A Shadow Curriculum: Incorporating Students’ Interests into the Formal Biology Curriculum

Students have been largely ignored in discussions about how best to teach science, and many students feel the curriculum is detached from their lives and interests. This article presents a strategy for incorporating students’ interests into the formal Biology curriculum, by drawing on the political meaning of “shadow government” as alternative policies developed by parties not in office. A “shadow curriculum” thus reflects the interests and information needs of those who have no voice in deciding what the formal curriculum should include, although they are the ones who are most influenced by it. High school students’ interests in three Biology topics were identified (n = 343) and retested on another student sample (n = 375), based on their solicited questions as indicators for interests. The results of this exploratory case study showed that half of the questions asked by students in the areas of genetics, the cardiovascular system and the reproductive system are not addressed by the national curriculum. Students’ questions were then expressed in the curricular language of principles, phenomena and concepts in order to create a shadow curriculum. A procedure that could be used by other researchers and practitioners to guide the development of a curriculum that is more aligned with student interests is suggested.     

Students’ Persistence in a Distributed Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership in Higher Education: A Mixed Methods Study

The purpose of this mixed methods sequential explanatory study was to identify factors contributing to students’ persistence in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Distributed Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership in Higher Education by obtaining quantitative results from surveying 278 current and former students and then following up with four purposefully selected typical respondents to explore those results in more depth. In the first, quantitative, phase, five external and internal to the program factors were found to be predictors to students’ persistence in the program: “program”, “online learning environment”, “student support services”, “faculty”, and “self-motivation”. In the qualitative follow up multiple case study analysis four major themes emerged: (1) quality of academic experiences; (2) online learning environment; (3) support and assistance; and (4) student self-motivation. The quantitative and qualitative findings from the two phases of the study are discussed with reference to prior research. Implications and recommendations for policy makers are provided.     

Teamwork — teach me, teach me not: A case study of three Australian preservice teachers

Explicit training in teaming skills (both preservice and inservice) has been identified as a key means of facilitating the effective functioning of teaching teams (Main, 2007). This case study explored how groupwork tasks within university coursework can prepare preservice education students to work effectively in teaching teams. Three students in their final year of study were primed to the skills that have been identified as necessary for successful team practices. The students then participated in a semi-structured interview about their groupwork experiences at university. Results from this study of preservice teacher education students reflected findings from studies of students’ groupwork experiences in other disciplines (i.e., business). Students reported opportunities to practise teamwork. However, they were not explicitly taught “how” to work effectively together. It was also found that the assessment focus was entirely on the final “product” and not on the group “process”.     

Two Dimensions of Student Ownership of Learning During Small-Group Work in Physics

The theoretical framework student ownership of learning is developed both theoretically and with qualitative research. The metaphor “ownership” is related to the process towards meaning making and understanding and is seen as relevant especially to improve physics instruction. The dimension group ownership of learning refers to the groups’ actions of choice and control of the management of the task; how the task is determined, performed and finally reported. The other dimension, the individual student ownership of learning, refers to an individual student’s own question/idea that comes from own experiences, interests or anomalies of understanding; an idea/question that comes back several times and leads to new insights. From literature and from our own data, we have developed categories for group and individual student ownership of learning, which were iteratively sharpened in order to identify ownership in the two dimensions. As a consequence, we argue for use of the framework student ownership of learning as a way to identify an optimal level of ownership for better learning and higher motivation in physics teaching.     

Tailoring National Standards to Early Science Teacher Identities: Building on Personal Histories to Support Beginning Practice

Individual recommendation plans (IRP) for student teaching practice were co-constructed with two methods students based on the select application of National Science Teachers Association’s National Standards for Science Teacher Preparation. Methods students completed a resume, an interview on pedagogical preferences, and a learning styles survey to determine the reform-based standards and pedagogical approaches that better fit their personal histories and identity formation as science teachers. Each case was unique with one student better meeting the Standards of “Issues” and “Science in the Community” and the other student better meeting the standards of “Inquiry” and the “Nature of Science”. Student teachers planned and taught lessons based on their IRP and were mostly successful in meeting their prescribed standards and utilizing their preferred pedagogies. However, their success in use of specific strategies supporting their approach was highly dependent upon classroom context. The use of the IRP process as a reflective tool strengthening identity formation and early practice is discussed.     

Exploring the orientations of international students in Mexico: differences by region of origin

This study examined the dispositions, experiences, and expectations of international students in a developing country to understand the increasing phenomenon of reverse student flows and the role of the political economy in international student mobility. Students’ dispositions, experiences and expectations—referred here collectively as “orientations”—served as the guiding framework for this study. Data were drawn from survey responses from 279 international students at universities throughout Mexico and analyzed to explore the orientations among students from Europe, Latin America and North America. Findings showed significant differences among international students’ dispositions, experiences, and expectations by these geographical regions of origin. In a broader context, this research addressed the important role of developing countries as not only senders but also receivers of international students. This research also demonstrated the ways that the political economy shape the orientations of students studying abroad.     

The Learning Research Cycle: Bridging Research and Practice

A science teacher and her mentor reflect on their participation in the Learning Research Cycle, a professional learning model that bridges research and practice in both university and public school contexts. Teachers do scientific research in scientists’ laboratories, then bridge their scientific experiences with the design of new classroom learning environments and teacher-driven educational research projects. Science students do scientific research via their teachers’ lessons that bridge laboratory research with classroom learning. Scientists and educational researchers bridge their research interests to create new questions centered on teaching and learning in authentic science learning environments. The authors engaged in this qualitative inquiry present their perspectives on “what goes on,” “what we have learned,” and “what it means to the larger community.”     

Problem-solving in a case-based course: Strategies for facilitating coached expertise

This paper proposes the use of specific coaching strategies to facilitate student use of expert-like problem-solving strategies while analyzing and solving instructional design case studies. Findings from an exploratory study, designed to examine changes in students' problem-solving skills as they analyzed case studies, suggested that students could show expert characteristics at times, under some circumstances, but did not perform like experts on a regular basis. At two midwestern universities, 37 students analyzed 6 to 10 case studies both in class and in on-line discussions. Comparisons were made both within and across students, as well as across time, to examine patterns and changes in student problem-solving approaches. Findings suggested that primary influences on the incidence of expert performance were more external than internal and might be more aptly characterized as “coached expertise”. Specific suggestions are included for coaching the development of student problem-solving skills within a case-based course.     

Figuring “Success” in a Bilingual High School

Using the concept of figured worlds, this article demonstrates how the faculty, staff, and students of Gregorio Luperón High School in New York City figured “success” by prioritizing the students’ linguistic and cultural resources. “Success” was constructed specifically through granting Spanish high status, developing positive teacher–student relationships, and relying upon the cultural artifact of the opportunity narrative. This qualitative ethnographic study focuses on the school-related social interactions that took place among students, teachers and staff, to explore the socially and locally constructed model of success within this bilingual high school for newly arrived, Spanish-speaking immigrant youth. Ali Michael is a PhD candidate in Teaching Learning, Curriculum and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Her academic and research interests include whiteness studies, multicultural education and anthropology of education. Norma Andrade is the Language and Latin American Coordinator and Advocate for a non-profit organization, Refugee Women’s Alliance, located in Seattle, Washington. She advocates for the immigrant and refugee communities in Washington State. Lesley Bartlett is an assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include anthropology of education, comparative and international education, sociocultural studies of literacies, transnationalism, and schooling across the Americas.     

Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Voices Describe How Their Teacher Motivated Them to do Mathematics

In this study, data in the form of (preservice teacher) student voices taken from mathematical autobiographies, written at the beginning of the semester, and end-of-semester reflections, were analyzed in order to examine why preservice elementary school teachers were highly motivated in a social constructivist mathematics course in which the teacher emphasized mastery goals. The findings suggest that students entered the course with a wide variety of feelings about mathematics and their own mathematical ability. At the end of the semester, students wrote about aspects of the course that “led to their growth as a mathematical thinker and as a mathematics teacher…” Student responses were coded within themes that emerged from the data: Struggle; Construction of meaning [mathematical language; mathematical understanding]; Grouping [working in groups]; Change [self-efficacy; math self-concept]; and the Teacher’s Role. These themes are described using student voices and within a motivation goal theory framework. The role of struggle, in relation to motivation, is discussed.     

Changing Images of the Inclined Plane: A Case Study of a Revolution in American Science Education

Between 1880 and 1920 the way science was taught in American High Schools changed dramatically. The old “lecture/demonstration” method, where information was presented to essentially passive students, was replaced by the “laboratory” method, where students performed their own experiments in specially constructed student laboratories. National leadership in education was generally weak during this period, and the new method required significant investments by the schools, but within a few decades American science education was rapidly and completely transformed. Previous studies of this fundamental change have concentrated on the activities of organizations like the NEA, the Bureau of Education and a few major universities, but the way in which these groups were able to effect actual changes in classroom practice is not completely clear. This article attempts to broaden the existing narrative by integrating the rich and largely ignored material culture of science education—such things as textbooks, lab manuals, student notebooks, science teaching instruments and scientific instrument catalogs. Surprisingly, much of this story can be seen in changes to the depiction of a single, venerable and otherwise unremarkable teaching instrument: the inclined plane.     

Descendants of “Ruth:” black Girls Coping Through the “Black Male Crisis”

This article presents the complex relationship between how black male and female identities have been constructed dichotomously in response to the gender framed “crisis” in black America. The ethnographic research study was conducted in an secondary African American History course, located in an urban school district in the southern portion of the United States. A case study of one black female student in a class of fourteen black male students was developed to deconstruct opposition and the use of resistance and empowerment by the female student. The classroom interactions among the male students, teacher, and Nicole were presented and analyzed from Nicole’s perspective. Analysis centralizes how Nicole interprets the class community, social interactions, and language used reflecting the needs of the African American males at the expense of her own social, cultural, and gender identity.     

Faculty Emphases on Alternative Course-Specific Learning Outcomes in Holland’s Model Environments: The Role of Environmental Consistency

This study examines variability in the extent to which faculty members in the disciplinary-based academic environments of Holland’s theory emphasize different student learning outcomes in their classes and whether such differences are comparable for those in “consistent” versus “inconsistent” environments. The findings show wide variation in the extent to which faculty members in four of the academic environments of Holland’s theory emphasize the alternative student learning outcomes and that such differences vary based on the level of consistency or inconsistency in the environmental profiles of the environments. The implications of these findings for future research using Holland’s theory to understand longitudinal patterns of change and stability in the attitudes, interests, and abilities of college students as well as variability in the patterns of professional attitudes and behaviors of college faculty are discussed. Attention is also devoted to the policy development and practical implications of these findings for academic advisors, career counselors, and other college and university leaders.     

Emergent pedagogy: learning to enjoy the uncontrollable—and make it productive

This essay reflects the shared experiences of four college faculty members (a biologist, a psychologist, a computer scientist, and a feminist literary scholar) working together with K-12 teachers to explore a new perspective on educational practice. It offers a novel rationale for independent thinking and learning, one that derives from rapidly developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiries in the sciences and social sciences into what are known as “complex” or “emergent” systems. Using emergent systems as a model of teaching and learning makes at least three significant contributions to our thinking bout teaching, in three very different dimensions. It invites us into an awareness that the brains of individual students and teachers operate as emergent systems that are neither possible nor desirable to control fully. It invites us to appreciate as well that the activities and benefits of a classroom are not all individual interactions between teacher and student. Interactions among students and teachers are collectively contributing to a somewhat unpredictable project with an insistently social dimension, which is in turn crucial to the individual achievements of all involved. Finally, emergent pedagogy encourages us to consider more carefully the relations between the individual classroom and the larger educational community of which it is a component, including a challenge to rethink the matter of assessment.     

Student attitudes toward learning,level of pre-knowledge and instruction type in a computer-simulation: effects on flow experiences and perceived learning outcomes

Attitudes toward learning (ATL) have been shown to influence students’ learning outcomes. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the ways in which the interaction between ATL, the learning situation, and the level of students’ prior knowledge influence affective reactions and conceptual change. In this study, a simulation of acid-base titrations was examined to assess the impact of instruction format, level of prior knowledge and students’ ATL on university-level students, with respect to flow experiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) and perceived conceptual change. Results show that the use of guiding instructions was correlated with a perceived conceptual change and high levels of “Challenge,” “Enjoyment,” and “Concentration,” but low sense of control during the exercise. Students who used the open instructions scored highly on the “Control flow” component, but their perceived learning score was lower than that for the students who used the guiding instructions. In neither case did students’ ATL or their pre-test results contribute strongly to students’ flow experiences or their perceived learning in the two different learning situations.     

The (Embodied) Performance of Physics Concepts in Lectures

Lectures are often thought of in terms of information transfer: students (do not) “get” or “construct meaning of” what physics professors (lecturers) say and the notes they put on the chalkboard (overhead). But this information transfer view does not explain, for example, why students have a clear sense of understanding while they sit in a lecture and their subsequent experiences of failure to understand their own lecture notes or textbooks while preparing for an exam. Based on a decade of studies on the embodied nature of science lectures, the purpose of this article is to articulate and exemplify a different way of understanding physics lectures. We exhibit how there is more to lectures than the talk plus notes. This informational “more” may explain (part of) the gap between students’ participative understanding that exists in the situation where they sit in the lecture on the one hand and the one where they study for an exam from their lecture notes on the other. Our results suggest that in lectures, concepts are heterogeneous performances in which meaning is synonymous with the synergistic and irreducible transactions of many different communicative modes, including gestures, body movements, body positions, prosody, and so forth.     

Burden of Acting Neither White Nor Black: Asian American Identities and Achievement in Urban Schools

Ogbu’s theory of “burden of acting white” has been one of the most frequently cited studies to explain black and white achievement gap. However, emerging studies have argued that Ogbu’s theory may be limited when examining variability of school achievement among black and white students. Research shows that in addition to culture, other social forces, such as class, peer networks, and school context may play a significant role when accounting for minority students’ academic aspirations and achievement. In the midst of this on-going debate, however, there is a limited understanding of how, if at all, theory of “acting white” plays a role for racial groups other than black and white students. By extending the discussion beyond a black-and-white discourse, this research examines how Asian American students in two different social and economic contexts, negotiate their race and ethnic identities. Framed by a prevalent model minority stereotype that conflates Asian Americans with whiteness, the findings show that portrayal of Asian “success” much like black “failure” cannot be explained solely on their cultural orientation. By comparing experiences of two groups of Korean American students—both high- and low-achieving—in different economic and school contexts, this study illustrates how the two groups of Korean American students adopt different racial strategies depending on their socioeconomic backgrounds, peer networks, and school contexts. Using Korean American students in urban schools as a case study, this research complicates and challenges our understanding of the role of culture in school achievement and illustrates how culture intersects with class, race, and schools. Jamie Lew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Education, Rutgers University-Newark, 110 Warren Street, Newark, NY, 07102-1814, USA     

Differential Patterns of Change and Stability in Student Learning Outcomes in Holland’s Academic Environments: The Role of Environmental Consistency

The findings of this study show wide variation in the learning patterns of college students in the academic environments of Holland’s theory and, more importantly, that such variability differs based on the level of “consistency” or “inconsistency” of the environments. Differences in the learning patterns of students in “consistent” academic environments tend to be more in alignment with the premises of Holland’s theory than those of students in “inconsistent” environments. Implications of these findings for future research using Holland’s theory to understand longitudinal patterns of change and stability in the attitudes, interests, and abilities of college students are discussed, and attention is devoted to policy development and practical implications for academic advisors, career counselors, campus leaders, and governmental and accrediting officials.     

The development of personal,intercultural and professional competence in international field experience in initial teacher education

This paper reports a qualitative case study of four preservice student teachers’ professional learning experiences in an international field experience programme situated in the language and cultural immersion component of a PGDE(Primary) Programme in Hong Kong. Two of the student teachers undertook the international field experience in Australia and Canada. The other two had their “non-local” field experience in mainland China1. The findings reveal student teachers' development in personal and intercultural competence in cross-cultural experiences. Their professional learning experiences in the action context, socio-professional context, and supervisory context of the cross-cultural school settings, and their reflection upon these experiences constituted the development of their professional competence. Suggestions for improvement of the international field experience programme and implications for future research are discussed.     

Students’ Socio-Scientific Reasoning in an Astrobiological Context During Work with a Digital Learning Environment

In a European project—CoReflect—researchers in seven countries are developing, implementing and evaluating teaching sequences using a web-based platform (STOCHASMOS). The interactive web-based inquiry materials support collaborative and reflective work. The learning environments will be iteratively tested and refined, during different phases of the project. All learning environments are focusing “socio-scientific issues”. In this article we report from the pilot implementation of the Swedish learning environment which has an Astrobiology context. The socio-scientific driving questions are “Should we look for, and try to contact, extraterrestrial life?”, and “Should we transform Mars into a planet where humans can live in the future?” The students were in their last year of compulsory school (16 years old), and worked together in triads. We report from the groups’ decisions and the support used for their claims. On a group level a majority of the student groups in their final statements express reluctance towards both the search of extraterrestrial life and the terraforming of Mars. The support used by the students are reported and discussed. We also look more closely into the argumentation of one of the student groups. The results presented in this article, differ from earlier studies on students’ argumentation and decision making on socio-scientific issues (Aikenhead in Science education for everyday life. Evidence-based practice. Teachers College Press, New York, (2006) for an overview), in that they suggest that students do use science related arguments—both from “core” and “frontier” science—in their argumentation and decision making.