Later Life: A Time To Learn

In this article, an emerging framework for investigating and interpreting the experiences of learning in later life is presented. This framework is contextualized by a study in which the lived experiences of later-life computer learners were investigated. Significant ontological and existential interpretations from the study provided insights into the meaning of time in later life. Time for the omega generation is particularly important because people look to the past and the present for both meaning and integrity. They then use this knowledge to look to the future for a time when they will no longer be living. The period of older adulthood is also unique in the life course as an opportunity to learn. With no time constraints, people in later life are able to devote time to learning in a way not previously experienced. Interpretations from the research project provide a link between learning in later life and the ontological and existential search for meaning. These three related constructs (i.e., time, later life, and learning) are explored in this article.     

教孩子环保，从点滴做起

把环保的观念早早种在孩子小小的心灵里,培养孩子环保的生活方式,这是环保父母们的心愿。他们身体力行,孩子耳濡目染,不知不觉中,孩子不仅成为了一个个环保小卫士,一些好习惯也养成了。     

学会学习、学会研究、学会创新——对本科生、硕士生、博士生素质教育的思考

针对社会发展对不同层次人才的不同素质需求,指出我国高等院校在开展素质教育时应不同层次区别对待.提出本科生应重点学会学习、硕士生应重点学会研究、博士生应重点学会创新的素质教育培养目标,同时就如何实现相应的素质教育培养目标提出建议.     

Writing to Learn: Benefits and Limitations

Writing to learn is a pedagogical approach grounded in the belief that the reasoning required to write about a topic or concept will help students gain understanding. However, research indicates that the impact writing has on student learning depends on context. Using a mixed-method, quasi-experimental, repeated measures design, we examined how embedding writing-to-learn pedagogy in a required college course impacted students’ learning as well as their perceptions of writing to learn. Our quantitative analysis revealed that writing to learn did not have a differential effect on student achievement of course goals. However, qualitative analysis revealed evidence indicating students valued writing to learn as a way to make sense of course content by reasoning through their ideas and responses to class experiences. From the instructor's perspective, writing to learn also helped build rapport with students. Our results indicated that in our context, writing to learn pedagogy had benefits and limitations. We offer practical implications and pedagogical suggestions based on our experiences and findings.     

论远程开放教育中学生学习能力的培养

让学生学会学习,是完成开放教育所必需,是实现终身教育所必备,也是素质教育需要研究的一个重要课题。本文运用当代教育理论和心理学的研究成果对此问题进行一些探讨,认为转变观念是实现学习能力培养的关键,掌握学习策略与整合信息技术环境下的各种学习资源的能力,是学会学习的两个重点。     

Self-Efficacy: An Essential Motive to Learn

During the past two decades, self-efficacy has emerged as a highly effective predictor of students' motivation and learning. As a performance-based measure of perceived capability, self-efficacy differs conceptually and psychometrically from related motivational constructs, such as outcome expectations, self-concept, or locus of control. Researchers have succeeded in verifying its discriminant validity as well as convergent validity in predicting common motivational outcomes, such as students' activity choices, effort, persistence, and emotional reactions. Self-efficacy beliefs have been found to be sensitive to subtle changes in students' performance context, to interact with self-regulated learning processes, and to mediate students' academic achievement. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.     

Aptitude and Propensity to Learn

This study was designed to investigate the extent to which a policy regarding graduate admission standards exists among selected graduate faculty members at Colorado State College. Twenty judges utilized Normative Judgment Analysis techniques to generate a projected criterion of graduate school success on profile data for thirty randomly selected doctoral graduates. The results of the study indicate that essentially one policy was being expressed by the judges.     

让学生学会学习的自我监控

部分中学生在学习方面不乏认真刻苦,但缺乏有关策略运用的条件性知识、缺乏对学习活动进行有效的自我监控成了他们提高学习效率的关键问题.本文通过案例,探讨如何培养学生学习的自我监控能力.     

Introduction: Learning to Learn from Seattle

The road to Kananaskis Village curves up from Highway 40 in a long twisting arc.     

勤于赏识善于点拨乐于搭台--浅谈作文评讲如何促使学生可持续发展

作文评讲是习作教学的重要环节。作为一种教学手段，作文评讲应着眼于人，关注学生个性和潜能，促进学生作文素质可持续发展。那么作文评讲如何促使学生持续发展呢？     

Epilogue: Choosing to Learn or Not-Learn in School

As Herb Kohl has pointed out, some students learn to not-learn, refusing to pay attention in school, overriding curiosity. Often students are trying to short-circuit a pattern of failure and humiliation. In classrooms where students have some personal control over what and how they learn, not-learning seems to occur less frequently. I discuss examples of personal control in a reinvented writing program that I studied, as well as in examples from the other papers in this volume. Personal control, or self-determination, is an important component in integrated, constructivist education.     

素质教育：学会做人 学会生存

素质是指个人的才智、能力和内在涵养,即才干和道德力量。学会做人,学会生存是素质教育的灵魂。探讨素质教育的内涵与实质,指出当前教育存在的问题,提出实施素质教育的意见和建议。     

Learn to use and use to learn: Technology in virtual collaboration experience

This study examined how global learning teams utilized technology in a virtual collaboration to solve complex problems. The study offers an in-depth explanation of why and how the learning teams used technology to support computer-mediated communication. A model of technology application at different stages of virtual collaborative process is proposed. The model can be used to maximize potential of global teams and facilitate further integration of virtual collaboration into university curricula. Time difference and lack of nonverbal cues were identified as challenges the global teams faced. The benefits of virtual collaboration were the opportunities to: learn how to use technology in a meaningful way; practice using technology to solve problems; and broaden one's perspective by communicating with people from different cultures.     

Learning to Draw and Drawing to Learn

Young children enter formal schooling with a repertoire of modes of representation with which they try to make sense of the world – drawing, modelling, role play, storying, emergent literacy and numeracy. In drawing they use mark making for kinesthetic pleasure and later learn to repeat patterns and shapes intentionally. From these repeated marks they begin to explore the potential of drawings to represent what they know. A parallel set of drawing strategies with an explicit communicative function develop through social relationships at home or in pre-school/care settings. Children observe and mimic modes of representation and absorb the semiotics modelled by adults or older children in the community/culture[s] in which they are reared. On entering formal school, the messages children receive from the culture of classrooms is that the modes of representation that are valued are the formal symbolic modes of literacy and numeracy whereas teachers perceive drawing as useful for occupational or recreational purposes. Ironically, as children are cultured into ‘academic’ achievements, they lose out on opportunities to engage in alternative modes of representation/symbolic systems, which may offer opportunities for cognitive challenge at higher levels. Thus, whilst pushing children to perform ‘academically’ in the early stages of schooling, we underestimate them ‘intellectually’. At elementary school level children’s mark-making is shaped into a ‘catch-all’, narrative/representational style of drawing across all subjects. Children often elect to explore their own personal, culturally specific ways of drawing outside school as ‘home art’. In school their capabilities in using alternative modes of representation as tools for learning wither away.     

Playful Talk: Negotiating Opportunities to Learn in Collaborative Groups

This case study examines the role of playful talk in negotiating the “how” of collaborative group work in a 6th-grade science classroom. Here we develop and test a Vygotsky-derived hypothesis that postulates playful talk as a mechanism for identity exploration and group status negotiation. Our findings indicate that students utilized the playful talk genre as a means to (a) position themselves and others as more or less competent within the group in order to create or foreclose opportunities to learn, (b) maintain and strengthen bonds that were developing within the group toward the goal of achieving higher levels of coordination and opportunities to learn, and (c) pivot toward a self-selected identity aimed sometimes at affecting one’s status within the group. Taken together, these 3 playful talk functions allowed the group to manage tensions that arose as a result of periods of low coordination and to open opportunities to learn for lower status group members. This study contributes to researchers’ understanding of affective aspects of collaborative learning, which are theorized as foundational to success in such endeavors.     

Assessing Students' Opportunity to Learn: Teacher and Student Perspectives

How can we assess the opportunity that students have to learn the material they find on tests? How do students' perceptions of opportunity to learn differ from their teachers?