Conceptualizing the adventure-sports coach

As a comparatively recent development, the adventure-sports coach struggles for a clear and distinct identity. The generic term ‘instructor’ no longer characterizes the role and function of this subgroup of outdoor professionals. Indeed, although the fields of adventure/outdoor education and leadership are comparatively well researched, the arrival of this ‘new kid on the block’ appears to challenge both the adventure-sports old guard and traditional views of sports coaching. In an attempt to offer clarity and stimulate debate, this paper attempts to conceptualize the adventure-sports coach in the context of the existing roles in the field and current motivations for activity in the outdoors. We identify issues that are specific to the adventure-sports coach while also recognizing those skills and competencies shared with other professionals, both in the adventure sports profession and traditional sports coaching fields. Based on this review, we offer a conceptual model which may be used to focus debate, stimulate research and, at a possible later stage, to underpin accreditation, training and professional development.     

Teachers Conceptualizing Student Achievement

Although teachers vary widely in their perceptions of education, student achievement, and methods of assessment, more than psychometricians and other people they concentrate on student performance of tasks. To the teacher, grades are an indication of successful acquisition of particular knowledge and an increase in skill. Achievement is not thought of so much as enhancing a trait or increasing an ability, but as successfully completing the task. They visualize the experience, more so than the competence. When emphasis is given to standardizing curricula and testing, even though goals and standards can be expressed as task performance, the technology of testing and school reform devises indicators of success in terms of human ability. Ability is generalized; task performance is particularized, contextualized. When the success of teaching or schooling is interpreted in terms of test scores, the teacher is pressed to reconceptualize teaching and, directly or indirectly, to teach for the test.     

Personality structure,instructional outcomes,and instructional preferences

Four instructional treatments differing in structure and student responsibility were used with 60 abstractthinking and 60 concrete-thinking students. As predicted, abstract students preferred those treatments with less structure and more responsibility; however, abstract and concrete students showed similar achievement levels as a result, of each treatment. The differentiated outcomes hypothesis is offered to account for the findings.

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Résumé Quatre méthodes de traitement pédagogique de structure et de responsabilité des étudiants ont été employées avec 60 étudiants pensant abstraitement et 60 étudiants pensant de manière concrète. Ainsi que prévu, les étudiants pensant abstraitement préféraient les méthodes ayant moins de structure et plus de responsabilité. Les deux catégories d'étudiants ont toutefois obtenu des niveaux d'accomplissement pareils avec chaque méthode de traitement. L'hypothèse des aboutissements différenciés est offerte comme explication des conclusions.

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This study was based in part on the doctoral dissertation of the junior author. The authors would like to thank the students and staff of the County College of Morris, Morristown, N.J., for their cooperation.     

不可忽视教态的教学功能

一、身体的动作 教师在课堂上身体的动作,主要指教师在教室里身体位置的移动和身体的局部动作. 1.教师在课堂上的走动走动是教师传递信息的一种方式,如果一个教师一节课只一个姿势地站在那里一动也不动,课堂就会显得单调而沉闷.相反,教师适时地在学生面前走动,而又能调动学生的注意力,课堂就会变得有生气,还能激发学生的兴趣,调动其积极情绪.     

追寻教学意义重塑教学生活

“百名学者评论中国教育”专栏,以教育研究者的角度,就教育理论和实践中的热点、焦点、难点、冰点问题发表各种建设性见解。先期办成开放式的,一事一议,或提出问题,或分析评论,力求形成百家争鸣、百花齐放之势,激活中国之教育学术。待有重点问题时,再分专题讨论。特邀教育界有影响的专家学者参与,以教授和博士为主办成一个高层次论坛。各位同仁可就自己认为教育理论与实践中的重要问题写成评论,每篇2000-3000字为宜,诚请各位同仁在百忙中赐教赐稿。     

Conceptualizing Teachers' Ways of Knowing

This article addresses issues related to the ways teachers learn mathematics and the teaching of mathematics and the relevance of those ways to their professional development. Preservice teachers' understanding of school mathematics lacks sophistication, a situation that needs to be addressed in mathematics teacher education programs. What is critical is the means by which they encounter and explore the mathematics they will be teaching. Fundamentally, their mathematical experiences need to be congruous with the kind of teaching we would expect of a reflective, adaptive teacher. The article contains both practical and theoretical considerations of how these experiences might be structured. Theoretical orientations for conceptualizing teachers' belief structures are offered as a foundation for conceptualizing teachers' ways of knowing. The moral dimension of teacher education is considered as a backdrop for understanding how teachers come to know.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Conceptualizing effectiveness in disability research

Policies promoting evidence-based practice in education typically endorse evaluations of the effectiveness of teaching strategies through specific experimental research designs and methods. A number of researchers have critiqued this approach to evaluation as narrow and called for greater methodological sophistication. This paper discusses the value and complexity of working within and against the experimental research model in disability research by simultaneously engaging in inclusive research practices. A study is presented to support the discussion using case examples of researching on/for/with young people diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. The study incorporated a single-case research design to investigate the impact of an educational practice. The investigation was co-constructed and co-evaluated by students, parents and teachers to consider multiple pathways and perspectives on the intervention's impact on students' progress towards their goals. Deleuzian thinking was employed as a framework for producing different forms of knowledge and to help negotiate the tension existing between the processes of experimental and inclusive research. The study is both complicit with and a critique of traditional research approaches, by working partially within the experimental and inclusive models and reflecting on the benefits and limitations of each.     

Enhancing instructional design efficiency: Methodologies employed by instructional designers

Instructional systems design (ISD) has been frequently criticised as taking too long to implement, calling for a reduction in cycle time—the time that elapses between project initiation and delivery. While instructional design research has historically focused on increasing learner efficiencies, the study of what instructional designers do to increase efficiency during the design of instruction, including web‐based training, has not yet been fully examined. The purpose of this qualitative developmental study was to identify and understand the methodologies used by experienced instructional designers to increase the efficiency of the instructional design process. Data were gathered from 11 instructional designers working within two business and industry consulting firms that provide learning solutions to global clients. Results revealed 47 efficiency methodologies found within the four categories of design model, instructional design team member roles, instructional design processes and instructional design tools. Additionally, 14 supporting instructional designer competencies were found within the category of instructional designer knowledge, skills and attitudes.     

Evaluating instructional quality

ABSTRACT

Building on the papers in this special issue, this article uses modern conceptions of validity theory to provide a framework for considering the evaluation of teaching quality. The 3 facets of teaching quality focused on are domain conceptualization, evidence and inferences, and their evaluation. Domain definitions vary in their specificity with tradeoffs in their range of applicability and specificity of inference. Evidence collection can range from highly standardized assessments to observations that must attend to evidence from a myriad of classroom interactions. For all assessments, however, even the most standardized, different interpretations of assessment tasks can threaten the validity of score interpretations. The papers consider a range of processes that are designed to generate, support, and interrogate the validity of inferences based on assessment scores. A fundamental question underlying this type of measurement is whether differences in the quality of teaching that students experience can be causally attributed to the teacher.     

The instructional developer

Summary The study reported in this article was conducted with a selected group of instructional developers, the members of the Division of Instructional Development of the Association for Educational Communications and Technologoy. While the information seems to represent the most complete set of data now available on this group, it is too limited to permit sweeping generalizations. The intention of the study was to survey instructional developers in order to obtain some information about their demographic, professional, and ideological characteristics. A major thrust of this study dealt with what range of learning theories and instructional guides the developers used in dealing with problems of learning and development.     

Evaluating instructional software

This article describes a new model for evaluating instructional software. Also described is a study in which the new model was field tested. Unlike most such models, which focus on the instructional and technical characteristics of software, the model focuses on the extent to which students learn the skills a software package is intended to teach. It is argued that by using this approach, educators will be better able to reliably identify software that is instructionally effective.     

Two instructional aids to optimise processing and learning from instructional explanations

Although instructional explanations are commonly used to introduce learners to new learning content, previous studies have often shown that their effects on learning outcomes are minimal. This failure might partly be due to mental passivity of the learners while processing introductory explanations and to a lack of opportunity to revise potential misunderstandings after working on introductory explanations. Against this background, we provided learners with two instructional support measures to optimise the introduction of new principles and concepts by providing instructional explanations in the domain of management theory: (a) prompts designed to induce inferences that are focused on the central content of the explanations, and (b) remedial explanations that are adapted to the learners’ knowledge gaps. We tested their effects in a 2 × 2 factorial experimental design with the following factors: (a) prompts designed to induce focused processing (with vs. without), and (b) remedial explanations (adapted vs. random). The participants consisted of 80 psychology students. We found that the prompts fostered both the share of deep-oriented processing and the acquisition of conceptual knowledge. The beneficial effect of prompts on conceptual knowledge was mediated by the number of inferences that learners generated in response to the prompts. In addition, we found that prompts also fostered the instructional efficiency of providing instructional explanations. The provision of adapted remedial explanations, however, fostered neither deep-oriented processing nor the acquisition of conceptual knowledge. We conclude that prompts designed to induce focused processing can foster deep-oriented processing as well as both the effectiveness and efficiency of learning from instructional explanations.     

注重教学设计 促进教学改革

教学设计是通向成功教学的桥梁.注重教学设计有助于更新教学观念,促进教学整体改革.在教学设计应用中要把握其内涵本质,处理好理论与实践的关系.