First‐year secondary school mathematics students’ conceptions of mathematical proofs and proving

The aim of this study is to investigate students’ conceptions about proof in mathematics and mathematics teaching. A five‐point Likert‐type questionnaire was administered in order to gather data. The sample of the study included 33 first‐year secondary school mathematics students (at the same time student teachers). The data collected were analysed and interpreted using the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results have revealed that the students think that mathematical proof has an important place in mathematics and mathematics education. The students’ studying methods for exams based on imitative reasoning which can be described as a type of reasoning built on copying proof, for example, by looking at a textbook or course notes proof or through remembering a proof algorithm. Moreover, they addressed to the differences between mathematics taught in high school and university as the main cause of their difficulties in proof and proving.     

Student views regarding online freshmen physics courses

Background: Nationally, many public universities have started to move into the online course and program market that was previously associated with for-profit institutions of higher education. Public university administrators state that students seek the flexibility of online courses. But do students want to take courses online, especially freshmen-level science courses perceived to be difficult?

Purpose: This study investigated student views related to the potential of a physics course they were currently enrolled in being offered online.

Sample: This study took place at a large, public, mid-western university and involved students enrolled in either the first or second semester of a face-to-face flipped physics course for engineering technology majors.

Design and methods: Discussions with students during the semester about their online course experiences and expectations were used to develop the concourse and subsequently the Q sample to perform a Q methodology study about students’ views regarding taking physics courses online. Additional statements for the concourse and Q sample were taken from communications with administrators at the university. In this way, the statements sorted by the students included those from students and those from administrators. Factor analysis of the Q sorts resulted in three factors, each representing a unique perspective. Interpretations of these perspectives included the analyses of the Q sorts, the researcher’s interactions with students and administrators, and students’ written responses regarding their previous online course experiences and their sorting decisions.

Results: Three unique student views emerged were named: keeping it real and face-to-face, Online could be ok depending upon the course and instructor, and Online not for STEM classes. Consensus among the views is also discussed.

Conclusions: Overall, students’ views are negative concerning having physics courses, including labs, online and those views conflict with statements expressed by administrators regarding students’ desires for online courses at the university.     

Science of Education

ABSTRACT

With more students pursuing university, it becomes essential for high schools to provide training that maximizes their graduates’ success. There is debate over whether an extra year of high school better prepares students for university. The authors used a nationally representative survey to contrast academic and employment outcomes between high school graduates of Grade 12 and Grade 13. Results suggest that Grade 13 graduates obtain higher grades in high school, are more likely to pursue university, and are less likely to be employed full time compared with Grade 12 graduates. Among students enrolled in university, Grade 13 graduates report higher grades in university and satisfaction with their program and do not transfer out of their programs compared to Grade 12 graduates. These findings highlight the importance of an additional year of high school to produce better prepared and more satisfied graduates.     

Exploring pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical capacity for formative assessment through analyses of student answers

Background: There has been an increasing emphasis on empowering pre-service and in-service science teachers to attend student reasoning and use formative assessments to guide student learning in recent years. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical capacity for formative assessment. Sample: This study took place in Turkey. The participants include 53 pre-service science teachers in their final year of schooling. All but two of the participants are female. Design and methods: We used a mixed-methods methodology in pursing this inquiry. Participants analyzed 28 responses to seven two-tiered questions given by four students of different ability levels. We explored their ability to identify the strengths and weaknesses in students’ answers. We paid particular attention to the things that the pre-service science teachers noticed in students’ explanations, the types of inferences they made about students’ conceptual understanding, and the affordances of pedagogical decisions they made. Results: The results show that the majority of participants made an evaluative judgment (i.e. the answer is correct or incorrect) in their analyses of students’ answers. Similarly, the majority of the participants recognized the type of mistake that the students made. However, they failed to successfully elaborate on fallacies, limitations, or strengths in student reasoning. We also asked the participants to make pedagogical decisions related to what needs to be done next in order to help the students to achieve academic objectives. Results show that 8% of the recommended instructional strategies were of no affordance, 64% of low-affordance, and 28% were of high affordance in terms of helping students achieve the academic objectives. Conclusion: If our goal is to improve pre-service science teachers’ noticing skills, and the affordance of feedback that they provide, engaging them in activities that asks them to attend to students’ ideas and reasoning may be useful.     

Research in the Department of Education at the State University of Utrecht‡

This study concerns students’ ideas about the superposition of electric fields. Two paper‐and‐pencil questionnaires were given to university students to investigate possible obstacles to a correct use of this principle.

The results confirm an expected difficulty about Gauss's theorem, i.e., the idea that only ‘internal’ charges create a field on a given closed surface. Another more surprising finding is that students are reluctant to admit that a field can penetrate into, or go out of, an insulator, particularly because ‘charges cannot move’.

These first findings are discussed in connection with common features of students’ reasoning about mechanics and about multivariable problems. Some directions of future research are proposed.     

The co-construction of epistemological framing in clinical interviews and implications for research in science education

ABSTRACT

Science educators demonstrated that students’ framings – their expectations of what is going on – influence how they participate, and what science knowledge they reveal, in clinical interviews. This paper complements research that explores how interviewers are likely to affect student framings, by exploring how subtler interactions can lead students to change their framings, and thus their behaviour, in unexpected ways. We present data from interviews with two students, Sarah and Omar, as they reasoned about evaporation and condensation. Sarah demonstrated spontaneous changes in how she participated over the course of the interview, whereas Omar demonstrated subtler changes that existing methods may not capture. These changes affected the nature of scientific knowledge and reasoning demonstrated by each participant, but could not be fully explained by response to interviewer behaviour. We use the constructs of footing and positioning theory to examine how students participated during the interviews, and how this affected the ways they demonstrated knowledge and reasoning about the interview topic. In both cases, footing and positioning theory allowed us to better understand the dynamic ways students engage in the interview. This paper contributes new methods for analysing complex interview dynamics, and suggests situations for which such methods are necessary.     

Complexity of reasoning about children's development: Links with teacher‐preparation content courses and supervised laboratory experience

Abstract

In a sample of 74 university students studying early childhood and pre‐kindergarten education, researchers assessed the relationships between child development knowledge, complexity of reasoning about development, prior work experience with children, and teacher‐preparation content courses and laboratory courses. There was no statistically significant association between knowledge of child development and complexity of reasoning. The former primarily involves the acquisition of facts about patterns of general change, whereas complexity of reasoning permits caregivers to apply those facts to real‐life care‐giving dilemmas. Child development knowledge was predicted by the number of completed pre‐kindergarten content courses, but not by experience with children. Complexity of reasoning was predicted by both content and laboratory courses, the effects of which were assessed separately. Findings suggest that teacher‐preparation content courses, supplemented by guided experience with children, provide a basic framework for integrating important concepts about children's growth and behavior.     

University Education and Deliberation: In Defence of Practical Reasoning

In this article I argue that the use of practical reasoning in university classrooms is necessary to establish conditions under which university teachers and students can move beyond the dominant “transmission mode” of education (teaching and learning). This mode of education had been, and in many cases remains to be prevalent in several (South African) university classrooms. I argue what it could mean for university teachers and students to reason together with one another in classroom practices. Central to reasoning together is the idea of deliberation which provides opportunities for teachers and students to experience “intelligent action” (Biesta 2004a) that could enhance educational problem solving in (and beyond) university classrooms.     

What We are Failing to Measure in Education

Abstract

This study compared the effectiveness of computer-based handwriting exercises (Lally &; Macleod, 1982) with traditional instruction in the remediation of handwriting difficulties. Thirty-six students in Grades 4 to 6 with poor handwriting received one of three different instructional methods. In Method 1, students performed computer-based handwriting exercises using the Apple Graphics Tablet, an electronic pen, and the computer monitor to track visible and invisible letters. In Method 2, conventional instruction was provided using pencil, paper, plastic overlays, and felt pens to copy and trace letter forms. In Method 3, conventional instruction using tracing and copying was provided through the computer using the Touch Window and a stylus pen. Several measures were used to assess improvement in performance. The results indicated that the traditional group using pen and paper demonstrated significant improvements from pretest to posttest on five measures, and the computer groups on two measures. The findings suggest that traditional instruction using pen and paper is the more effective treatment method.     

Identifying Essential Epistemic Heuristics for Guiding Mechanistic Reasoning in Science Learning

Mechanistic reasoning, or reasoning systematically through underlying factors and relationships that give rise to phenomena, is a powerful thinking strategy that allows one to explain and make predictions about phenomena. This article synthesizes and builds on existing frameworks to identify essential characteristics of students’ mechanistic reasoning across scientific content areas. We argue that these characteristics can be represented as epistemic heuristics, or ideas about how to direct one’s intellectual work, that implicitly guide mechanistic reasoning. We use this framework to characterize middle school students’ written explanatory accounts of two phenomena in different science content areas using these heuristics. We demonstrate evidence of heuristics in students’ accounts and show that the use of the heuristics was related to but distinct from science content knowledge. We describe how the heuristics allowed us to characterize and compare the mechanistic sophistication of account construction across science content areas. This framework captures elements of a crosscutting practical epistemology that may support students in directing the construction of mechanistic accounts across content areas over time, and it allows us to characterize that progress.     

Modelling activities integrating construction and simulation supported explanatory and evaluative reasoning

ABSTRACT

Model-based instruction offers numerous benefits to students, including increased content knowledge and critical thinking. This study explored the differences in the knowledge outcomes and reasoning processes employed by undergraduate students in an introductory biology lab as they constructed, revised, and simulated a computational model of a prokaryotic gene regulatory system. We analysed post-lesson conceptual models (n?=?335) and audio-recorded small group discussions (n?=?10) of students that either constructed and revised a computational model and then investigated a pre-constructed computational model or only investigated a pre-constructed computational model to determine the impact of constructing and revising a computational model. No significant differences were found between the mental models of students who constructed and revised a computational model and those who only simulated a pre-constructed computational model. However, this study demonstrated that constructing and revising a model before simulating it offered additional benefits to students by fostering deeper cognitive reasoning processes. Constructing and revising a model elicited more explanatory and evaluative reasoning and prompted students to discuss the underlying mechanisms of the biological system.     

Service learning as a tool to enhance future teachers’ media competence / Aprendizaje-Servicio como estrategia favorecedora del desarrollo de la competencia mediática en futuros docentes

Abstract

This paper presents a study of service learning (SL) as a methodology to facilitate the development of media competence in future teachers. The SL methodology fulfils a training and service need for two different populations: in our case, a preschool/primary school and students from the Bachelor’s in Education degrees at the Universidad de Jaén. The study involved 193 university students who carried out 63 projects involving new technologies. The goal of these projects was to produce materials to be used on smartboards, advertising materials, picture-reading materials or multimedia resources, among others. These materials were designed and created in the university classes as a part of the practical sessions of a course and were then given away to be used at a preschool/primary school. At the end of the project, the university students filled out a questionnaire that required them to compare SL to traditional activities in terms of how well each type of practice helps them to achieve the 20 competences of the course. The results show that students recognize the value of the SL methodology more than traditional practice, which suggests the relevance of this methodology for university students.     

Can we engage postgraduates in active research methodology learning? Challenges,strategies and evaluation of learning

ABSTRACT

Due to the complex nature of research methodology courses, the current study focused on implementing the active teaching and learning approach to a postgraduate research method course in a Malaysian university over an academic semester. A qualitative analysis of observations, instructor-learner interactional exchanges, students’ drafts of tasks and pre-course and focus group discussion was performed. The findings revealed three types of challenges: student-oriented challenges, subject-matter-related challenges and instructor-oriented challenges. Three main pedagogical strategies: instructional scaffolding, peer scaffolding and engaging the postgraduates in drafting their tasks were employed as a response to these challenges. Although the active teaching and learning practices resulted into students’ enhancement of the assigned research methodology tasks and positive research learning experience, such practices were time and effort-consuming. Therefore, future research will need to examine the applicability of our active teaching and learning approach to research methodology courses in different contexts.     

To walk invisible: distance students in a dual-mode university*

Abstract

This paper argues that dual mode provision has a critical role to play in widening participation. The mixed methods study drew on institutional records, an online survey (n = 126) and 17 semi-structured interviews to explore the participation experience of a group of distance graduates (n = 268) from a dual mode university. Derived from the theories of Bourdieu, a social reproduction framework was employed, using the concepts of habitus, field and capital. Findings indicate that graduates shared a predominantly working class background. They chose a dual mode university as they did not want their degree seen in any way as different from those of conventional university graduates. During their participation they experienced a sense of belonging to their peer group, but not to the university. They perceived themselves to have been less important to the university than full-time students and felt excluded from institutional supports. Implications for dual mode provision are drawn from the findings.     

The worldly space: the digital university in network time

Abstract

This article considers the effect of information technology upon teaching, learning and research in the ‘digital university’. In less than a generation the university has become a business like any other. It does so in the determining context of neoliberal globalisation and the computer revolution. The university develops through what we may now see as a disastrous ‘category error’. The article argues that humans are analogue creatures who have constructed analogue worlds that they recognise in large measure, in nature. Digital logic is nowhere recognised in nature, and is ultimately alien to us. The university is the key institution for enabling us to understand who and what we are, yet it is being undermined through the suffusion of the market logic and the digital technologies that drive it from a past we look to less, to a present we dwell in more, and a future we are less able to shape.     

Using representational tools to support historical reasoning in computer-supported collaborative learning

Abstract

In this article the authors focus on how features of a computersupported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment can elicit and support domain-specific reasoning and more specifically historical reasoning. The CSCL environment enables students to collaborate on a historical inquiry task and in writing an argumentative essay. In order to support historical reasoning the authors compared two representational tools: a graphical representation (argumentative diagram) and a linear representation (argument list). As it is assumed that an argumentative diagram can support both cognitive and interaction processes, it was expected that using this tool would result in more qualitative historical reasoning, in the chat as well as in the essay. However, the results of this study did not show a significant difference in the amount of historical reasoning between the two conditions. A possible explanation can be found in the way the students make use of the representational tool while executing the task. The tool does not only function as a cognitive tool that can elicit elaborate activities, but also as a tool through which students communicate.     

Enhancing student engagement in student experience surveys: a mixed methods study

Background

Measuring the student experience is becoming increasingly important in higher education in the UK. Student experience surveys are used as indicators of quality and form the basis of rankings of higher education institutions. They are also used by them as tools to assist their quality enhancement initiatives. However, these surveys frequently suffer from low response rates, which can reduce the reliability and usefulness of their data. The UK Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES) is a relatively new survey and suffers from a low response rate. As this survey is new, little is known about why students do not respond to it.

Purpose

This study aimed to explore the reasons why postgraduate students do not respond to the PTES.

Sample

Three hundred and fifty-five postgraduate taught students from four health faculties in one UK higher education institution completed an online survey. Of these, seven participated in one of two focus groups.

Design and methods

The online survey was completed both by students who completed the PTES in 2011 and those who did not. This provided us with cross-sectional data to compare both groups’ knowledge of PTES and their reasons for completing or not completing it. We used multivariate regression analysis to explore which variables were associated with response to PTES. We led two focus groups to explore the themes that emerged from the survey in more depth. This data was analysed by two researchers using thematic analysis.

Results

The cross-sectional data found that students who were not clear about the purpose of PTES were less likely to respond, independent of other potential predictor variables. Focus group data indicated that if postgraduate students felt a stronger connection to the university community they may be more likely to respond to PTES.

Conclusions

This study suggests that higher education institutions may wish to review their strategies for advertising student experience surveys to focus more on their purpose rather than their impact.     

Just for them to understand better: The impact of learning difficulties at university

Abstract

There has been much attention given to the needs of students with learning disabilities in Australian schools in recent years. The needs and experiences of university students with learning disabilities have received less attention. This article reports on the results of a small study of students who identified as having a range of difficulties with learning at one Australian university. Eight students across a range of discipline areas and year levels were asked about the nature of their difficulties, the kinds of adjustments they receive and their effectiveness, and for their suggestions about how these adjustments could be improved. The results pointed to the need for university lecturers to better understand the kinds of learning difficulties experienced by such students. Such an understanding can assist lecturers in knowing how to adjust their teaching and learning practices so these students can more fully participate and be successful in their university studies.     

Formal operations as predictor of university academic achievement

Abstract

In view of the postulated relationship between Piaget's theory of formal operations and academic achievement, this article investigates the extent to which university students in possession of proportional and combinatorial reasoning would perform in an educational psychology graduate course at the University of Transkei. The findings show that those who had the concepts of proportional and combinatorial reasoning significantly outperformed those who had not attained formal operations. This is a clear demonstration that pursuit of academic studies at university subsumes the acquisition of formal operations.     

Do Senior Secondary Students Possess the Moral Maturity to Negotiate Class Rules?

Abstract

Two studies are reported using written question sheets to assess attitudes to and moral reasoning about class rules among a total of 117 senior secondary school students and 87 trainee teachers. The studies confirmed the prediction of the multidimensional control model of the development of moral reasoning of Langford (1991a, b; 1992a, b) that the moral reasoning of such students about this topic is much more mature than predicted by Kohlbergian theory, their most important source of information for making moral decisions in this area being the general welfare of students and teachers. Other detailed predictions of the multidimensional control model were also, in the main, verified. It was found that, although the great majority of senior secondary students thought we ought to have those class rules that are necessary to protect the right of others to learn, there exist a small minority whose main aim is revenge upon schools and teachers and a rather larger minority who are not even prepared to uphold such rules in theory when it comes to classes in which they are not interested. It was concluded that while it is possible to reach agreement with the great majority of students of this age about rules to protect the learning of others, sanctions are needed to back class rules opposed by a minority even in theory.