Work‐related learning for students with significant learning difficulties: relevance and reality

The 14–19 proposals brought work‐related learning to the forefront of educational policy. We look at how the tenets, which underpin them, can be interpreted and applied for students with significant learning difficulties. We examine the nature of vocational or work‐related learning for students with severe and or profound and multiple learning difficulties as currently reported by schools in England. Its relevance for this group of learners is discussed in the light of the proposals and we consider the reality of current practice in relation to the slippery concept of vocational learning. Finally, we reflect on important recent policy commitments relevant to our research, but published after its completion, outlined in the White Paper 14–19 education and skills. We note and welcome its explicit consideration of the needs of students with significant learning difficulties. At the same time we remain concerned and perturbed about its affirmation of educational aims that are narrowly conceived in relation to an economic imperative.     

‘Will I learn what I want to learn?’ Usable representations, ‘students’ and OECD assessment production

Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) ‘students’ are constructed, fixed and normalized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) initiative. Based on an analysis of AHELO texts, we argue that the OECD, during the early stages of test production, fixes and circulates the meaning of ‘students’ as represented objects. We identify and analyze two distinct representational practices at work in AHELO texts: classifying and organizing, and marking. We posit that by fixing images of the student as an object of learning and as a consumer–investor subject, the OECD creates ‘usable’ representations of ‘students’ to claim jurisdiction over teaching and learning in HE and to justify intervention through standardized testing.     

Mapping psychology students’ perspective on group peer-tutoring in statistics

Students in psychology generally have difficulties to successfully accomplish mandatory courses in statistics. Group peer-tutoring is a pedagogical strategy to support them with a peer that has already successfully mastered the content of such a course. In order to specifically tailor group peer-tutoring to the needs of students and to sustain tutees’ participation, it is important to understand how they conceptualize tutoring. The aim of this study was to provide an empirical investigation of psychology students’ conceptualization regarding cross-year group peer-tutoring in statistics. A multivariate concept mapping analysis generated a relevant three-cluster structure (Tutoring setup, Tutor knowledge, interpersonal skills, and relational dynamics and Student role and commitment to the course) that underlies students’ cognitive structure regarding group peer-tutoring. The implications of the results for selecting and training peer-tutors are discussed.     

Becoming employable students and ‘ideal’ creative workers: exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements

In this paper we explore how the ‘employable’ student and ‘ideal’ future creative worker is prefigured, constructed and experienced through higher education work placements in the creative sector, based on a recent small-scale qualitative study. Drawing on interview data with students, staff and employers, we identify the discourses and practices through which students are produced and produce themselves as neoliberal subjects. We are particularly concerned with which students are excluded in this process. We show how normative evaluations of what makes a ‘successful’ and ‘employable’ student and ‘ideal’ creative worker are implicitly classed, raced and gendered. We argue that work placements operate as a key domain in which inequalities within both higher education and the graduate labour market are (re)produced and sustained. The paper offers some thoughts about how these inequalities might be addressed.     

How students reason about matter flows and accumulations in complex biological phenomena: An emerging learning progression for mass balance

In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K-12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge structures. In this study, we investigated how students use mass balance reasoning as a conceptual scaffold to gain a deeper understanding of how matter moves through biological systems. Our aim was to lay the groundwork for a mass balance learning progression in physiology. We drew on a general models framework from biology and a covariational reasoning framework from math education to interpret students' mass balance ideas. We used a constant comparative method to identify students' reasoning patterns from 73 interviews conducted with undergraduate biology students. We helped validate the reasoning patterns identified with >8000 written responses collected from students at multiple institutions. From our analyses, we identified two related progress variables that describe key elements of students' performances: the first describes how students identify and use matter flows in biology phenomena; the second characterizes how students use net rate-of-change to predict how matter accumulates in, or disperses from, a compartment. We also present a case study of how we used our emerging mass balance learning progression to inform instructional practices to support students' mass balance reasoning. Our progress variables describe one way students engage in three dimensional learning by showing how student performances associated with the practice of mathematical thinking reveal their understanding of the core concept of matter flows as governed by the crosscutting concept of matter conservation. Though our work is situated in physiology, it extends previous work in climate change education and is applicable to other scientific fields, such as physics, engineering, and geochemistry.     

Enhancing Force Concept Inventory diagnostics to identify dominant misconceptions in first-year engineering physics

This work presents the results of a study whose aim is to detect systematic errors about the concept of force among freshmen students. The researchers analysed the results of the Force Concept Inventory test, which was administered to two different groups of students. The results show that, although there were significant performance variations between the two groups, they, nonetheless, shared common incorrect answers that were consistently triggered by the same misconceptions. The analysis proposed in this paper could also be applied in other universities to reveal the students’ a priori mindset in Newtonian mechanics and serve as a guideline for developing effective computer simulations or other tools.     

Student group presentations: a learning instrument in undergraduate mathematics for engineering students

In this study we created an environment for peer learning, where students teach students by making oral presentations in groups about solving mathematical problems and explaining the theoretical background in mathematics, during the first year of an undergraduate engineering programme at the Norrköping campus of the Linköping University. In order to strengthen the students’ understanding and perception of central mathematical concepts, the study was designed to take the students through five different learning experiences, preparing the presentation, presenting the mathematics, listening to others presenting, discussion by all students after the presentation and feedback by the teacher to the small group of students separate from the other students. We study how oral presentations work as a learning and assessment method. The study consisted of three stages. After a first run of the presentations as a learning instrument, three guidebooks with recommendations for students and teachers were developed in order to assist students as well as teachers about their role in this learning environment. Students’ and teachers’ views on the student presentations as learning instrument were surveyed before and after the intervention. In stage three, students were interviewed individually to ascertain the relevant success of the different learning experiences.     

Towards a theory of mathematics homework as a social practice

This article presents a theoretical conceptualization of mathematics homework as a social practice. Rather than considering homework as a task or an artifact, this approach frames homework in terms of the social contexts in which students participate and how students participate in those contexts. This perspective has long been suggested by homework researchers but has not been developed as a framework for understanding homework. Drawing from Wenger’s (1998) social theory of learning and research grounded in sociocultural theory, this conceptualization makes central meaning making and identity development, and puts forth meaning and identity as lenses for understanding students’ participation in the practice of mathematics homework. To further develop this conceptualization of homework, I draw on data from an ethnographic study of the role and meaning of mathematics homework in the lives of middle school students. Case studies of two students are presented to demonstrate the relationships among the meaning of homework, students’ identities, and their participation in the practice of homework. One student’s experiences support him in identifying as a capable mathematics student who is bound for continued academic success through high school to college. Thus, he comes to take on mathematics homework as a means to learn and succeed. The other student’s experiences support him in building an identity that leads him to reject homework. This conceptualization of homework and the case study data have implications for the practice of homework and for theories of students’ motivational dispositions in the context of mathematics homework and learning in general.     

From Concepets to Practice

Social work has a number of broad conceptual models, but the difficulty lies in translating them into concrete categories that reflect the student's or practitioner's experience in the field. This paper presents a middle-range conceptualization which works both deductively from the conceptual models and inductively from practice experiences. The conceptual frame is made up of three dimensions: (a) levels of intervention; (b) phases of the problem-solving model; and (c) components involved in each step of the intervention. In each cell of the framework one can specify relevant practice activities. The topic of engagement is discussed as an example of how the model works. Finally, the paper describes how this middle-level conceptualization can be taught to graduate school students.     

‘Designing the plane while flying it’: concept co-construction in a collaborative action research project

In the field of collaborative action research (CAR), the quality of the collaborative partnerships between university researchers and practitioners has received much attention. Most accounts focus on three areas: the question how to organise and optimise the encounter of these ‘worlds’ of scientific and practical reasoning; the professional development and emancipation of practitioners; and the enhancement of the practical utility of a CAR-project. In this article, we look at CAR projects from a different angle and explore the question how theoretical concepts are co-constructed in CAR-projects, thereby acquiring both practical as well as scientific relevance. We have focused on the participatory process of conceptualization during a CAR project in primary education, in order to find out how a key concept in the considered project is co-constructed and operationalized in multidisciplinary communities of practices. Both the theoretical validity of the concept is evaluated as well as the validity of collaboration. An ‘hourglass’ model is introduced for analysing participation in CAR projects, holding a more relational and dialogic interpretation of participation than the ‘Participation Ladder’ model. Furthermore, a heuristic approach to conceptualization in CAR projects is proposed.     

Rethinking diversity in learning science: The logic of everyday sense‐making

There are many ways to understand the gap in science learning and achievement separating low‐income, ethnic minority and linguistic minority children from more economically privileged students. In this article we offer our perspective. First, we discuss in broad strokes how the relationship between everyday and scientific knowledge and ways of knowing has been conceptualized in the field of science education research. We consider two dominant perspectives on this question, one which views the relationship as fundamentally discontinuous and the other which views it as fundamentally continuous. We locate our own work within the latter tradition and propose a framework for understanding the everyday sense‐making practices of students from diverse communities as an intellectual resource in science learning and teaching. Two case studies follow in which we elaborate this point of view through analysis of Haitian American and Latino students' talk and activity as they work to understand metamorphosis and experimentation, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this new conceptualization for research on science learning and teaching. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 529–552, 2001     

A question of autonomy: Bourdieu’s field approach and higher education policy

The concept of field forms the centre of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and the notion of ‘autonomy’ is its keystone. This article explores the usefulness of these underexamined concepts for studying policy in higher education. It begins by showing how Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach enables higher education to be examined as a distinct and irreducible object of study. It then explores the value and limitations of this conceptualization through analyses of policy during two contrasting moments of transition in the same field. First, the insights offered by a field approach are illustrated by analysing the new student debate over the creation of new universities in early 1960s English higher education. This shows how the field’s relatively high autonomy shaped the focus and form of policy debates by refracting economic and political pressures into specifically educational issues. Second, considering contemporary changes in policy highlights how the erosion of the social compact underpinning higher education has increasingly fractured autonomy, necessitating the development of Bourdieu’s conceptualization. A distinction between positional and relational dimensions of autonomy is introduced to capture an increasing disjuncture between the origins of the actors running higher education and of the principles they are adopting, respectively. These concepts are utilized to illuminate the effects of current moves towards marketization and managerialism in higher education on principles, practices and identities within the field.     

论以科学发展观引领高校学生党建工作

在学习实践科学发展观活动中,如何以科学发展观引领高校学生党建工作,这是需要认真研究和解决的问题。我们要深刻领会科学发展观的内涵,正确认识科学发展观与党建的关系。以科学发展观引领高校学生党建工作,首先要做到理论先行,用科学的理论武装头脑;同时要加强学生党组织建设,保持党员先进性;还要做到不断探索,努力提高学生党建工作水平。     

Unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in China: Historical,social and value perspectives

Abstract

This study concentrates on exploring the ‘logic’ of modern universities in China-a working concept that promotes a more in-depth discourse on the implicit illustrations of the ‘logic’ of universities in contemporary China. Drawing on the logic model, we explore the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of university and examine how the concept of ‘logic’ of modern universities to be perceived, challenged and negotiated through the historical, social and value perspectives. The historical logics, social logics and value logics contribute on unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China. We suggested that the ‘logic’ of university has important conceptual and practical implications for higher education, especially the importance of explicitness. The ‘logic’ of modern university in China is subject to offer a platform where expectations of university students are elaborated. In addition, the study also seeks to offer an insight into the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China.     

Personal and Social-Contextual Factors in K–12 Academic Performance: An Integrative Perspective on Student Learning

Our extensive literature review in the fields of educational, social, and cognitive psychology has led us to identify about a dozen variables that demonstrate direct empirical links to academic achievement at the K–12 level. Those variables are grouped into four major categories: student engagement, learning strategies, school climate, and social-familial influences. We then categorize the first two variables as personal factors and the latter two as social-contextual factors. We document empirical findings that have shown particular relationships between the reviewed personal and social-contextual factors and academic achievement, mainly in the areas of reading and mathematics. Based on our conceptualization, we propose an integrated perspective that students’ personal factors in the domains of behavior, affect, attitude, and cognition as well as their social-contextual environment have to work in concert to produce optimal school performance. We conclude with a discussion on educational implications and future research to be addressed.     

Positioning as not‐understanding: The value of showing uncertainty for engaging in science

Not understanding is central to scientific work: what scientists do is learn about the natural world, which involves seeking out what they do not know. In classrooms, however, the position of not‐understanding is generally a liability; confusion is an unfortunate condition to resolve as quickly as possible, or to conceal. In this article, we argue that students' public displays of uncertainty or confusion can be pivotal contributions to the classroom dynamics in initiating and sustaining a class's science inquiry. We present this as a central finding from a cross‐case analysis of eight episodes of students' scientific engagement, drawing on literature on framing to show how participants positioned themselves as not‐understanding and how that was consequential for the class's scientific engagement. We show how participants enacted this positioning by asking questions or expressing uncertainty around a phenomenon or model. We then analyze how participants' displays of not‐understanding shaped the conceptual, epistemic, and social aspects of classroom activity. We present two cases in detail: one in which a student's positioning helped initiate the class's scientific engagement and another in which it helped sustain it. We argue that this work motivates considering how to help students learn to embrace and value the role of expressing one's confusion in science.     

“Science capital”: A conceptual,methodological, and empirical argument for extending bourdieusian notions of capital beyond the arts

This paper sets out an argument and approach for moving beyond a primarily arts‐based conceptualization of cultural capital, as has been the tendency within Bourdieusian approaches to date. We advance the notion that, in contemporary society, scientific forms of cultural and social capital can command a high symbolic and exchange value. Our previous research [Archer et al. (2014) Journal of Research in Science Teaching 51, 1–30] proposed the concept of “science capital” (science‐related forms of cultural and social capital) as a theoretical lens for explaining differential patterns of aspiration and educational participation among young people. Here, we attempt to theoretically, methodologically, and empirically advance a discussion of how we might conceptualize science capital and how this might be translated into a survey tool for use with students. We report on findings from a survey conducted with 3658 secondary school students, aged 11–15 years, in England. Analysis found that science capital was unevenly spread across the student population, with 5% being classified as having “high” science capital and 27% “low” science capital. Analysis shows that levels of science capital (high, medium, or low) are clearly patterned by cultural capital, gender, ethnicity, and set (track) in science. Students with high, medium, or low levels of science capital also seem to have very different post‐16 plans (regarding studying or working in science) and different levels of self‐efficacy in science. They also vary dramatically in terms of whether they feel others see them as a “science person.” The paper concludes with a discussion of conceptual and methodological issues and implications for practice. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Research in Science Teaching Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52: 922–948, 2015.     

让学校德育工作真正见实效

学校的德育工作真正见实效,必须做到学校德育工作全员参与,全程育人、全方位育人,扩大德育范围,充实德育内容,开拓德育新路子;尊重、关心、爱护学生,给学生以母亲般的师爱,在师生中间建立起情感道通;实行科学的德育方法,加强德育工作的计划性、针对性,遵循德育规律,用科学理论指导德育工作,提高实效性;在德育工作中,强化行为培养,提供价值选择、参与机会和表现舞台。让学生以主人翁的恣态投入到学校的德育活动中,去摸索,去体会,教师起引导和参谋的作用。     

What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work

The concept of agency has become widely used in learning research, especially in studies addressing professional and workplace learning, but also in policy discussion on how to promote individually meaningful careers and life-courses amid rapid changes in working life. The purpose of this article is to provide a critical review of the multidisciplinary concept of agency, and to suggest a fruitful conceptualization of professional agency at work. The following questions are addressed: (i) How have the ontological characteristics and manifestations of agency been understood? (ii) How have the relationships between the social and individual aspects of agency been understood? We examined previous studies and discussions on agency in the fields of education and social sciences, looking selectively also at psychology and gender studies. We identified four major research traditions in which notions of agency were prominent: (i) the social science tradition, (ii) the post-structural tradition, (iii) the socio-cultural approach, and (iv) the identity and life-course approach. Analyses within and across these traditions brought out a range of understandings and manifestations; thus agency might be viewed merely as rational and intentional activity, or else it might be seen from a temporally broad perspective, covering subjects’ ontogenetic development, and encompassing discursive, practical, and embodied relations with the world. Analysis of the relationships between individual and social/contextual elements revealed assumptions ranging from analytical inseparability to separateness, and in case of analytical separateness assumptions of strong or weak contextual influence. Based on our review, we suggest a conceptualization of professional agency from a subject-centered socio-cultural perspective. This takes individual agency and social context to be analytically separate, but mutually constitutive, and in complex ways highly interdependent. The suggested conceptualization is summarized in terms of seven propositions.