Exploring college students’ cognitive patterns during reasoning*

This research aimed to investigate the nature of cognitive processes when college students reason about evidence on global climate change (GCC). Twenty-six undergraduate students participated in this qualitative study, where they were interviewed to evaluate competing arguments on key issues related to GCC and discuss their own perspectives. Constant comparative analysis of data from think-aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews revealed three patterns of reasoning: minimum reasoning, constrained reasoning, and deliberative reasoning. Minimum reasoning demonstrated that participants predominantly favoured arguments which supported their own beliefs, with limited reasoning about the relative correctness of opposing arguments. Constrained reasoning showed participants’ emphasis on surface features of evidence on GCC rather than its scientific underpinnings. In contrast, deliberative reasoning involved more sophisticated cognitive efforts in coordinating evidence and claims, and a key characteristic of this pattern was in-depth statistical and causal reasoning. The current findings added to our understanding of college students’ reasoning processes when they are faced with controversial issues like GCC. This work contributed to current efforts in using cognitive research to inform science and environmental education, and laid a foundation for future endeavours in promoting scientific reasoning and argumentation in climate change education.     

Populism,democracy and a pedagogy of renewal

ABSTRACT

Laclau and Mouffe have long argued the democratic possibilities of ‘left populism’ underpinned by their agonistic critique of liberal democracy. We are currently witnessing the attempted application of their theories by European political parties. However, there remains very little international scholarship taking up the challenge of situating these arguments in the broader literature on the relationship between democracy and education. We argue that this is an urgent task, particularly in the context of populist trends which appear inimical to educational practice. Thus, we explore the implications of populism for adult education aimed at defending and extending democratic life. We question the conflation of agonistic democracy with left populism on several grounds, and we consider how a focus on education might help to ground their theory and clarify its ambiguities. We argue that adult educators can surface aspects of the context which representations of populism on the one hand, and populist representations on the other, often hide. Our argument is illustrated through two vignettes of populist events and the educational problems and opportunities they posed.     

Getting ‘foolishly hot and bothered’? Parents and teachers and sex education in the 1940s

The reluctance of parents to provide sex education has been a problem for educators since the first attempts at the modernisation of sex education in the early twentieth century, yet the sexual needs, desires and fears of parents are rarely even mentioned in pedagogical debates. This article examines the intense anxiety and embarrassment felt by both parents and teachers when they tried to provide sex education in mid-twentieth-century England. The gendered sexual cultures of women and men and the way in which these shaped responses to the pubertal experience of girls and boys are described. Sex education was a rational progressive discourse; the response of sex educators to resistance and rejection of what they offered was to present ‘rational’ arguments explaining that these anxieties are unnecessary and can thus be abandoned. Waves of popular emotion concerning child sexual abuse since the 1980s demonstrate the continuing relevance of this fear and anxiety, emotions that shaped the course of sex education over the past century.     

Deliberative academic development: the potential and challenge of agency

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore possibilities and challenges for deliberative academic development. Deliberative academic development refers to a practice that engages members of the university in dialogue about its purposes, ways of organizing and leading higher education, as well as teaching and learning. The paper critically analyses data from focus group interviews with academic developers from four universities within two national contexts. Combining sociological conceptualizations of agency and the framework of ‘epistemic living spaces’, the paper offers insights into challenges and opportunities for deliberative academic development, as well as a framework for studying agency in other contexts.     

Deliberative Teaching: Effects on Students’ Democratic Virtues

Since the early-2000s, deliberative democratic theory has influenced the debate on teaching. Proponents of deliberation in education have argued that deliberative communication as a teaching model enhances both subject knowledge and democratic virtues among students. However, empirical support for this assumption is weak. The aim of this article is to empirically test the assumptions made by the proponents of deliberative teaching. This study uses a field experimental research design. The study was carried out in a civics course in Swedish upper-secondary schools in both vocational programs and programs preparing students for ensuing studies. To some extent, the results support the hypothesis derived from deliberative theory. Deliberative teaching seems to enhance democratic virtues among students in vocational programs.     

Deliberative Communication in Elementary Classroom Meetings: Ground Rules,Pupils’ Concerns,and Democratic Participation

Previous research has identified numerous obstacles that counteract attempts to involve pupils in democratic processes in schools. Drawing from deliberative democratic theory and sociolinguistic research on dialogic teaching we discuss an intervention grounded on the ideas of deliberative communication and decision-making in an elementary classroom in Finland. We show that deliberative communication can provide pupils with opportunities for democratic participation. This process involves altering conventional classroom interactional patterns and the power processes they uphold. The possibilities of expanding deliberative communication from isolated democratic meetings to everyday schooling are considered.     

‘Put me in,coach, I’m ready to play’: sexuality education for adults at Good Vibrations

Although sex education is often provided to young people, there is a lack of spaces where adults can go to learn more about sex from experts in a free and welcoming environment. One place that provides an opportunity for adult sex education is adult sexual retail stores. While these stores aim to be commercially successful, they also fulfil a role of educating adults about sex and sexuality. This study explains how Good Vibrations (GV), a sex-positive adult sexual retail store company in the USA, disseminates sexuality education for adults. Using qualitative methods including observations, interviews and textual analysis, I show how GV serves as a coach to its patrons. The coaching framework described here promotes shared responsibility through inclusive and accessible education, highlighting communication and focusing on pleasure and positivity. This paper provides one of the first evidence-based accounts of how an adult sexual retailer educates its customers and provides a model for sexuality educators for all ages.     

The Process Matters: Moral Constraints on Cosmopolitan Education

Cosmopolitan education aims to transmit cosmopolitan forms of life in order to participate morally in the world community. The primary characteristics of this cosmopolitan education are its acceptance of the shared humanity of all persons as a fact of human existence and as a motivating guide for human interaction, and the requirement of democratic inclusion in deliberations of the governance of those interactions, including morality. Such an education in cosmopolitan morality requires means that befit its core components. This paper contrasts the concepts of strict and moderate cosmopolitanism, empirical and deliberative morality, and structural and dispositional cosmopolitanism to show that the moderate, inclusive and deliberative processes of deliberative dispositional cosmopolitanism are more suited to cosmopolitan education in morality than strong, empirical‐focused structural cosmopolitan efforts. Though strong, structural and empirically based forms may be more likely to guarantee preferred outcomes in the learning of specific morals or the implementation of institutional norms, they are also more likely to run afoul of the core components of cosmopolitanism because they will privilege outcomes over processes, and are thus more likely to be less inclusive and more coercive. In contrast, and even though they are less certain to guarantee preferred moral outcomes or actions, moderate, deliberative dispositional forms of cosmopolitan education embody the morality they seek to inform, and are more likely to find sustained internalised support over time.     

通过网络的协商民主：机遇与风险

协商民主理论强调公共协商和对话的重要性,倡导以必要的对话协商程序来实现民主的实质。互联网技术的迅猛发展,为实现协商民主提供了新的手段和途径,它可以让协商民主突破时间和空间的限制,扩大公民参与广度的同时提升参与的质量,打破精英对话语权的垄断以实现政治平等;但同时通过网络的协商民主也面临着诸如＂数字鸿沟＂、＂网络暴力＂以及群体极化等风险。     

论协商民主在政治决策中的功能

政治决策是社会主义民主政治的重要内容，协商民主对政治决策的发展和完善有重要意义，主要体现在：为政治决策提供“和而不同”的人民利益的价值取向；为政治决策提供公开化的信息和民意；为政治决策提供自由平等的民主参与；为政治决策提供合法性基础上的责任性。     

论协商民主对我国政治发展的重要启示

协商民主理论是民主理论发展的最新成果,它不是对现有民主理论的否定,而是应对社会发展变化而作出的补充和发展。本文试图在协商民主的视野下,分析我国政治制度内在的协商民主基因及当前社会发展对协商民主的外在需求,指出按照协商价值对我国民主政治制度及运行机制进行调整和完善。     

The Hostile Vagina: Reading vaginal discourse in a school health text

This article considers the use of the field of bioethics for those practising sex education. It reviews dominant approaches on the part of bioethics that might be applicable to sex educators and undertakes an evaluation of their relevance to sex education. It considers key ideological objections to dominant bioethical approaches and evaluates the impact they might have on sex educators. From these evaluations, it briefly suggests how practitioners might develop alternative conceptions of ethics for the benefit of their work and their clients.     

Reconceptualising advocacy: creating inclusive education in US universal pre-kindergarten

This narrative inquiry concerns preschool education in the USA. It describes and analyses the barriers and possibilities for inclusion/exclusion that educators and parents of young children in a West Virginian community believe that it poses. The researchers present a case study designed to examine the context of inclusive education as revealed in 15 educators’ and parents’ narratives and observations of universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) practice. Due to semi-market-based orientations, new UPK structures, and perceptions of acceptable roles for parents and educators, possibilities for advocacy, and inclusive education often went unrealised. Based on these data, the researchers offer suggestions for how teacher education might be further developed to reconceptualise advocacy as inclusive education created in part through a praxis orientation and deliberative relationships between homes and schools.     

Learning to be a woman: feminist theological reflections on sex education in church schools

This article suggests that sex education in Church schools should address the personal as political through proclaiming the liberating potential of incarnational theology. The author suggests that Christian sex educators should be alert to the construction and commodification of desire and its attendant capitalist implications. While resisting this grand narrative they should encourage the young to embrace their own human/divine natures and dance in the sensuality of their erotic power.     

Persuasion and attitude change in science education

Many strategies used to induce the occurrence of desirable science-related beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors involve the use of persuasive messages. Science educators need to become acquainted with persuasion in the context of social influence and learning theory to be able to evaluate its usefulness in the science education milieu. Persuasion is the conscious attempt to bring about a jointly developed mental state common to both source and receiver through the use of symbolic cues, and it can be distinguished from other forms of social influence. Propaganda is a type of persuasion directed toward a mass audience. Coercion relies on reinforcement control, whereas persuasion is prompted by information. Brainwashing involves coercive techniques used to obtain cooperation and compliance. Persuasion and instruction are much alike; both require conscious cognitive activity by the recipient and involve communication which includes giving arguments and evidence for the purpose of getting someone to do something or to believe something. Persuasion research is anchored in learning theory. Early efforts were based on information processing. Studies following an information process approach focused on the effect of the variables harbored within the question “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect?” on belief and attitude change. Cognitive processing and social exchange approaches to persuasion represent extensions to information process. Cognitive processing is concerned specifically with how people personally process the arguments presented in a persuasive message. Social exchange emphasizes the interchange that takes place between the message source and recipient. These approaches seem to be fruitful areas for future persuasion research in science education. Science educators' unfamiliarity with persuasion research stems from the fact that it is largely reported in the social psychology literature and has not been integrated into a framework familiar to educators.     

合肥协商民主运作机制研究

改革开放以来,社会主义市场经济不断发展,社会结构分化加剧,利益主体日益的多元化,人民参与政治、表达利益诉求的要求日益增多。协商民主成为我国发展社会主义民主政治的重要路径选择。在对现行协商民主运作机制的主要内容、具体程序进行阐释与分析的基础上,针对存在的问题,就如何优化协商式民主运作机制提出了几点对策：发展协商文化,提升协商环境;进一步明确协商民主的规范与程序;完善协商民主评价监督机制。     

Technology education and science education: Engineering as a case study of relationships

Technology education and science education are seen to be related in a particular fashion by many science educators, a relationship exemplified by the common pairing of the two areas in labels such as “Science-Technology-Society” and “Science and Technology Curriculum”. At the heart of this common science education perspective is a view of technology education as dependent on and subservient to science education. In this paper engineering, often seen by scientists as a form of applied science dependent on and subservient to science, is considered. An analysis of the arguments that engineering, far from being an applied science, is a unique way of knowing (that engineering has a unique epistemology) is used to consider the technology education view of the relationships between science education and technology education. It is suggested that science educators need to rethink their perceptions of this relationship if they are to understand the arguments of technology educators. Specializations: science education, teacher education.     

Nudging the public sphere: a Habermasian perspective on public deliberation as an aim of moral education

This article offers an account of the understanding citizens need in order to justify moral principles in the public sphere and it identifies an important role for moral education in the promotion of that civic understanding. I develop this account through a contrastive analysis of Phillip Kitcher’s conception of public knowledge and Jurgen Habermas’ Discourse Ethics. Kitcher is focused on the social conditions necessary for the circulation of scientific knowledge in advanced democracies; the analysis offered in this article expands on what Habermas and other deliberative democrats claim are epistemic conditions necessary for the construction and circulation of moral understanding. I use this account to critically assess public policy that aims to ‘get around’ public deliberation by using strategies derived from behavioral economics in order to shift civic behavior in specific (moral) directions. Finally, I specify how such strategies have the potential to undermine moral understanding in the public sphere and I argue for a central role for moral education in mitigating such effects.     

Assuring the Quality of Engineering Education: issues of effectiveness and the ethos of excellence

This paper examines the possibility of applying industrial principles of quality assurance within the sphere of engineering education. In view of the impending ‘one market Europe’ and the envisaged transnational mobility of professionals, it is important for educators to demonstrate their commitment to quality. It is suggested that to teach about quality within engineering courses is insufficient: it is time to prove the benefits of these concepts through personal commitment and action. The industrial Quality Assurance model, ISO9000 is considered in the context of education and is proposed as a suitable vehicle for the implementation of the requisite attitudinal and cultural changes embodied in Total Quality Management. The possible conflict between the industrial view of quality as fitness for purpose and the educational ethos of striving for excellence is discussed. It is concluded that there is an urgent need for engineering educators to practise what they preach and move towards a customer centred, market driven education system dedicated to continuous self-improvement.     

Learning challenges in higher education: an analysis of contradictions within Open Educational Practice

Open education, including the use of open educational resources (OER) and the adoption of open education practice, has the potential to challenge educators to change their practice in fundamental ways. This paper forms part of a larger study focusing on higher education educators’ learning from and through their engagement with OER. The first part of the study was a quantitative survey investigating educators’ learning behaviour when they learned to use OER in their practice. The second part of the study explored qualitatively how educators engaged with OER and how they conceptualised their learning. Data were gathered through interviews with 30 higher education educators. This paper reports the analysis of these interviews. The analysis draws on the theory of self-regulated learning and cultural–historical activity theory to explore the challenges adult education practitioners encounter when changing their practice. The study tests the application of a framework that traces the discursive manifestations of contradictions, exploring how this framework can be used to examine different aspects of self-regulated learning as educators learn how to use OER. We have identified three distinct tensions in higher education educators’ practice: tensions between the emerging needs of the individual (as he or she adopts new forms of practice) and organisational policies; between the transfer of responsibilities from educators to students as new practice is embedded and institutional accountability; and between cost efficiency and learning objectives. The framework for the discursive manifestations of contradictions was a useful tool used to surface these apparent tensions.