Is pair programming more effective than other forms of collaboration for young students?

This study investigates differences between collaboration methods in two summer enrichment classes for students entering the sixth grade. In one treatment, students used pair programming. In the other treatment, students engaged in frequent collaboration, but worked ontheir own computer. Students in the two treatments did not differ significantly in their performance on daily quizzes or responses to attitudinal survey questions. However, the students who worked on their own computer completed exercises more quickly than those using pair programming. This study compares two learning environments with high levels of collaboration to isolate aspects of pair programming that are and are not responsible for the reported success of educational research focused on pair programming. This study expands our understanding of pair programming by moving beyond simplistic comparisons of learning environments with and without collaboration and by extending pair programming research to elementary school students.     

Learning about the world of the student: writing poetry for teacher–student understanding

The authors aim to assist teachers to gain a deeper understanding of the inner lives of students especially those with special educational needs. This aim is pursued in two ways. The first is an exploration of the experience of writing poetry using the students' sentiments, actual words and phrases – a poetic engagement. The second is to argue for the transformative potential of this poetic engagement for the practitioner seeking to ‘get alongside’ the student.     

Are instructional explanations more effective in the context of an impasse?

Effective instructional explanations help the students to construct coherent mental representations. To do so, one condition is that they must be tailored to students’ needs. It is hypothesized that explanations are more helpful if they also explicitly aid the students to detect problems in their mental representations, as this provokes an impasse that motivates students to process the explanation deeply. Participants were provided with a computer-based material on plate tectonics and then with explanatory support in the form of either a tailored explanation preceded by an impasse-trigger (I + E group) or an identical explanation without the impasse-trigger (noI + E group). After the reading of the materials they solved retention and transfer tests; their flawed ideas were also counted. Participants in the I + E group recalled more correct information, generated more transfer solutions, and showed fewer flawed ideas than those in the noI + E group. This indicates that tailored explanations combined with impasse-triggers that make explicit conflicts between the text model and the students′ models can indeed foster deep learning.     

Learning more by being taught less: a “time-for-self-study” theory explaining curricular effects on graduation rate and study duration

In this article, an alternative for Tinto’s integration theory of student persistence is proposed and tested. In the proposed theory, time available for individual study is considered a major determinant of both study duration and graduation rate of students in a particular curriculum. In this view, other activities in the curriculum, in particular lectures, constrain self-study time and therefore must have a negative impact on persistence. To test this theory, we collected study duration and graduation rate information of all—almost 14,000 students—enrolling in eight Dutch medical schools between 1989 and 1998. In addition, information was gathered regarding the timetables of each of these curricula in the particular period: lectures hours, hours spent in small-group tutorials, practicals, and time available for self-study. Structural equation modeling was used to study relations among these variables. In line with our predictions, time available for self-study was the only determinant of graduation rate and study duration. Lectures were negatively related to self-study time, negatively related to graduation rate, and positively related to study duration. The results suggest that extensive lecturing may be detrimental in higher education. However, in the curricula employing limited lecturing considerable energy was spent in supporting self-study activities of students and preventing postponement of learning. Given our findings, both activities will likely have large pay offs, in particular in curricula with low graduation rates.     

Learning by explaining orally or in written form? Text complexity matters

In this experiment, we examined whether linguistic text complexity affects effects of explaining modality on students’ learning. Students (N = 115) read a high-complex and a low-complex text. Additionally, they generated a written or an oral explanation to a fictious peer. A control group of students retrieved the content. For the low-complex text, we found no significant differences between conditions. For the high-complex text, oral explaining yielded better comprehension than writing explanations. The retrieval condition showed the lowest performance. Mediation analyses revealed that the effect of explaining modality while learning from the high-complex text was mediated by the personal references and the comprehensiveness of the generated explanations. Our findings suggest that the effect of explaining modality emerges when students are required to learn from difficult texts. Furthermore, they show that oral explaining is effective as, likely due to increases of social presence, it triggers distinct generative processes during explaining.     

Why is externally-facilitated regulated learning more effective than self-regulated learning with hypermedia?

We examined how self-regulated learning (SRL) and externally-facilitated self-regulated learning (ERL) differentially affected adolescents’ learning about the circulatory system while using hypermedia. A total of 128 middle-school and high school students with little prior knowledge of the topic were randomly assigned to either the SRL or ERL condition. Learners in the SRL condition regulated their own learning, while learners in the ERL condition had access to a human tutor who facilitated their self-regulated learning. We converged product (pretest-posttest shifts in students’ mental models and declarative knowledge measures) with process (think-aloud protocols) data to examine the effectiveness of self- versus externally-facilitated regulated learning. Findings revealed that learners in the ERL condition gained statistically significantly more declarative knowledge and that a greater number of participants in this condition displayed a more advanced mental model on the posttest. Verbal protocol data indicated that learners in the ERL condition regulated their learning by activating prior knowledge, engaging in several monitoring activities, deploying several effective strategies, and engaging in adaptive help-seeking. By contrast, learners in the SRL condition used ineffective strategies and engaged in fewer monitoring activities. Based on these findings, we present design principles for adaptive hypermedia learning environments, engineered to foster students’ self-regulated learning about complex and challenging science topics.

Learning paths in synthesis writing: Which learning path contributes most to which learning outcome?

Instructional Science - This paper presents a secondary analysis of data collected during an intervention study in which students learnt to synthesise pairs of texts presenting opposite views on...     

A Research-based Community Theater Performance to Promote Ageing: Is it More than Just a Show?

Research-based community theater can address important life issues in a safe and entertaining environment. This study investigated using a theater performance about widowhood as a medium for facilitating older people's engagement with key life events and countering negative stereotypes. Quantitative questions incorporating semistructured qualitative sections were conducted with 29 older people from a group of 250 audience members who attended the performance. The majority of participants found the performance true to life, enjoyable, of high quality, and a useful learning tool. This study illustrates the potential for wider application of research-based community theater for promoting healthy ageing in older adults.     

Academic leisure crafting: More than a respite to breath?

In the context of the increased frustration and anxiety around managerialism of universities, this article explores how a group of 11 academics, from three different universities, diverse disciplines and levels are responding collectively outside of their work. Moreover, it tracks the enactment of the ‘Slow Swimming Club’, initiated by the author and jointly participated in and shaped by these academics. The club represents a particular form of leisure crafting, called slow swimming. Using an autoethnographic approach, the impact of the Slow Swimming Club was explored over a 10-year period. The article reflects on the initial effect of this practice, around an individualised compensatory respite from the academics’ feelings of frustration and insecurity. This respite was framed in terms of temporal and aesthetic task crafting. The article then reflects on how the external, counter-performative nature of leisure crafting has opened up time and space for job crafting, back in their universities. The differentiating feature of this research is around the role of academic agency in moving beyond respite towards structural contestation and more systemic change. It also highlights the importance of the relationship between leisure and work within this crafting process. Through placing the aesthetic and temporal dimensions in the foreground, the article offers a significant conceptual contribution to crafting typology. It also extends slow scholarship, by advocating an embodied, sensual and experiential response to the fast pedagogies of managerialism.     

What traits do academics value in student writing? Insights from a psychometric approach

The number of students studying for university qualifications through the medium of English and for whom English is not their first language has increased significantly in recent years. This, along with efforts to widen access to those under-represented in higher education, has brought into focus the question of what academics see as constituting a ‘good’ piece of student writing. In this small-scale pilot study, Thurstone’s method of paired comparisons was used to establish a scale for ranking six essays in terms of how favourably each was viewed by academic lecturers when compared with every other essay in the set. Kelly’s repertory grid technique was subsequently applied to interviews conducted with the same lecturers to establish which traits they associated with the upper and lower end of the scale. Findings suggest that this methodology represents a promising approach to establishing what academic tutors regard as the key elements of good writing and thus provides an indication of what English teachers might fruitfully focus on in their teaching of the skill.     

Aversiveness of teacher-chosen interventions and student problem characteristics: Is there a relationship?

There is limited empirical evidence regarding teachers' decisions about interventions to change the behavior of students with emotional and behavioral problems. This study examined whether teachers considered such salient student characteristics as age and type of problem behavior when selecting interventions that they perceived as likely to be effective in managing students' behavior. The results suggest that both regular and special education teachers take student characteristics into consideration when making such intervention choices.     

Why do women more often intend to study abroad than men?

Higher Education - In many Western countries, women are more likely to study abroad than men. At present, there is a lack of theory-guided empirical studies searching explanations for this pattern....     

From Green to Red Tomatoes or Is there a Shortcut by which to Change the Conceptions of Teaching and Learning of College Teachers?

No general shift from a teaching to a learning paradigm in higher education is possible without a parallel change in the conceptions that college and university teachers have of teaching and learning‐‐from teaching, conceived as transmission and reception of knowledge, to teaching as facilitation of student learning. Staff development and action research can play a useful role in “defreezing” the existing conceptions and attitudes. But for a substantial change in teaching practices in the direction of learning of high quality to occur, more substantial changes in organization, curricula, funding, staff recruitment, and professional development policies are needed. The international academic community can play an important role in this paradigm shift by presenting models of good practice as well as exchanges of experiences and incentives. Such assistance is especially important for small countries in transition, like Slovenia.     

Is Response to Intervention Good Policy for Specific Learning Disability?

Abstract The reauthorized Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act ( IDEA ) established new provisions for specific learning disability (SLD) identification, including: (a) no longer requiring consideration of IQ–achievement discrepancy and (b) permitting response to intervention (RTI) as part of SLD evaluation procedures. We discuss several policy implications of these new regulations by considering the original construct of SLD, the still “experimental” status and implementation of RTI, the closer alignment of RTI objectives with No Child Left Behind than former IDEA regulations, and the shift in focus from serving as a special education identification procedure to a general education instructional procedure. We conclude by proposing several recommendations for the appropriate inclusion of both RTI and psychometric evaluation within the continuum of SLD identification procedures.     

Learning to collaborate in a peer-tutoring situation: Who learns? What is learned?

The issue of “collaborating to learn” is tackled by analysing a peer-tutoring situation aimed at providing help to students with learning difficulties. The corpus consists of a six-lesson cycle between a 15 year-old student and her 14 year-old tutee who has difficulties with German. The analysis shows that the tutor and the tutee interactively construct the asymmetry and complementarity of their roles. As a consequence, what seemed at first sight to be the tutor’s discursive and guidance abilities appears, upon closer examination, to be the result of the students’ interactional work. In this particular case, the mode of collaboration which is achieved results in the tutor taking charge of the major part of the cognitive work.     

A sociocultural perspective on teacher response: Is there a student in the room?

This article explores the implications of a sociocultural perspective on learning for the study of teacher response. From such a perspective, knowledge is seen neither as something that can be handed down ready made, nor something that can be constructed by individuals on their own. Rather, it is viewed as being socially constructed in interactive processes, and in school, intimately wedded to the activities in which teachers and students engage. Both students and teachers are seen as contributing to the interaction and thus, to the social process of knowledge construction. Yet in the literature on teacher response, the pervasive focus has been on what teachers say and do. Less attention has been paid to the students' perspective and role in the process — to how they react to, and what sense they make of, their teachers' comments. Lack of attention to the student's perspective limits the conclusions that can be drawn from research on teacher response. Three of the articles in the present issue are reviewed in light of this limitation.