The Use of Reflective Journals to Stimulate Critical Thinking in the Academic Internship

Reflective journals have been widely accepted throughout various educational disciplines for many years as a means of enhancing experiential learning practices. Reflective journals allow for students to gain a better understanding of a given experience and explore the levels of critical thinking as they work through the understanding and learning processes. Critical thinking involves the logical progression from mere knowledge and understanding to the highest levels of synthesis and evaluation. The immediate study presents findings of the analyses of a series of sequential reflective journals presented over the course of a semester-long internship experience. Findings indicate that reflective journals are shown to facilitate progression through the levels of critical thinking as identified in Bloom’s taxonomy and promote a higher level of understanding and application of theoretical concepts to practical experiential learning.     

The effect of hands-on ‘energy-saving house’ learning activities on elementary school students’ knowledge,attitudes, and behavior regarding energy saving and carbon-emissions reduction

Energy saving and carbon-emissions reduction (ESCER) are widely regarded as important issues for progress towards ensuring sustainable forms of economic development. This Taiwanese study focuses on the effects of a series of educational activities about ESCER on students’ knowledge, attitudes and behavior. Sixty fifth-grade students from two elementary school classes were assigned to an experimental group, and 59 from two others to the control. Covariance and qualitative data analysis were conducted after 14 lessons on the topic in both ‘treatments.’ The following key findings emerged. First, hands-on ‘energy-saving house’ learning activities seemed to have positive effects on students’ knowledge, attitudes, and behavior toward ESCER, even as the design of authentic learning activities was recognized as not being as closely aligned to the students’ daily lives as they could have been for achieving behavior-related outcomes. Second, students demonstrated slight gains in conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge via the hands-on activities, but some ESCER misconceptions persisted. We conclude that students’ learning processes, prior learning and authentic contexts for ESCER-related work should not be ignored in the attempt to link knowledge to action in teaching and learning activities.     

The role of student journals in facilitating reflection at doctoral level

Journal entries submitted by thirteen Doctor of Education students as a course requirement were analysed in order to explore the nature and content of their reflection and the effectiveness of journal writing in facilitating student learning. The findings confirm that journal writing encourages students to engage cognitively and reflectively with course concepts and content and to make connections between their academic learning and their personal/professional experience. Marked individual differences in response styles were apparent and these impacted on the learning outcomes reported by students. An ‘analytic’ approach to journal writing helps students to clarify, organise, evaluate and personalise ideas, an ‘extracting’ approach provides a useful record of ideas and issues, and an ‘affective’ approach encourages freedom of expression and self‐evaluation. Students who adopt a ‘course‐feedback’ style, however, receive little benefit from the activity. Suggestions are made for improving the effectiveness of student journals as a learning technique.     

学生所知道的 教师所知道的——理论、工具和结果

评估——无论采用何种形式——不得不建立在对不同水平和质量的理论思考基础之上。其中至关重要的是测验内容领域要依据教与学的过程来构建。其次,任务是评估相关内容结构的核心工具。因此,在设计对数学的教育评估时,按照合理的标识和特征对任务进行分类就成为一个息息相关的问题,也是一个巨大的挑战。本文重点研究PISA(国际学生评估项目的缩写,是以数学素养为目标的国际比较研究,包括在国家层面德国所做的许多调整)和COACTIV(德国教师数学知识和数学教学知识的一个代表性研究)。两者都旨在实现区分性评估(differentiated assessment),都考虑了评价内容和任务分析的不同方面。区分性评估结果使得我们能够获取有用的信息,进一步推动课堂教与学的发展。这些信息主要表现为两个方面:评估学生不同类型的知识,这些知识类型直接指向课堂教学与学习中存在的各种问题;探索教师知识对学生学习进展的影响,表明哪种教学行为是有效的。     

The Complexity of Learning: Exploring the Interplay of Different Mediational Means in Group Learning with Digital Tools

The relationship between the different mediational means for supporting students’ learning with digital tools in science group work in a Norwegian lower-secondary school is examined. Analyses of teacher-student and student-student interactions are located in cultural-historical theory and draw on Galperin’s conceptualisation of learning processes. Findings show that digital tools, task design, peer collaboration, and teacher’s interventions dialectically interplay to shape how learners use mediational means: (1) digital tools are the resources that enable students to explicate their (mis)understandings; (2) compare-and-contrast tasks promote analytical thinking; (3) peers present themselves as resources who promote development of conceptual understanding; (4) the teacher guides learners’ attention towards the potential of the mediational resources, elicits, organises, and structures students’ knowledge. The dialectical interplay of these mediational means creates a system that supports and guides students’ learning.     

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.     

Learning about friction: group dynamics in engineering students’ work with free body diagrams

In educational research, it is well-known that collaborative work on core conceptual issues in physics leads to significant improvements in students’ conceptual understanding. In this paper, we explore collaborative learning in action, adding to previous research in engineering education with a specific focus on the students’ use of free body diagrams in interaction. By looking at details in interaction among a group of three engineering students, we illustrate how they collectively construct a free body diagram together when learning introductory mechanics. In doing so, we have focused on both learning possibilities and the dynamic processes that take place in the learning activity. These findings have a number of implications for educational practice.     

Adaptive Comparative Judgment as a Tool for Assessing Open-ended Design Problems and Model Eliciting Activities

We investigated the use of adaptive comparative judgment to evaluate the middle school student learning, engagement, and experience with the design process in an open-ended problem assigned in a technology and engineering education course. Our results indicate that the adaptive comparative judgment tool effectively facilitated the grading of the students’ products and improved the judges’ understanding of the processes the students used to arrive at their solutions. We found the reliability and validity of the tool to be acceptable and the outcomes of our study suggest that there is justification for the use of the adaptive comparative judgment method to assess student learning outcomes at multiple levels of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education.     

Refining a learning progression of energy

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a revised learning progression for the energy concept and initial findings on diverse progressions among subgroups of sample students. The revised learning progression describes how students progress towards an understanding of the energy concept along two progress variables identified from previous studies – key ideas about energy and levels of conceptual development. To assess students understanding with respect to the revised learning progression, we created a specific instrument, the Energy Concept Progression Assessment (ECPA) based on previous work on assessing students’ understanding of energy. After iteratively refining the instrument in two pilot studies, the ECPA was administered to a total of 4550 students (Grades 8–12) from schools in two districts in a major city in Mainland China. Rasch analysis was used to examine the validity of the revised learning progression and explore factors explaining different progressions. Our results confirm the validity of the four conceptual development levels. In addition, we found that although following a similar progression pattern, students’ progression rate was significantly influenced by environmental factors such as school type. In the discussion of our findings, we address the non-linear and complex nature of students’ progression in understanding energy. We conclude with illuminating our research's implication for curriculum design and energy teaching.     

Reproduction and transformation of students’ technology practice: The tale of two distinctive secondary student cases

Disparities in the technology practices, skills and knowledge of school students still exist, despite widespread investment, and use in schools. In order to understand why inequalities remain, we first need a more nuanced understanding of students’ technology practice, including understanding how their backgrounds, circumstances and experiences shape their perceptions of and engagement with technology. This paper proposes that research in the field of educational technology would benefit from a sociological framing in order to highlight how and why students use technology at school and in their everyday lives. The paper reports on a qualitative embedded case study of 13–16-year-old students in two Australian secondary schools. In-depth case studies of two selected students illustrate the complex nature of students’ technology practice. Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital are used as a lens through which to view and understand inequalities in students’ technology practice. The findings demonstrate the utility of sociological theory in educational technology research by highlighting systems and structures of reproduction and transformation. Furthermore, the findings can inform an approach to teaching and learning that considers students’ varied experiences, knowledge, perspectives and backgrounds relating to technology.     

Substantiating the need to apply a sociocultural lens to the preparation of teachers in an effort to achieve science reform

This qualitative, sociocultural study examines how teacher preparation programs may have deliberate impact on science reform by unearthing the complex layers of diversity inherent in the contextual reality of education. This study was conducted in one of the largest school districts in the Southeastern United States, serving a predominately Hispanic population comprising 65 % of its student body, followed by African Americans at 24 %. The representative subjects utilized for this study were elementary education undergraduate students and later a percentage of the same subjects, as practicing teachers in the field. All subjects were exposed to inquiry based methodology in science teaching as part of their undergraduate studies with emphasis on the learning cycle, facilitation of student voice and exposure to the nature of science. The goal of science education was emphasized to students as purposeful in promoting scientific literacy. This study is framed by sociocultural theory grounded in a social constructivist paradigm with the understanding that science learning takes place within social and collaborative processes leading to internalization and greater sense of self-efficacy. The study examines the perception of education students’ beliefs about scientists as well as reflections on their own learning of science as elementary students themselves. As present practicing teachers, perspectives from their position in the field were obtained via interviews. Interviews served to elicit reflections on present practice as related to previous perceptions, in order to analyze whether these were pervasive in framing practice as well as self-perceptions related to science. A lack of change of these perceptions may underscore the importance of an emphasis on issues of gender, culture and social factors within teacher preparation, specific to science teaching and learning. Cognizance of such factors are believed to support internalization and hence greater understanding of the complexities framing science teaching and learning, leading to an actual paradigm shift in our elementary science classrooms.     

Stories of Policing: The Role of Storytelling in Police Students’ Sensemaking of Early Work-Based Experiences

Storytelling has been shown to play a key role in transferring work experience from more experienced towards novices in a number of vocational educational practices, however previous studies have not to the same extent dealt with the role of students’ own storytelling practices for sensemaking of work experience. This study set out to examine police students’ storytelling of their first occupational experiences from a sensemaking perspective, with an analysis drawing on the concepts of enactment, selection, and retention. The study is based on participant observations of field training follow up sessions’ in the context of police education. Findings indicated that student storytelling of work experience tended to be geared towards action, extremeness and the telling of ‘war stories’. Furthermore, these type of stories functioned to enable student identification, self-enhancement and emotion management. These findings contribute to our current understanding of how students engage in sensemaking of work-based experiences and in extension how knowledge integration and learning from work placements can be structured pedagogically.     

Connections: A Collaborative Design Project

This is a study of the Connections project; a collaborative design exercise between Birmingham School of Architecture and Landscape, and local primary schools. It explains the processes and outcomes of this annual collaborative design exercise, in which students of architecture join forces with primary school children, to explore connections between architecture, and various subjects of the National Curriculum. It shows how graphical learning methods, from architectural education, have been adopted successfully across the curriculum at primary level. Three phases of the project, and their different kinds of graphic communication, are identified. Learning in each of these is explored with supporting evidence from students’ diaries and interviews with teachers. Two examples of recent project work are used to show processes and outcomes. The first, a Science and Architecture project, demonstrates how methods of working gave a clear relationship between abstract ideas, and representational models and drawings. The second illustrates quality of outcomes, and depth of understanding in an Art and Architecture project. Finally the study introduces ongoing research, based on the Connections project experience, which addresses the scope of learning at both curriculum levels.     

Teaching aquatic science as inquiry through professional development: Teacher characteristics and student outcomes

We present an inquiry‐based, aquatic science professional development (PD) for upper‐elementary, middle, and high school teachers and examine changes in student outcomes in light of participating teachers’ characteristics and the grade band of the students. Our study lends support to the assertion that inquiry‐ and content‐focused PD, paired with classroom implementation, can effectively improve student learning. Our findings indicate that students improved in their nature of science (NOS) and aquatic science content knowledge and that these changes depended in some ways on the participating teachers’ characteristics and adherence to the program. The students’ improvements were amplified when their teachers adhered more closely to the PD activities during their classroom implementation. The teachers’ previous science PD experience and pre‐PD understanding of inquiry‐based teaching also explained some of the variability in student growth. In both NOS and content, students of teachers with less prior science‐PD experience benefited more. Grade band also explained variation in student outcomes through interactions with teacher‐characteristic variables. In high school, students of teachers with lower pre‐PD inquiry knowledge appeared to learn more about NOS. Our results suggest that inquiry and content training through PD may minimize disparities in teaching due to inexperience and lack of expertise. Our study also demonstrates the value of PD that teaches a flexible approach to inquiry and focuses on underrepresented, interdisciplinary content areas, like aquatic science. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 54:1219–1245, 2017     

Alignment of Assessment Objectives with Instructional Objectives Using Revised Bloom's Taxonomy—The Case for Food Science and Technology Education

Abstract: Nine food science and technology (FST) subjects were assessed for alignment between the learning outcomes and assessment using revised Bloom's taxonomy (RBT) of cognitive knowledge. Conjoint analysis was used to estimate the utilities of the levels of cognitive, knowledge, and the attribute importance (cognitive process and knowledge dimension) for learning outcomes and assessments. Lecturers for these subjects produced learning outcomes for ability of students to Understand (4.935) Procedural (3.316) as well as Apply (4.491) Conceptual (3.083) knowledge. Lecturers’ expected students’ to move beyond mere recall and recognition of knowledge to higher order cognitive knowledge of apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. However, the assessments tested students’ ability to Understand (4.791) Conceptual (4.168) as well as Remember (3.217) Procedural (0.581) knowledge resulting in a misaligned teaching and learning exercise. For all the subjects, emphasis was more (52.9% to 72.9%) on the cognitive dimension than on forms of knowledge in formulating the learning outcomes, whereas emphasis placed on the cognitive (33.3% to 62.5%) dimension and the knowledge (37.5% to 66.7%) forms in the questions differed from subject to subject. The cognitive weight in the assessment was more for Understand (1.781)/Remember (0.787) Conceptual (1.416) knowledge. RBT provides an assessment framework that can be used to assist instructors in going beyond factual knowledge and comprehension to include academic skills such as application, analysis, evaluation, and creation.     

Learning intercultural communication through group work oriented to the world beyond the classroom

Competence in intercultural communication has become a necessity for functioning effectively in our increasingly globalised and multicultural society. This study reports the use of a group project to enhance students’ learning of intercultural communication. Participants were from a large undergraduate class in an Australian university. The aim of the course is to encourage students to develop knowledge of intercultural communication by orienting themselves to the world beyond the classroom, and by learning from each other’s experiences and perspectives. In a group project assignment, students used the knowledge and skills gained in class to resolve practical problems that they encountered in intercultural interactions outside the classroom. This paper focused on students’ experience of working in groups, and links between this experience and performance on the group project. Our study confirms previous research that demonstrates active engagement in group work can enhance learning outcomes. It also goes further in showing that groups that more highly rated their learning of intercultural communication through the group work experience obtained higher grades on the project.     

Modification of a School Programme in the Deutsches Museum to Enhance Students’ Attitudes and Understanding

The study examines the nature, conditions, and outcomes of student learning from an organised guided tour in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The instructional methods that best support students’ cognitive and affective learning as well as how students’ motivational and emotional states influence their achievement were investigated. A sample of 96 secondary school students took part in two different versions of a guided tour on an energy topic. The tours varied in the degree of support of students’ active involvement, group work, and the variety of general activities offered during the tour. The data collected indicate that both tour versions led to an increase in student understanding of the visit topic to nearly the same extent. However, the version stimulating students’ active participation, group work, and including a larger variety of activities aroused more positive attitudes. Students of the modified school programme showed higher interest and intrinsic motivation, felt more competent, and were less bored after the guided tour. In addition, the results suggest that students’ visit‐related emotional states predict the degree of their post‐visit topic understanding, even when demographics and prior knowledge are taken into consideration.     

Being more human: rooting learning analytics through resistance and reconnection with the values of higher education

ABSTRACT

Universities are now compelled to attend to metrics that (re)shape our conceptualisation of the student experience. New technologies such as learning analytics (LA) promise the ability to target personalised support to profiled ‘at risk’ students through mapping large-scale historic student engagement data such as attendance, library use, and virtual learning environment activity as well as demographic information and typical student outcomes. Yet serious ethical and implementation issues remain. Data-driven labelling of students as ‘high risk’, ‘hard to reach’ or ‘vulnerable’ creates conflict between promoting personal growth and human flourishing and treating people merely as data points. This article argues that universities must resist the assumption that numbers and algorithms alone can solve the ‘problem’ of student retention and performance; rather, LA work must be underpinned by a reconnection with the agreed values relating to the purpose of higher education, including democratic engagement, recognition of diverse and individual experience, and processes of becoming. Such a reconnection, this article contends, is possible when LA work is designed and implemented in genuine collaboration and partnership with students.     

Students’ strategies for learning identities as industrial workers in a Swedish upper secondary school VET programme

The aim of this article is to investigate the learning strategies vocational students use to become part of a work community, and how these strategies are related to the formation of a vocational identity at the workplace. Conducting qualitative interviews, data were collected from 44 industrial programme students from six upper secondary schools. The findings revealed five recurrent strategies used by the students for learning vocational identities as industrial workers. The students took individual responsibility for their own learning, asked questions to gain deeper vocational knowledge, searched for role models in the work community, positioned themselves as a resource to the work community, understood and used humour and jokes in order to become a member of the community. The conclusion is that the students actively develop learning strategies to adapt their behaviour to the norms and ideals of the industrial work community. In the process of develop the vocational identities as industrial workers, the students’ vocational habitus is transformed to better fit the industrial work community. The integration of the notions of agency and habitus demonstrates the dynamic nature of students’ participation in work communities; simultaneously, the students reproduce social structures that promote vocational identities.     

Student perceptions of facilitators’ social congruence,use of expertise and cognitive congruence in problem-based learning

In problem-based learning (PBL), the role of a tutor or facilitator is different from what is typically considered as the role of a traditional teacher. In addition to being a subject-matter expert, the facilitator is also expected to be ‘socially’ and ‘cognitively congruent’. In this study, we analyze the survey responses from more than 10,000 students in order to better understand their perceptions of what makes a good or poor facilitator, and to identify specific qualities related to social congruence, cognitive congruence and use of expertise. Students’ comments for the highest and lowest scoring groups of facilitators were analyzed qualitatively using inductive data analysis strategies. The following themes were identified: for social congruence—facilitator personality, relating to students, professionalism, motivating students, and learning environment; for cognitive congruence—scaffolding learning, and communication skills; for use of expertise—content knowledge and experience, and stretching students’ learning. Coding of students’ feedback also demonstrated that students most frequently commented on issues related to facilitators’ social congruence. Our findings indicate that social congruence encompasses skills which facilitators may improve on. We also argue that understanding students’ perspectives is critical especially in a learner-centred approach such as PBL and therefore propose that our findings provide useful input for the professional development of PBL facilitators.