choose the main entities which compose the system, define the relationship between them, specify the mechanisms by which changes in the system take place, and to model and analyse the system.