Should we be encouraging pupils to ask more questions?

This article investigates the issue of secondary school pupils asking questions. This is an important topic on which very little has been published to date. The article reviews the current literature, which almost exclusively reports the lack of student initiated, content related questioning in classrooms. A small study is described that challenges this view, finding a significantly greater level of student participation, a high percentage of inquiry driven questions and little reluctance on the part of pupils to participate actively in lessons. However, when these questioning patterns, which appear to indicate exemplary lessons on paper, are examined in terms of pupil learning, it is found that large numbers of student questions can lead to severe disruption unless adequately controlled. For effective learning to take place, it is a vital that the learner has the opportunity to ask questions of the teacher. The vast bulk of the literature explores this topic through quantitative analysis of questioning patterns and suggested strategies for increasing the quality and frequency of pupil’s questions. This article reviews this research and explores the issue further through classroom observations, pupil questionnaires and interviews with teachers. The findings are compared with the current paradigm and the issue is discussed in terms of impact on pupil learning.     

How can action learning contribute to social capital?

This paper explores the contribution that action learning can make to the formation of social capital via experiences of action learning projects in NHS Pathology Services in the UK. The paper describes the development of action learning practice in recent years, reviews the notion of social capital and considers how action learning might contribute to its formation. A case study of action learning in the development of a locally unified pathology service is used to illustrate the processes by which actions and learnings may be transferred and extended from sets to contribute to organisational learning in wider systems and networks.     

How to ask about the time?

一、when用来询问任何时间。例:1)-When were you born?你什么时候生的? -I was born in1991,我生于1991年。2),-When do you usually go out for a walk?你通常什么时候出去散步?     

What am I to action learning and what is action learning to me?

This account of practice charts one organisation development practitioner’s experience of the influence of action learning (AL) at various points in his career, from the early 1970s to the present day. It explores the impact of AL upon his practice over the years, chronicling various episodes which had strongest impact. It contrasts AL as it was in its formative years in the UK with how it is now, asking some questions as to how the early pioneering spirit might sustain the face of forces for commoditisation.     

How should theory guide a ‘shift to digital’ in mobile game-based learning?

Educational technology research and development - This paper provides a theory-based critique and response to the Giannakas et al. [Educational Technology Research and Development, 66,...     

Reflections on ‘creative’ action learning in business education: some issues in its theory and practice

The purpose of this paper is to consider some issues in the uses of what we have termed ‘creative’ action learning in a business education context, and to review some aspects of its practice. A review of the literature, including its use in higher education, is followed by a case illustration of its use in a UK business school with predominantly international students. Action learning is principally thought of as a human resource development practice and is widely used in a variety of public and private sector organisations. The focus here, however, is on the use of action learning in a business school setting and the application of specific creative thinking tools, in order to explore its potential for developing collaborative peer learning and support.     

Can undergraduate biology students learn to ask higher level questions?

Our goals in this study were to explore the type of written questions students ask after reading one or more chapters from their textbook, and to investigate the ability of students to improve their questions during the course of a single semester. In order to classify student's questions we used a taxonomy that we have developed specifically for this purpose. Two comparable populations were examined: Undergraduate students in a large, introductory biology class who were taught in traditional lecture format, and students in a similar class who were taught in cooperative/active learning style. After the taxonomy was presented to the active learning class, more students were able to pose better, written questions. Their questions became more insightful, thoughtful, and content‐related, and were not easily answered by consulting the textbook or another readily available source. The best questions could be recast as scientific research questions (i.e., hypotheses). In contrast, when the taxonomy was presented to students in the traditionally taught class, the quality of student‐posed questions was largely unchanged. Various explanations for the difference in outcomes are discussed, and methods are suggested about how generally to encourage students' questions and to improve their question‐asking skills regardless of overall teaching style. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 854–870, 2000     

Bourdieu’s habitus and field: implications on the practice and theory of critical action learning

This paper considers the logic of practice of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to critical action learning: in particular habitus which is co-created with field and the interplay amongst the two in the form of misrecognition and risk. We draw on interviews with participants who have experienced action learning as part of an NHS leadership programme. We argue that Bourdieu provides helpful ways of understanding and explaining the complex processes of social interactions which are centre stage in action learning – especially the ‘social friction’ through which action learners gain new insights and new prompts to action in their workplace from learning set members. These insights can support action learning practitioners keen to explore their own practice.     

How different are students of school psychology and clinical psychology?

Based on many years of training students in both school and clinical psychology, the authors have formulated some impressions of differences and similarities found in these trainees. While generalizations remain tentative and call for research, the students in each of these disciplines seem to present different patterns in cognitive styles, perceptions of clients, conceptions of professional role, and personality characteristics. In personality, the students in these fields often display differences in need for structure, need for external support, social maturity, and desire for autonomous professional functioning. Differences seem to be related to variations in previous work and educational experiences, and to differences in age, sex and marital status. Implications for quality of service offered and training needs are outlined.     

When does an opportunity become an opportunity? Unpacking classroom practice through the lens of ecological psychology

Drawing on ecological psychology, this paper considers how student engagement is an accomplishment of the classroom system. Specifically, this paper presents an analysis of two teachers and their students who were using a project-based unit in their mathematics classes. The two teachers used identical curricular materials, but had dramatically different personal histories of teaching and different instructional practices. Our goal is to investigate the role of the teacher in supporting student engagement by considering the kinds of opportunities to learn that were presented by the teacher, and the relationship between those opportunities to learn and the ways their students engaged. Pragmatically, this paper contributes to our understanding of how teachers’ framing of activity significantly impacts the ways that students are likely to engage tasks. Theoretically, this paper highlights the interactional nature of learning, with the goal of clarifying why learning is not simply an individual accomplishment.     

Feeling good,learning better? Effectivity of an emotional design procedure in multimedia learning

Emotional designing describes the elicitation of positive affect during learning through specific design elements of the learning environment to enhance learning. This experimental study examined the effectivity of an emotional design procedure on learning performance. Moreover, the learner’s affective states before learning were taken into consideration as possible moderators. 145 university students learned for 20?min either in a multimedia positive affect inducing learning environment (n?=?85) or a neutral multimedia learning environment (n?=?60). The Affect was measured before, during, and after learning. Performance was tested afterwards. To control for possible confounding effects, achievement motivation, emotion regulation, and situational interest were measured. In contrast to earlier findings, no superiority effect of the emotional design procedure was found. Furthermore, the effectivity of the emotional design procedure was not moderated by student’s prior effective states. However, there was a main influence of student’s positive affect on transfer performance.     

Does multimedia learning theory extend to middle-school students?

The purpose of this study is to translate principles of multimedia learning from college-age readers to middle grade students, when reading science texts with a supporting diagram. In this experimental study, sixth-grade students (n = 180) were randomly assigned to display conditions before reading. Each student read two explanatory sciences passages, a life-science and a physical science text. Passages were accompanied by either no illustrations (control), illustrations of the cycle with labels for each part (parts), illustrations of the cycle with labels for each major process (steps), or illustrations showing the labels for each part and each major process (parts and steps). Additionally, there were two text conditions in which half of the students read standard text (control) and half read texts with cues which indicated to students when to access the diagrams (cued). Through ANOVA analysis, in the life-science text students showed modest improvement (partial η² = .18) from the addition of diagrams, with the parts diagram and the steps diagram outperforming the control. In the physical science text, students did not receive benefit from the diagrams. Findings did not replicate results from college-age readers to younger readers, nor between the two texts with younger readers. These results raise concern for the application of multimedia design theory to classroom practice.     

Safe or unsafe? The paradox of action learning

Business Driven Action Learning (BDAL), as a learning philosophy that attempts to create real value for business is often used by executive education providers in their management development programmes. As the action learning facilitator, I found that the learning that took place during such a management development programme resulted in participants experiencing stress, anxiety and high levels of frustration, which threatened the learning process. The resulting paradox in the learning environment is that the same anxiety that is necessary to ensure that learning took place has the propensity, if too high to hamper learning. Utilising the findings from this research, this account of practice makes recommendations for the action learning facilitator to consider while guiding action learning sets (groups). The facilitator can alleviate many of the fears by emphasising that anxiety is necessary in the learning process. The facilitator can mediate the learning relationship between the individual participant and the learning environment as depicted in the model at the end of the article.     

Nurturing learning or encouraging dependency? Teacher constructions of students in lower attainment groups in English secondary schools

‘Ability’ or attainment grouping can introduce an additional label that influences teachers’ expectations of students in specific attainment groups. This paper is based on a survey of 597 teachers across 82 schools and 34 teacher interviews in 10 schools undertaken as part of a large-scale mixed-methods study in England. The paper focuses on English and mathematics teachers’ expectations of secondary school students in lower attainment groups, and explores how low-attaining students are constructed as learners who benefit from specific approaches to learning justified through discourses of nurturing and protection. The authors argue that the adoption of different pedagogical approaches for groups of low-attaining learners to nurture them may in some cases be fostering dependency on teachers and cap opportunities for more independent learning. Furthermore, more inclusive whole-school learning-culture approaches may better allow for students across the attainment range to become independent learners.     

How are feelings of difficulty and familiarity linked to learning behaviors and gains in a complex science learning task?

European Journal of Psychology of Education - The feelings of difficulty and familiarity (FOD and FOF) are two types of metacognitive experiences. Both may influence student engagement and the...     

Are instructions in video format always better than photographs when learning manual techniques? The case of learning how to do sutures

In faculties of medicine today, a growing number of medical procedures are taught in manual techniques workshops. These workshops leave the students only very little time to train. One solution to this problem would be to provide medical students with an opportunity to practice these skills by themselves thanks to online learning materials. In order to determine the instruction presentation medium best suited to complete this training, different formats were compared (video + audio, video + text, and photographs + text). Forty-eight students were required to do five sutures using one of these formats. Their performance was assessed by time measurements and measurements of the quality of the knots. For all of the time indicators, the results show that the videos were more effective than the photographs for the first trial. This trend was reversed for the following trials, where the performance levels recorded using the photographs were better than those using the videos. The quality of the knots, however, was systematically better with the photographs than with the videos for all of the trials.