Changing Play – writing,researching and learning in an early years arts project

ABSTRACT

‘Changing Play’ is an ongoing project initiated by education curators from the Serpentine, a prestigious London art gallery, working with the Portman children’s centre nursery. Viewed by curators as a collaboration between artist, children’s centre staff and parents, and the gallery, Changing Play combines art and action research, and expands the boundaries of the gallery. In the words of one of the education curators, ‘the project is about social change’. It is not for the gallery curators to develop proposals but to ‘co-develop work’. Ethnographic evidence employing narrative, visual arts informed analysis is being used by the gallery to report to funders, inform iterative planning and inform future directions. The paper focuses on methodological questions on ways in which ethnographers might meet artistic projects both during and after being in the ‘field’. It takes the form of a ‘loose parts’ montage which reflects the ways in which the art project was conducted.     

Enhancing self-regulated learning by writing learning protocols

Learning protocols are a self-guided way of writing that allows for elaboration and reflection on learning content. In an experimental study (N = 103), we supported protocol writing with prompts to elicit important strategies as postulated by a cyclical model of self-regulated learning. Students received either (a) no prompts, (b) cognitive prompts, (c) metacognitive prompts, (d) mixed prompts without, or (e) including prompts for planning of remedial strategies. Prompting all essential sub-processes of self-regulated learning (group e) fostered students' comprehension best. Thus, with appropriate support, writing can serve as a beneficial medium helping students to self-regulate their understanding of subject matter.     

英语写作教学中的合作学习

在电大英语写作教学中采用合作学习方式能够促进学生写作能力的提高。通过小组合作活动,每个学生都有机会运用所学语言知识,并由此逐渐培养起学习的主动性和探究意识。采用合作方式进行写作教学时应处理好教师与学生的关系和独立学习与合作学习的关系,同时注意进行合理的评价。     

Cooperative learning in English writing teaching

Writing plays an important role in our daily communication among the four basic language skills.However,in China,both the teacher and students do not attach much weight to English writing in school education.Many problems exit in the current teaching of English writing.Cooperative learning is a creative and effective teaching theory based on interaction among group members.This essay mainly explores the possibility of combining cooperative learning and English writing teaching together.     

浅谈确立学习目标的重要性与策略

本文结合目标教学法在大学课堂中的实际应用,阐述目标教学使教学目标数字化,明确化。结合目前大学生实际情况,通过调查问卷,访谈,特别的公开课等方式获得第一手材料,探讨目标教学对教师教学和学生学习的双重积极意义。并结合高校非英语专业英语教学课堂、学生特点,对目标教学在高校课堂中的具体实施和实际运用提出看法。     

Managing multiple goals in real learning contexts

Understanding students’ multiple goals in real learning contexts is an emerging area of importance for educators and researchers investigating student motivation in classrooms. This qualitative study conducted over an academic year investigates the multiple goals articulated by seven 11-year-old students and explores relationships between goals and changes in goals during the year. Findings show students pursue a range of related academic and social goals over time and that goals can be complementary and dynamic. The significance of multiple goals is emphasised as goals are shown to be complex, dynamic, and pursued simultaneously in real learning contexts.     

Generalized achievement goals and situational coping in inquiry learning

This study examined situation-specific coping strategies of students with different achievement goals as they take part in inquiry learning. A case study was conducted in a Finnish elementary school. 21 ten-year-old students participated in the study. Two types of data were collected: (1) Students self-reported questionnaires on achievement goals, (2) Video data on the students' learning processes and social interaction. The results revealed the importance of a situative perspective in instructional design, since the students not only differed in their coping attempts regarding their initial goals but also according to their individual situational interpretations that mediated their active coping attempts. Some of the non-learning-focused students had difficulties engaging in the working procedures. A lack of teacher's concrete and precise guidance in both cognitive and motivational sense appeared to explain this phenomenon.     

在作文中形成语文素养

本文主要探讨在基础教育1至6年级阶段的写作中运用直接尝试、观察想像、求异思维等方式,形成学生良好的语文素养.     

Factors influencing the pursuit of personal learning goals in MOOCs

MOOCs are promising opportunities for lifelong learning, but as promising as these learning opportunities seem, many learners do not succeed in pursuing their personal learning goals. Barriers to learning are the main reason for not finishing the intended (parts of the) MOOCs. This study addressed the question whether the factors age, gender, educational level, and online learning experience affect barriers faced while learning in MOOCs. The results show that it is challenging to combine work and family life with lifelong (online) learning activities, especially for learners in their early adulthood and mid-life. However, more experience with online learning positively affects individuals’ ability to cope with these challenges. Also, learners with a lower educational level may experience a lack of knowledge or difficulties with the course content. These findings may serve as input to inform potentially vulnerable learners about these issues and support them in successfully achieving their personal learning goals.     

Supporting writing for assessment in online learning

This article explores some specific issues involved in online learning and assessment. It draws on data from a postgraduate course for professional educators, delivered globally online, and highlights the relationship between students’ online discussion and their written assessed work, arguing that we need to focus on both of these in terms of the writing demands they make on students. In so doing it utilizes a theoretical framework which conceptualizes writing as contextualized social practice. The paper illustrates the complexity of the rhetorical demands being made on students in these new environments of teaching and learning and, in focusing on writing, complements present approaches to online learning which have, to date, tended towards collaborative and constructivist perspectives. The article highlights the relationship between pedagogy, technology and assessment. It concludes with a discussion of the design of an online writing resource to support student writers on this particular masters programme.     

Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.     

Chinese parents’ goals and practices in early childhood

We review the literature on Chinese parents’ views and practices through the lens of Confucianism. Confucianism advances seven developmental goals for children – knowledge, social norms, modesty, shame, self-restraint, filial piety, and harmonious relationships – and unique beliefs about parents’ role in children's development (Guan). We examine how these goals and beliefs are reflected in parents’ socialization of their young children, and how they play out in associations between parenting and children's development. We close with a contextualized, dynamic approach to the study of parenting goals and practices by describing historical shifts in China's economy, policies, and the global context that have led to marked changes in Chinese parenting.     

Cognitive conflicts in mathematics learning

The paper describes research results on how students’ conceptions conflict and change in the process of learning mathematics. There are conflicts within the learner which can be explained as developmental conflicts. Some of them seem to be age-dependent (U-shaped behavioral growth: a global view gets destroyed into a chaos and grows up again as a structured view), and others seem to be fundamental as gaps between two types of concepts (spontaneous versus scientific in the sense of Vygotsky). A third kind of conflict appears when the learner expands the boundaries or exceeds the limits of a concept which was successful till then in the limited version. Conflicts between the learner’s concept and an outside concept originate from communication problems. Both the learner and the teacher may have correct concepts but there is a mismatch of understanding because of thinking in different frames.     

Cognitive abilities and learning disabilities

Summary The greater discrepancy between spatial vs sequential/conceptual WISC subtest results in learning-disabled children is instrumental to the idea that these children might profit relatively more from an imagery based strategy in organizing and recalling noun pairs and triplets than from a verbal strategy. The results from the present studies with concrete nouns show that this is not the case. Another result is that learning-disabled children’s recall performance is also lower when strategy instructed (except in the first experiment) than normal children’s performance. Suggestions as to which strategy aspects could be responsible are given. This paper is based upon a presentation at the 30th Annual Conference of The Orton Society in Indianapolis, November 1979.     

Mastery goals,positive emotions and learning behavior in self-directed vs. teacher-directed learning

European Journal of Psychology of Education - It is generally accepted and well documented that mastery goal orientation positively affects students’ learning behavior. However, less is known...     

Encouraging children's early writing efforts

A study of preschool classroom teachers reveal insights into the nature of children's writing efforts and how teachers can best foster those abilities.     

Cognitive and affective processes in multimedia learning

This special section focuses on cognitive and affective processes in multimedia learning in a range of learning domains. Expanding previous research that has taken a predominantly cognitive perspective of multimedia learning, recent studies have begun to consider affective aspects of multimedia learning with the aim of integrating emotion, motivation, and other affective variables into cognitive processing models. The articles included in this special section are examples of the various ways in which the cognitive perspective can be enhanced by taking affective aspects of learning into account. Investigations range from the study of confusion as an affective state that can be beneficial to learning, and the consideration of the potential distracting or motivating function of decorative illustrations, to an inquiry into how visual design can induce positive emotions in learners. The results of the studies included in this section are in line with Moreno's Cognitive-Affective Theory of Learning with Media (CATLM; Moreno, 2006) and show how emotion and interest facilitate cognitive processing and improve cognitive and affective outcomes.