How repeated studying and testing affects multimedia learning: Evidence for adaptation to task demands

Two biases can occur in multimedia learning: overconfidence and over-reliance on text processing. The present research sought to identify these biases and to investigate whether they can be reduced, and hence learning fostered, when studying and testing are repeated. In 2 experiments (Exp.1: N = 79, Exp.2: N = 52), students learned either with text only or with text and pictures (multimedia) about how the toilet flush works, gave judgments-of-learning (JOLs), were tested on the learning contents; afterwards this study-test cycle was repeated. Results from both experiments revealed stronger overconfidence due to multimedia in both study-test cycles (JOLs higher than learning outcomes). Eye movement data showed a relative increase in attention on the picture versus text from cycle 1 to cycle 2; this relative increase in attention was related to better learning outcomes. Repeated studying and testing thus helped to reduce over-reliance on text processing in multimedia learning, fostering performance.     

The accuracy of performance task scores after resolution of rater disagreement: A Monte Carlo study

When multiple raters score a writing sample, on occasion they will award discrepant scores. To report a single score to the examinee, some method of resolving those differences must be applied to the ratings before an operational score can be reported. Several forms of resolving score discrepancies have been described in the literature. Initial studies of the various methods, however, have demonstrated that decisions about student performance may differ depending on the resolution method applied. Thus, studies are needed to investigate the quality of the scores associated with each model. To study score quality associated with each model, we conducted a Monte Carlo study and varied the factors associated with scoring and resolution to determine the conditions under which a particular resolution method might be superior.     

The concerns of teachers of gifted youth: Using concerns to improve staff support

A Concerns‐Based Adoption Model (CBAM) is discussed as a technique for training teachers of programs for the gifted.     

The educational situation: As concerns the elementary school

In 1894, when John Dewey came to Chicago, US educational leaders were reshaping the elementary school, high school, and college, institutions initially aimed at different social groups, into three 'levels' of a more integrated K-16 system. At the same time, Dewey's fellow reformers were furthering the 'new education' by advocating activity-based, cooperative subjects, including nature study and manual arts for the elementary school curriculum. In The School and Society (1899), Dewey addressed the two problems of how to integrate practical co-operative activities with academic subject matters and how to connect the subject matters and learning methods of the three educational 'levels' to provide continuity throughout the curriculum and between it and out-of-school experience. The School and Society, one of the best known of Dewey's early educational writings, argued that the success of 'new education' was 'inevitable', because it was 'part and parcel of the whole social evolution'. Dewey noted that the opportunities children previously possessed for practical learning in home and neighbourhood production had been eliminated once production moved to urban factories. The earlier common schools had merely added a layer of literacy and numeracy to the base of practical thinking abilities formed outside of school. Schools in the industrial city, however, simply had to provide these opportunities themselves. Dewey's conception of experience-based practical learning to form habits of inquiry and co-operation securing democratic life was a masterful synthesis of the 'new education', and The School and Society became an educational classic inspiring educators for a century. The Educational Situation (1902), by contrast, has received little attention. The tone is decidedly less upbeat. Far from proving 'inevitable', Dewey says, the 'new education' has come up against unanticipated obstacles because it is not an 'organic part' of the 'educational whole'. The institution, he says, remains structured by mechanical features of school organization and administration that determine educational experience 'even on its distinctively educational side'. The new education will fail unless educators can put in place a new organizational and administrative structure that both conforms with the external realities of industrial society and supports new experienced-based learning activities. The three chapters of The Educational Situation analyse the difficulties inherent in fundamental structural change, and propose structural reforms for the elementary school, high school, and college. In chapter 1, which originally appeared in 1901 as a separate essay and is reprinted here, Dewey carefully delineates the interplay between organizational and administrative structures and curriculum. His analysis of the problem of curriculum change anticipates the contemporary work of such scholars as John W. Meyer, Robert Dreeben, and 388 j. dewey Larry Cuban-and defines an issue which, arguably, has not been explored as systematically in the 100 years that have followed the publication of The Educational Situatio. Leonard J. Waks     

Methodological Reconsiderations: The Shifting Paradigms

In the struggle to gain an understanding of ourselves, we have developed a variety of explanatory theories, models, and paradigms with methods of questing answers that have been considered appropriate to the theory, model, or paradigm. Behaviorists have sought to determine the nature of relationships by means of a basic cause-effect design. They assume that laws governing behavior exist and are discernible, that cause is fundamentally external in nature, and that empirical methodologies represent the best approach to the explanation of behavior within societies. Advocates of an alternative world view (antipositivism or interpretivism) adhere to the naturalistic conception of a human being as a rule-following agent. They assume that people are conscious social actors capable of controlling their behavior, and that human behavior originates in the individual's interpretation of reality. Their research methods are aimed at exploring the situations of the actor in order to work out how individuals arrived at the interpretations and created the actions they did. Both schools of researchers seem to be tackling the same issues, but those steeped in the behavioral sciences are questing for empirical generalizations while the interpretivists are analyzing conceptual properties and the meaning of each. Yet, it is not a blind allegiance to one specific world view and its concomitant methodologies that is important but an ability to think creatively and to have a sound conceptual base on which to build a world view. Methods are the tools of scholarship and should be adapted according to the nature of the questions, not unquestioningly applied.     

Design Research: Theoretical and Methodological Issues

The term "design experiments" was introduced in 1992, in articles by Ann Brown (1992) and Allan Collins (1992). Design experiments were developed as a way to carry out formative research to test and refine educational designs based on principles derived from prior research. More recently the term design research has been applied to this kind of work. In this article, we outline the goals of design research and how it is related to other methodologies. We illustrate how design research is carried out with two very different examples. And we provide guidelines for how design research can best be carried out in the future.     

On inferring selective association: Methodological considerations

The theoretically appropriate means for demonstrating selective association are discussed and shown to be empirically necessary. Following the acquisition of an unsignaled instrumental avoidance baseline, dogs received either CS-contingent shocks (CS+) or random, independent CS/shock presentations. The CS was either a tone or a flashing light. When the CSs were subsequently presented during avoidance responding, only the tone-CS+ group showed absolute facilitation of response rate. However, both tone- and light-CS+ groups showed facilitation relative to their respective random controls due to the nonassociative inhibitory effects of the light. A bidirectionally sensitive dependent variable enabled the detection of this pattern of effects. Thus, a demonstration of selective association requires (1) appropriate controls for nonassociative effects and (2) selection of a dependent measure that is sensitive to both excitatory and inhibitory influences.     

追踪研究:方法论意义及其实施

追踪研究的方法在社会研究中所具有的方法论意义体现在两方面,首先,它具有与实验研究相似的内在逻辑,因此它能够较好地用来分析现象之间的因果关系。其次,由于追踪研究需要跨越相当长的一段时间,因此它还具有明显的解释现象变化过程的特点。论文结合笔者近期完成的一项追踪研究的实践,详细探讨了实施追踪研究的具体方法和其中的关键环节。     

Modern pedagogy,local concerns: the Junkyard on the kibbutz kindergarten

This paper focuses on the “Junkyard” (chatzar grutaot) – a unique educational environment and practice developed in kindergartens on the Israeli kibbutz in the 1940s and 1950s, and still in wide use today in kibbutz kindergartens. The Junkyard, consisting of artefacts of the adult world that are no longer in use, is an ever-changing set-up in which children’s free play is encouraged, with minimal rules for use of time, space, objects, and social relations. Anchored in the writings of its two founding educators, as well as in writings of and interviews with its advocates and instructors over the years, this paper shows how the Junkyard drew on widespread ideas about early childhood development and education, at the same time as it responded to local conditions and concerns. The paper argues that a unique conjunction of factors – material and structural, educational and pedagogical, ideological and cultural – facilitated the process by which the Junkyard was inserted relatively smoothly into the kibbutz educational landscape, in lasting ways.     

Faculty vitality in the comprehensive university: Changing context and concerns

Much of the current research on faculty vitality—including studies of faculty workload, reward structures, and morale—are focused on research universities and liberal arts colleges. Results of two surveys of faculty vitality at DePaul University, administered in 1986 and 1992, suggest that the earlier models of faculty vitality, although useful, need to be reexamined for comprehensive universities. This case study suggests that nontangible correlates, particularly institutional direction and mission articulation and their relationship to faculty workload and the reward's structure, play an important role in ensuring a balanced effort at promoting faculty vitality at comprehensive universities.