Examining the Effect of Enactment of a Geospatial Curriculum on Students’ Geospatial Thinking and Reasoning

A potential method for teaching geospatial thinking and reasoning (GTR) is through geospatially enabled learning technologies. We developed an energy resources geospatial curriculum that included learning activities with geographic information systems and virtual globes. This study investigated how 13 urban middle school teachers implemented and varied the enactment of the curriculum with their students and investigated which teacher- and student-level factors accounted for students’ GTR posttest achievement. Data included biweekly implementation surveys from teachers and energy resources content and GTR pre- and posttest achievement measures from 1,049 students. Students significantly increased both their energy resources content knowledge and their GTR skills related to energy resources at the end of the curriculum enactment. Both multiple regression and hierarchical linear modeling found that students’ initial GTR abilities and gain in energy content knowledge were significantly explanatory variables for their geospatial achievement at the end of curriculum enactment, p < .001. Teacher enactment factors, including adherence to implementing the critical components of the curriculum or the number of years the teachers had taught the curriculum, did not have significant effects on students’ geospatial posttest achievement. The findings from this study provide support that learning with geospatially enabled learning technologies can support GTR with urban middle-level learners.     

The Effects of a Flipped Classroom Model of Instruction on Students’ Performance and Attitudes Towards Chemistry

This study establishes the effects of a flipped classroom model of instruction on academic performance and attitudes of 66 first-year secondary school students towards chemistry. A pre-test and post-test experimental design was employed to assign students randomly into either the experimental or control group. In order to assess the suitability of using flipped model of instruction, students were divided in two groups. For the first group called the experimental group, a “flipped classroom” was used in which the students were given video lessons and reading materials, before the class to be revised at home. On the other hand, the second group followed traditional methodology, and it was used as control. The rate of reaction knowledge test and the chemistry attitude scale were administered. In addition, the researcher documented classroom observations, experiences, thoughts and insights regarding the intervention in a journal on a daily basis in order to enrich the data. Students were interviewed at the end of the research in order to enrich the qualitative data also. Findings from this study reveal that the flipped instruction model facilitates a shift in students’ conceptual understanding of the rate of chemical reaction significantly more than the control condition. Positive significant differences were found on all assessments with the flipped class students performing higher on average. Students in the flipped classroom model condition benefited by preparing for the lesson before the classes and had the opportunity to interact with peers and the teacher during the learning processes in the classroom. The findings support the notion that teachers should be trained or retrained on how to incorporate the flipped classroom model into their teaching and learning processes because it encourages students to be directly involved and active in the learning.     

An Experimental Study on the Effects of Different Reading Tasks on English-Majored Students’Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition

The thesis firstly introduced the incidental vocabulary acquisition and involvement load hypothesis.The empirical study explores effectiveness of different learning tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition.After analysis and comparison,the results reveal learning tasks with higher involvement load are generally more effective for incidental vocabulary acquisition than tasks with lower.     

College Students’ Psychological Needs and Intrinsic Motivation to Learn: An Examination of Self-Determination Theory

Over the last several decades, instructional communication scholars have studied and measured student motivation as an important learning outcome. Unfortunately, this research has lacked theoretical guidance and has treated student motivation as a construct that varies only in quantity, ignoring existing theory that suggests student motivation is best understood as a construct that differs in quality (i.e., intrinsic motivation). To create two new measures that incorporate theoretical explanations of student motivation, three studies (N = 1,067) were undertaken using self-determination theory (SDT) to operationalize students’ intrinsic motivation as a product of basic psychological need satisfaction. In the first two studies, the Student Psychological Needs Scale and the Intrinsic Motivation to Learn Scale were developed and validated. In the third study, parallel mediation analyses supported SDT’s prediction that the fulfillment of students’ psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, relatedness) would mediate the relationship between personalized education practices and intrinsic motivation to learn.     

Examining Effects of Poverty,Maternal Depression,and Children’s Self-Regulation Abilities on the Development of Language and Cognition in Early Childhood: An Early Head Start Perspective

Early childhood poverty is a prevalent social issue, both in the United States and in the wider international community. It has been well established that factors associated with poverty, including familial income and parental education level, can negatively affect children’s language and cognitive development, which can result in academic achievement deficits that compound across the lifespan. Additional environmental factors, specifically maternal and children’s own social–emotional development, have also been shown to impact these sensitive early childhood developmental processes. Although individual components that relate to language and cognitive development in young children have been identified, additional examination of potential associative relationships between these components is warranted. Therefore, this study explored socio-economical, health, and developmental relationships between 122 caregiver–child dyads enrolled in an Early Head Start Program where children were 1–36 months old. Results indicated strong bidirectional correlations between children’s cognitive and language development. Multiple linear regression path analysis indicated that children’s cognition and social–emotional wellbeing have a significant direct effect on their language development. Additionally, language and fine motor development were found to have a significant direct effect and social–emotional wellbeing mediated an indirect effect through language on children’s cognitive development. In light of socioeconomic and sociocultural challenges, the importance of nurturing children’s social–emotional development in relation to language and cognitive development is discussed.     

Texas Hold ‘Em: An Exploration of the Divergent Perspectives of Texas’s Campus Carry Law

One of the most pressing concerns on college campuses today is student safety. To date, nine states have passed Campus Carry legislation and more states may follow. Texas was the eighth state to pass Campus Carry legislation. Specifically, in the 2015 Legislative session, the Texas Legislature voted to allow License to Carry (LTC) holders to carry concealed weapons on college and university campuses. This law, Senate Bill 11 (SB 11), took effect in the fall 2016 at four-year universities and, a year later, took effect on two-year college campuses across Texas. At the heart of this debate, are questions that will affect college campuses across this nation: will this law make colleges safer, or more dangerous and how practical is it to allow or prevent guns on campus? This article employed a case study approach to explore the perspectives held by faculty, staff and students at a Texas community college, which is currently implementing this new law. While the vast majority of Higher Education institutions opposed this new law, its passage in the Texas legislature was swift. At the onset of this study, the researcher speculated that the Campus Carry Law would be vigorously opposed by the faculty, staff and students, but surprisingly this research revealed dramatically different perspectives held by the stakeholders mostly centered around one issue: perceptions of safety. This research also seeks to outline policy considerations for institutions in states with similar pending legislation.     

Effects of a Value-Reappraisal Intervention on Statistics Students’ Motivation and Performance

The authors investigated the effects of an exploratory value-reappraisal intervention on students’ motivation and performance in an undergraduate introductory statistics course. They sampled 82 students from 2 instructors’ sections during both the fall and spring semesters. Students were randomly assigned within each section to either the Value-Reappraisal (VR) or Control condition (C). VR presented messages about the importance of statistics and guided students in exploring potential values of learning statistics. Results showed positive effects of VR on task value, endogenous instrumentality, and a choice-behavior measure of interest. The authors found VR to affect exam performance, but only for students who had a particular instructor. This research helps broaden literature on self-regulation and expectancy-value models of motivation by focusing on the regulation of value perceptions.     

Assessment and the aims of the curriculum: An explorer’s journey

This article considers lessons learnt through involvement in several assessment projects. Early experience, in university work and in school examinations, led to an opportunity to help establish a novel system of assessment for an innovative school curriculum. Different lessons were then learnt from work on a national survey of school students’ learning of science, and different lessons again while leading a group to advise the UK government on a new scheme for national testing of all students. Many welcomed the group’s advice but politicians rejected it; however, the recoil from this defeat led to very rewarding work on formative assessment. The article ends with reflection on the conflict between the summative and the formative and ways to resolve that conflict, along with the full benefit of formative approaches that investment can secure to help teachers share responsibility for high-stakes summative assessments.     

An Action Research Focusing on the Improvement of Students’ Writing Competence

Based on the theory of Consciousness- Raising( CR),this paper proposes a teaching reform in her class,aiming to improve students’ writing competence.Activities have been carried out in their English study and different tasks have been performed at different stages to train the students to be more effective in writing.This paper has expounded the feasibility of this action research and carefully presented the teaching procedures,hoping to help teachers to become more reflective and innovative in their teaching.     

Examining the Impact of Question Surface Features on Students’ Answers to Constructed-Response Questions on Photosynthesis

One challenge in science education assessment is that students often focus on surface features of questions rather than the underlying scientific principles. We investigated how student written responses to constructed-response questions about photosynthesis vary based on two surface features of the question: the species of plant and the order of two question prompts. We asked four versions of the question with different combinations of the two plant species and order of prompts in an introductory cell biology course. We found that there was not a significant difference in the content of student responses to versions of the question stem with different species or order of prompts, using both computerized lexical analysis and expert scoring. We conducted 20 face-to-face interviews with students to further probe the effects of question wording on student responses. During the interviews, we found that students thought that the plant species was neither relevant nor confusing when answering the question. Students identified the prompts as both relevant and confusing. However, this confusion was not specific to a single version.     

Extending the Bounds of Race and Racism: Indigenous Women and the Persistence of the Black–White Paradigm of Race

In this article, I illustrate how the dominant Black–White binary paradigm of race in the United States situates Indigenous women as either racialized Others or White Others in the context of a predominantly White university. Race and racism are thus salient in the lives of Indigenous students in multiple and complex ways—ways which are rarely elaborated upon in the current research literature. Angelina E. Castagno is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.     

A Meta-analysis of the Effects of Computer Technology on School Students’ Mathematics Learning

This study examines the impact of computer technology (CT) on mathematics education in K-12 classrooms through a systematic review of existing literature. A meta-analysis of 85 independent effect sizes extracted from 46 primary studies involving a total of 36,793 learners indicated statistically significant positive effects of CT on mathematics achievement. In addition, several characteristics of primary studies were identified as having effects. For example, CT showed advantage in promoting mathematics achievement of elementary over secondary school students. As well, CT showed larger effects on the mathematics achievement of special need students than that of general education students, the positive effect of CT was greater when combined with a constructivist approach to teaching than with a traditional approach to teaching, and studies that used non-standardized tests as measures of mathematics achievement reported larger effects of CT than studies that used standardized tests. The weighted least squares univariate and multiple regression analyses indicated that mathematics achievement could be accounted for by a few technology, implementation and learner characteristics in the studies.     

Healing the Trauma of Sethe:A Psychological Study on Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Beloved is one of Toni Morrison’s most famous novels and attracts much attention from the public.This essay aims to ana?lyze the healing process of Sethe’s trauma from the perspective of psychological analysis. There are four parts. First, it introduces the plot of the story and the theory. The second part analyzes the forming of Sethe’s trauma and the third part discusses the healing process. The last part reaches the conclusion. By analyzing Sethe’s trauma from psychoanalysis, this paper aims to help these black people to reconstruct their identity and achieve renascence.     

The Mediating Effects of Student Engagement on the Relationships Between Academic Disciplines and Learning Outcomes: An Extension of Holland’s Theory

This research examined the relationships among students?? academic majors, levels of engagement, and learning outcomes within the context of Holland??s person?Cenvironment theory of vocational and educational behavior. The study focused on the role of student engagement as a mediating agent in the relationships between academic majors and student learning. Drawing on data from a stratified random sample of 20,000 seniors who participated in the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement, results revealed that students?? academic majors were significantly related to levels of engagement and learning outcomes. Student engagement was also significantly related to learning outcomes. Students?? academic majors generally were not indirectly related to learning outcomes through levels of engagement. An important exception to this result was found for students in Enterprising environments where indirect relationships among Enterprising disciplines and Enterprising learning outcomes were positive, statistically significant, and substantially larger than the direct relationship.     

The Effects of Motion Math: Bounce on Students’ Fraction Knowledge

National assessments suggest that many students do not display proficiency with fractions. Considering that time and materials are precious resources, many educators are looking to use technology to provide supplemental instruction with low demand on the instructor. The current study utilized a multiple-baseline design to examine the effects of the Motion Math: Bounce application on the fraction quantity comparison and number line placement skills of three fifth-grade students. Results indicate that Motion Math: Bounce improved the quantity comparison skills of all three participants and the number line skills of one participant. Additionally, all three participants made improvements from pre- to posttest on a measure of general fraction knowledge. Implications for future research and intervention implementation are discussed.     

Effects of the Integrated Online Advance Organizer Teaching Materials on Students’ Science Achievement and Attitude

This two-group quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of the Online Advance Organizer Concept Teaching Material (ONACOM) integrated with inquiry teaching and expository teaching methods. Grade 7 students’ posttest performances on the light unit achievement and light unit attitude tests controlled for gender, previous semester science grade, and pretest scores were analyzed. No significant treatment effects were found between the inquiry and expository approaches. However, both groups demonstrated significant pretest–posttest gains in achievement and attitude. Independent from the method used, ONACOM was judged effective in both groups as students demonstrated increased achievement and attitude scores. ONACOM has a social and semantic network-aided infrastructure that can be adapted to both methods to increase students’ achievement and improve their attitude.