Using Spacing to Enhance Diverse Forms of Learning: Review of Recent Research and Implications for Instruction

Every day, students and instructors are faced with the decision of when to study information. The timing of study, and how it affects memory retention, has been explored for many years in research on human learning. This research has shown that performance on final tests of learning is improved if multiple study sessions are separated—i.e., “spaced” apart—in time rather than massed in immediate succession. In this article, we review research findings of the types of learning that benefit from spaced study, demonstrations of these benefits in educational settings, and recent research on the time intervals during which spaced study should occur in order to maximize memory retention. We conclude with a list of recommendations on how spacing might be incorporated into everyday instruction.     

The Thinking Body In/Of Multimodal Engineering Literacy

Studies show that engineering is particularly suited for students traditionally experiencing difficulties in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects—including those marked learning disabled—because it supports literacy in its different manifestations (i.e., across modes). This article addresses this topic, building on the late Vygotsky’s premise that activity is the origin of consciousness. In Vygotsky’s approach, there are no underlying conceptions and schema that drive human communication—because thought does not precede and instead becomes in communication—and the different communicative modes (speaking, gesturing, doing) are but manifestations (attributes) of a thinking body.     

Narrative inquiry as travel study method: affordances and constraints

This article maps how narrative inquiry—the use of story to study human experience—has been employed as both method and form to capture cross-cultural learning associated with Western doctoral students’ travel study to eastern destinations. While others were the first to employ this method in the travel study domain, we are the first to comprehensively explore the affordances and constraints of the methodology and the possibilities it holds for illuminating knowledge developments, community growth, and identity transformations on the part of participating students. Story fragments illustrating each of these opportunities and challenges are drawn from the China Study Abroad Program, a program sponsored by the University of Houston’s Asian American Studies Center that has been underway since 1995. Affordances of the narrative inquiry research method include such things as detailed accounts of individuals in interaction with diverse people/places/things and explications of stories people live in and by. Accounts, which are “true for now,” as opposed to true for all time and the dangers of human fallibility form two examples of narrative inquiry’s constraints.     

New Perspectives on the Adult: An Argument for Lifelong Education

The article brings into question the issue of regional network strategies aiming at implementing structures of lifelong learning in the local context, the so‐called learning communities. Facing a broad diversity in their implementation all over Europe, one can observe on the other hand much less effort to discuss conceptual frameworks that deal explicitly with this subject as a whole. Yet it seems essential to categorise these colourful patterns of practice and to identify key issues—notably with regards to the aspect of lifelong learning—to develop the discourse further and to render it adaptive to international debate.

For this purpose the paper draws attention to three instrumental case studies of learning communities (a Norwegian one, an English one and a German one) that were conducted within an exploratory research strategy. Designed as a between‐method triangulation, the case studies represent a mixed qualitative‐quantitative approach by means of an anonymous questionnaire and half‐standardised interviews. The members of the network and its key stakeholders from the meta‐level were investigated just as the local framework itself. Hence, the study intends not only to demonstrate exemplarily the European variety of learning communities, their origins and leading structures, but also to propose a further structuring of the topic by introducing a typology of learning communities. This eventually opens up controversial issues about lifelong learning strategies in general; for example the question, if these strategies will possibly rather widen already existing structures of inequality and exclusion than raising participation in lifelong learning.     

(Re)framing a philosophical and epistemological framework for teaching and learning in STEM: Emerging pedagogies for complexity

Today’s learners are engaging in study where access to knowledge is easier than it ever has been in human history. Rapid advancement of technology and the increasing ease with which communication and interaction can occur has dramatically changed the landscape in which teachers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) operate. The contemporary skills that students are required to possess include inter alia problem solving, creativity, teamwork abilities, communication skills and emotional intelligence. Despite the universal acceptance of their importance, these skills are commonly cited as underdeveloped and in addition, are still accompanied by outmoded ‘traditional’ forms of teaching and assessment. While the approaches of twentieth-century education were successful in developing knowledge stores, the ubiquity of access to knowledge—coupled with the constantly changing nature of the world today—requires alternative conceptions of teaching and learning. This article focuses primarily on an exploration of learning metaphors and teaching with the overall lens of creating self-regulated and furthermore, self-determined learners. The article begins with an exploration of learning in STEM education and a critique of the pedagogical perspective, discussing why this epistemology may be insufficient for contemporary STEM learning. The article then considers an alternative and potentially more contemporary notion; the emergent pedagogic space. The article presents a theoretical model to conceptualise learning in STEM education, with the goal of informing both practice and research. The realisation of this proposed emergent pedagogical space is explored through an applied case study from a design and technology context.     

Communities of Practice in Workplaces

Since the 1990s we have seen an increase in consideration of social and cultural aspects of learning as a way to foster organizational learning and human performance. Despite strong interest among practitioners and scholars, the study of organizational learning is lacking in empirical research. The study described here calls attention to the importance of informal learning in designing effective learning environments for the training of professionals. The study examines how people share and construct their knowledge in a Public Defender's Office and conclude that there are six attributes of communities of practice (CoPs) that serve as scaffolding for organizational learning. The attributes are (1) a group of professionals, (2) development of a shared meaning, (3) informal network, (4) supportive culture‐trust, (5) engagement in knowledge building, and (6) individuals' negotiation and development of professional identities. Implications for education and training in relation to the concept of CoPs are discussed.     

Change Management: Term Confusion and New Classifications

This article addresses two key aspects of change management and the notional confusion that occurs resulting from two different uses of the term change management. The author proposes new terms—macro change management and micro change management—for the two uses of the term change management. He then compares these two terms based on their attributes, comprising definition, target, focus, and roles of change agents including required competencies. The article concludes with explanations as to why change management notional clarification and term elaboration are important for the human performance technology field.     

Comparison of learning disabled and general education children on the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities

This study examined the diagnostic value of the MSCA in discriminating between learning disabled and general education children. The data were analyzed by several methods, including mean score comparisons, profile analysis, and discriminant analysis. The results indicated that learning disabled children performed differently—1 to 1 1/2 SDs lower—than general education children on the MSCA GCI and on all five major scale indexes. Some consistent differences between the two groups also were revealed at the subtest level. However, in examining the individual MSCA scale index profiles, it was found that a similar amount of scatter was present in the profiles of learning disabled and general education children. Furthermore, no specific pattern of scale indexes could be determined as typical for learning disabled children. These results are seen as not lending the necessary support to the use of MSCA profile as a diagnostic tool in identifying learning disabled children. The present findings are discussed in detail, and several rather consistent trends of performance on the MSCA are identified for learning disabled children.     

Information Technologies: What You See Is Not (Always) What You Get

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the gap between the learning potentials afforded by computers and the actual learning from them. A computer's unique potentials emanate from the kinds and varieties of four basic attributes that it offers: information, symbol systems, user activities, and relations with user. These attributes may affect four corresponding cognitions-knowledge structures, internal modes of representation, mental operations, and attitudes and perceptions respectively-by either activating, supplanting, or short-circuiting them. Such effects could be obtained through "low road" learning, which is practice-intensive, leading to near automatic responses, or through "high road" learning, which is thinking-intensive (i.e., nonautomatic operations are mindfully employed). The high road is seen as the more feasible and promising road to conceptual learning of the kind computers can facilitate. However, the extent to which high road learning actually occurs greatly depends on learners' volitional mindfulness, itself partly determined by the nature of the materials encountered and partly by personological, perceptual, and attitudinal factors. It is argued that the opportunity for mapping computers' attributes on their corresponding cognitions, although often available, does not always take place because learners do not always become mindful on their own. A computer's promise does not lie in its attributes alone, unique and powerful as they may be, but in how mindfully learners come to handle them. One important computer attribute—the partnerlike relationships with learners that it permits—and a number of instructional practices are discussed as possible means to promote and sustain learners' mindfulness.     

Factors influencing students’ perceptions of graduate attribute acquisition in a multidisciplinary honours track in a Dutch university

This article studies the relationship between students’ perceptions of teaching and learning in a multidisciplinary honours programme and their impact on graduate attributes acquisition. The study, conducted among 73 honours students in a Dutch research university, evaluates perceived improvement in graduate attributes through annually collected survey data pertaining to student motivation, perception of the teaching and learning environment, engagement in the programme and registered course marks. The evaluation study reveals that to the extent of the perceived development of graduate attributes, three factors play crucial roles: students’ performance motivation, the amount of teacher support in creative and critical thinking, and students’ inclination to approach the honours track as a learning community.     

Fictions of work-related learning: how a hit television show portrays internship,and how medical students relate to those portrayals

This article proceeds from three main premises. First, we assert that popular culture functions pedagogically and helps cultural consumers learn about work, even before they enter educational programs or workplaces. Second, we argue that exploring portrayals of internship is useful in understanding the ‘attributes of formality and informality’ that are present in any learning context. Third, we view internship not as a singular pedagogical strategy, but rather as a complex of pedagogical and learning approaches. We use the American television show Grey's Anatomy, set in a teaching hospital and focused on surgical residents, as a case of cultural representation of the internship process. We identify six approaches that are portrayed in the show: question-and-answer, experiential learning, mentoring, networking, peer learning and learning/teaching. These approaches illustrate how multiple strategies are developed and adopted by learner-workers and teacher-supervisors. We then explore how undergraduate medical students who participated in our study anticipated their own internship experiences and made sense of portrayals of it in the show.