Naturalistic Language Recordings Reveal “Hypervocal” Infants at High Familial Risk for Autism

Children's early language environments are related to later development. Little is known about this association in siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), who often experience language delays or have ASD. Fifty‐nine 9‐month‐old infants at high or low familial risk for ASD contributed full‐day in‐home language recordings. High‐risk infants produced more vocalizations than low‐risk peers; conversational turns and adult words did not differ by group. Vocalization differences were driven by a subgroup of “hypervocal” infants. Despite more vocalizations overall, these infants engaged in less social babbling during a standardized clinic assessment, and they experienced fewer conversational turns relative to their rate of vocalizations. Two ways in which these individual and environmental differences may relate to subsequent development are discussed.     

Techno‐pedagogy and the Conversational Learning Paradigm: Delivering the Curriculum at the Centre for Individual Language Learning

Techno‐pedagogy or the powerful combination of various technologies and pedagogy provides new opportunities to support a range of learning environments. This article describes how the Centre for Individual Language Learning (CILL) at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore applies techno‐pedagogy to a conversational self‐organised learning (S‐O‐L) environment. The concept of S‐O‐L is explained in terms of conversational constractivist learning events within a social context. We also review the pedagogy of S‐O‐L in terms of delivering task management components within a learning organisation. We then show how the CILL facility functions as a self‐organised conversational learning environment with its adapted working model of S‐O‐L pedagogy. We then discuss the three key technologies available in CILL and explain how the integration of these three technologies provides for a conversational scaffolding learning environment that helps deliver the CILL curriculum. This pedagogic process facilitates in learners the development of independent learning skills through both collaborative and individualized language learning encounters that enables them to take increased responsibility for self‐organising their own learning in both school and the community. The article concludes by discussing the benefits of techno‐pedagogic solutions and how these have shaped learning within a self‐organised conversational learning environment at CILL.     

Children's ideas about action at a distance

Children's ideas about action at a distance are analysed according to the commonsense theory. These ideas can be organized around three presuppositions which express concrete realizations of the abstract idea of interaction at a distance. The presuppositions are concerned with the uniqueness of earth, the need for connection between objects interacting at a distance, and how various forces support and focus each other. These ideas do not form a self‐consistent set of axioms to be applied coherently, but rather form a guiding framework. The chosen presuppositions are context dependent and related to the different environments of earth, a satellite, the moon and outer space. Support is preferred over connection. The relevance of these findings for instruction are discussed.     

The nature of teacher engagement at an online high school

Little research has examined the critical components of successful K‐12 online schools, due in part to the theoretical focus of current frameworks on higher education rather than characteristics of K‐12 online learners and environments. Using K‐12 online research, this paper examined teaching presence as explained by the Community of Inquiry framework and identified additional teacher roles that needed stronger emphasis. We termed the new construct teacher engagement. Teacher engagement was shown to be helpful in describing and identifying effective teacher practices at the Open High School of Utah (OHSU), a successful online charter school. Through a series of 22 interviews with over half of the OHSU faculty, it was found that teachers worked to improve student outcomes by (1) designing and organizing learning activities, (2) facilitating discourse with students and parents, (3) providing students with one‐on‐one instruction, (4) nurturing a safe and caring learning environment, (5) motivating students to engage in learning activities and (6) closely monitoring student behavior and learning. These six elements describe the core of teacher engagement.     

Teaching Urban Nature at Key Stage 2 in England: looking at what is there,not at what ecologists say should be there

In this paper it is argued that teachers in England at Key Stage 2 (KS2), i.e. teachers of pupils of 7‐11‐years‐old, have been influenced by Urban Wildlife Groups (UWGs), amongst others, in relation to what they teach in urban nature. The research presented shows that teachers have selected ideas from a set of traditional ecological values, theories and practices, originally developed for rural, not urban environments. The distinction between ‘native’ and ‘alien’ plant species and the utility of each to wildlife is a key yet contested concept, which can have pejorative and racist overtones. Some teachers may not be aware of this. From this research platform, an alternative contextual and theoretical approach is presented using the entity of the Multicultural City Ecosystem and the process of multicultural ecology. It provides a framework for thought and practical reflection amongst education officers in UWGs, curriculum planners and teachers. It accepts both historical and contemporary human induced plant movements as inevitable in a trading nation, especially to our ports and cities. In so doing, it provides curriculum planners and teachers with an approach to urban nature at KS2 which is based upon an analysis of real events, historical (and prehistoric), contemporary and future. In essence, its focus is on what is there and why it is there, not on mythological and arcadian notions ie what urban ecologists say should be there.     

Ways of relating to computer use in pre‐school activity

In the present study, three different pre‐school settings were investigated. The dual aim of the study was to analyse the teachers’ ways of relating to the computer as a tool in pre‐school activity, and to describe the three learning environments focusing upon how the computer was used. Data were collected at three Swedish pre‐schools, where one computer was available in each department. Three ways of relating to computer use were identified: as a threat to other activities, as an available option, and as an essential activity. A relationship was found between these categories and the three learning environments, characterized respectively as protective, supporting, and guiding.     

Effects of Using Thinking Routines on the Academic Results of Business Students at a Chilean Tertiary Education Institution

The present study investigates the effects of using thinking routines to promote interactive learning environments on the academic results of tertiary education students enrolled in the Cost and Budgeting course at a Chilean higher education institution during 2016. Using the quasi‐experimental methodologies Propensity Score Matching and Differences in Differences, student grade averages and exam grade averages were compared using information from both the year this initiative was implemented (2016) and the previous year (2015) to control for preexisting differences between the comparison groups. The results show that students taught using thinking routines obtain better academic results than their counterparts taught using traditional methods.     

Control is the key: Unlocking the motivation of at‐risk students

Traditional instructional environments for at‐risk (i.e., unmotivated) students are teacher controlled and provide low‐level, routine tasks. This, however, contradicts current theory and research regarding environments that enhance motivation to learn. To effectively assist motivationally disadvantaged students, instructional environments must support autonomy and challenge. Six “at‐risk” students in an alternative education program completed motivation surveys after engaging in various learning activities. Overall, the participants completed 54 surveys. Using multiple regression, involvement, boredom, confusion, competence, and desire to be doing something else were regressed on perceived challenge and perceived control. The results indicated that control and challenge were significant predictors of the motivation variables. The findings are discussed in terms of awakening to the powerful influence of instructional tasks on student motivation and desire to engage in learning activities. Limitations of the present study provide insights into future endeavors. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The relative merits of transparency: Investigating situations that support the use of robotics in developing student learning adaptability across virtual and physical computing platforms

This study examined whether developing earlier forms of knowledge in specific learning environments prepares students better for future learning when they are placed in an unfamiliar learning environment. Forty‐one students in the fifth and sixth grades learned to program robot movements using abstract concepts of speed, distance and direction. Students in high‐transparency environments learned visual programming to control robots (eg, organizing visual icons), and students in low‐transparency environments learned syntactic programming to control robots (eg, text‐based coding). Both groups received feedback and models of solutions during the learning phase. The assessment midway showed students in both conditions learned equally well when solving problems using familiar materials. However, a difference emerged when students were asked to solve new problems, using unfamiliar materials. The low‐transparency group was more successful in adapting and repurposing their knowledge to solve novel problems that required the use of unfamiliar high‐transparency materials. Students in the high‐transparency group were less successful in adapting their knowledge when solving new problems using unfamiliar low‐transparency materials. Both groups then proceeded to learn in the opposing transparency environments. The posttest revealed the benefits of initial learning in low‐transparency environments as students performed better on repeated and new inferential problems across virtual and physical platforms.     

The use of self,peer and teacher assessment as a feedback system in a learning environment aimed at fostering skills of cooperation in an entrepreneurial context

Education is criticized for producing inert knowledge and for paying too little attention to skills such as cooperating and problem solving. Powerful learning environments have the potential to overcome these educational shortcomings. The goal of this research was to find out ways in which a ‘learning enterprise’ can best be supported (coached) in order to constitute a powerful learning environment aimed at teaching certain cooperative skills in a business context. This ‘learning enterprise’ constitutes an entrepreneurial context in which students in secondary or higher education are working together to conceptualize and eventually commercialize a product. In this research, the impact of different ways of supporting a learning enterprise will be compared. These ways are based on existing guiding principles for the design of powerful learning environments and on a further elaboration of these principles in what is conceptualized as an ‘equilibrium model’. In this model, the balances that are needed between motivating students, activating them towards self‐regulated learning, coaching, structuring and steering the learning processes have been elaborated. Based on this model a differentiation between a ‘student‐controlled’, a ‘teacher‐controlled and a ‘coached approach’, as an equilibrated way between the various approaches to coaching a learning enterprise, has been worked out. We hypothesize that the coached approach will give the best learning results in relation to cooperative skills. A combination of self, peer and teacher assessment of these skills, and an adequate feedback‐strategy based on these assessments, should be an important part of approaches used. These approaches were put into practice in a design experiment, and the impact was compared by means of a pre‐test/post‐test design. Results confirmed the postulated hypotheses that there will need to be a balance between, on the one hand giving students enough freedom for self‐discovery and self‐regulation, and on the other hand steering the students in such a way that certain problems can be avoided and that every student can get optimal learning chances. An adequate assessment‐strategy is needed to search for this balance. Further, a systematic action research of the design experiences resulted in more information on how best to coach a learning enterprise. This information has been summarized in the form of general guidelines.     

Trajectories of the home learning environment across the first 5 years: associations with children's vocabulary and literacy skills at prekindergarten

Children's home learning environments were examined in a low-income sample of 1,852 children and families when children were 15, 25, 37, and 63 months. During home visits, children's participation in literacy activities, the quality of mothers' engagements with their children, and the availability of learning materials were assessed, yielding a total learning environment score at each age. At 63 months, children's vocabulary and literacy skills were assessed. Six learning environment trajectories were identified, including environments that were consistently low, environments that were consistently high, and environments characterized by varying patterns of change. The skills of children at the extremes of learning environment trajectories differed by more than 1 SD and the timing of learning experiences related to specific emerging skills.     

ICT,Leadership in Education and E‐leadership

Advances in information and communication technology are changing organisations, including those in educational settings. Old practices are being altered, and new practices, spaces and possibilities created. The changes are such that it is timely to consider whether our current leadership conceptions remain useful. In non‐educational sectors there is an emerging body of opinion and empirical research that is focusing on what is termed “e‐leadership”. Whilst e‐leadership is a recently constructed concept, with considerable conceptual ambiguity, there are significant differences in leading technology‐mediated environments. These environments appear to place greater emphasis on the ability of leaders to cope with paradoxes and dilemmas and the associated behavioural complexity, to communicate with team members and establish an appropriate social climate and to be able to convey exemplary interpersonal skills through the associated technology. There is a greater emphasis on dispersed leadership. In some situations, such as anonymous groups, formal leadership may be detrimental to group performance. More research is needed, but even at the early stage of the development of e‐leadership it is clear that leadership in technology‐mediated environments needs to be carefully considered. As more examples of these environments are developed in educational settings, e­‐leadership will become an important part of our view of educational leadership.     

Effective Schools and Home‐School‐Community Partnership Roles: A Framework for Parent Involvement

The increased interest in parent involvement as a strategy for school reform stems from two bodies of parent involvement research. One set of studies examined family learning environments; the other investigated the impact on student learning of school‐initiated parent involvement programs. This article reviews these two bodies of research, which have influenced current discussions about home‐school partnerships, shows the relationship between practices of successful home‐learning environments and effective schools research, and uses this relationship to propose a typology of home‐school‐community partnership roles and activities. When the research on effective family practices is combined with effective schools research and placed within a typology of partnership roles, schools have a framework for examining current parent involvement practices and exploring strategies that will enhance student learning both at home and at school.

     

New Learning Design in Distance Education: The impact on student perception and motivation

Many forms of e‐learning (such as online courses with authentic tasks and computer‐supported collaborative learning) have become important in distance education. Very often, such e‐learning courses or tasks are set up following constructivist design principles. Often, this leads to learning environments with authentic problems in ill‐structured tasks that are supposed to motivate students. However, constructivist design principles are difficult to implement because developers must be able to predict how students perceive the tasks and whether the tasks motivate the students. The research in this article queries some of the assumed effects. It presents a study that provides increased insight into the actual perception of electronic authentic learning tasks. The main questions are how students learn in such e‐learning environments with “virtual” reality and authentic problems and how they perceive them. To answer these questions, in two e‐learning programs developed at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) designers’ expectations were contrasted with student perceptions. The results show a gap between the two, for students experience much less authenticity than developers assume.     

Exploring high school students' and teachers' preferences toward the constructivist Internet‐based learning environments in Taiwan

This paper explores high school students' and teachers' preferences towards constructivist Internet‐based learning environments. The study proposes a framework, including two dimensions and five aspects, to illustrate the features of the Internet‐based learning environments. Based upon this framework, the Constructivist Internet‐based learning environment survey improvement (CILESI) was developed, which includes the scales of ease of use, multiple sources, student negotiation, reflective thinking, critical judgement and epistemological awareness. Questionnaire responses gathered from 630 high school students in Taiwan suggested that the CILESI showed adequate reliability in assessing students' preferences. Male students placed more emphasis on the student negotiation, critical judgement and epistemological awareness enhanced by the Internet‐based learning environments than female students did. In addition, the teachers of the sampled students (n?=?78) were also surveyed by CILESI. The teachers tended to express stronger preferences on the ease of use of the Internet‐based learning environments than did their students. However, students, when compared with their teachers, seemed to express more preferences towards the features of student negotiation, reflective thinking, critical judgement and epistemological awareness of Internet‐based learning environments.     

Governing individualized risk biographies: new class intellectuals and the problem of youth at‐risk

An apparent crisis of youth at‐risk is a key marker in contemporary debates about young people among a range of intellectuals, social commentators and experts in various domains and centres of expertise. Drawing on aspects of the reflexive modernization, governmentality and feminist literatures, this paper explores how risk discourses emerge as a means for rendering reality knowable—a technique that facilitates the management of individual biographies in institutionally structured risk environments. In this context there is intellectual work to be done in the social sciences that takes as its object the possibilities and limits of institutionalized intellectual abstraction for problematizing youth via rationalities of risk—and the limits of these rationalities for providing resources for governing our thoughts, actions and dispositions—our freedom.     

Mathematics Teachers’ Approaches to Computer‐based Instruction

Schon (1987) has criticized the normative curriculum of professional schools including technical colleges: at first basic science (mathematics, physics, etc.), then applied science, and finally technical skills of day‐to‐day practice. In Schön's opinion, the tradition of professional education is an obstacle to changing teaching methods from drill and practice to open‐learning environments. Solomon (1986) presents the different approaches which teachers take in computer‐based instruction in stages from drill and practice to open‐learning environments. This paper reports a six‐year case study, inspired by the work of Schön and Solomon, on the impact of, and the teachers’ role in, the use of computers and Mathcad in the mathematics instruction of technical colleges. The teaching experiment was started with 51 first‐year students during the academic year 1988‐1989 at the Technical Institute of Jyvaskyld. The class of mechanical engineering had 162 and the class of electrical engineering 206 lessons of mathematics during the first experimental year. Two senior lecturers of mathematics taught the classes. Before the experiment, computers had never been used in mathematics instruction at the institute. The various ways of using Mathcad were classified on the basis of the forms filled and files saved by the teachers, as well as on the notes made by the researcher. The teachers’ ways of using computers in our experiment during the years 1988‐1995 clearly showed the existence of stages. Some of the stages were the same for both teachers, but there were also some differences. Both teachers started by fitting an open computer‐based environment into the traditional instruction.     

Understanding social presence in text‐based online learning environments

This article reports on key aspects of a theory generative study into social presence in text‐based online learning environments. The focus of the article is the nature of social presence as experienced by online learners in those environments. Employing a collective case study design, the study accessed online learners’ experience‐based heuristic knowledge through a multi‐phase dialogical process which functioned as an extended interview. Among the key findings was (a) a definition of social presence drawn from learners’ experiences; (b) explication of the nature of social presence in online learning environments; (c) suggestions for the creation and sustenance of social presence in those environments; and (d) support for a relational view of social presence which emphasizes human agency in mediated social processes and foreshadows a role for social presence as a critical element of online learning environments.