Use of Reinforcement in Education

Abstract

Two randomly assigned sections of general psychology were taught by the traditional lecture method. Two other sections were taught by the name teacher, but divided into four groups of ten students each. These groups of students were encouraged to clarify, to elaborate on, to illustrate and to develop the implications of the main concepts in their textbook. They were asked to take the time to become acquainted and to develop a friendly atmosphere wherein all group members would feel comfortable and free to express themselves. Each was to have some responsibility for drawing out the other members of the group and to work toward clear statements on the part of himself and his fellows. The instructor went from group to group but did not teach in the traditional sense. lie served as a reinforcer to these students. The two experimental sections showed increased test scores which were beyond the .001 level of significance.     

自考生学习动机特点及影响因素调查分析

本研究通过对自考生学习动机的调查显示：自考生的学习动机总体上处于中上水平;不同群体自考生的学习动机在性别、是否独生子女、年级、家庭住址、学业成绩、专业满意程度等影响因素方面存在差异。研究进一步提出了相关的教育对策。     

Metamodelling Messages Conveyed in Five Statistical Mechanical Textbooks from 1936 to 2001

Modelling is a significant aspect of doing physics and it is important how this activity is taught. This paper focuses on the explicit or implicit messages about modelling conveyed to the student in the treatments of phase transitions in statistical mechanics textbooks at beginning graduate level. Five textbooks from the 1930s to the present are analysed with respect to their messages about the following issues: What is a good model? What is the purpose of modelling? What does it mean to understand a natural phenomenon? It is argued that these texts give the student quite different perceptions of these issues and thus what of it means to do physics.     

Personality and Student Teaching Success

The relationship between personality factors of education students and their success in student teaching was explored in relation to the student teacher’s sex and level of pupils taught. The IPAT Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire was administered to all education majors at Florida Atlantic University and the student teaching grade was collected for those students (N = 362) completing the education program.

A 3 × 2 × 2 Manova was employed wherein the level of pupil taught, teacher sex, and student teaching grade served as independent variables and the 16 personality scores as dependent variables. Significant effects were grade achieved in student teaching and sex. Separate discriminant functions were derived to separate both males and females with respect to student teaching grade. The percentage of hits resulting from subsequent classification of a replication sample was found too low to validate the personality discriminant model as a student teaching grade predictor.     

Learning and teaching: Differentiation and relation

In this paper we discuss the articulation between teaching and learning, how to differentiate them and how to establish relations between them, limiting ourselves to aspects dealing with knowledge. The aim is to allow the design of teaching situations more relevant for learning. The characteristics differentiating teaching and learning are used to analyse research studies relative to two time scales, one of the order of months or years and the other of the order of hours. The comparison shows the importance of the grain size chosen to analyse the knowledge involved both in teaching and in learning. On the first scale, the analysis of the students' knowledge and that of the knowledge to be taught are done independently to the extent that students' knowledge is not analysed in reference to the knowledge to be taught (in terms of error or missing aspect) but on the basis of the student's coherency. The decomposition of these two types of knowledge into similar components allows us to compare them and leads us to propose “intermediate notions” between the usual physics knowledge to be taught and the students prior knowledge. These intermediate notions can be rather far from complete correct physics knowledge but are learnable by the students. On the second scale, detailed analysis of a single teaching session and the students' processes during this session needs a fine level of knowledge granularity. Such a level allows us to make hypotheses based on the elements of students' prior knowledge from which they can construct new knowledge and not only on the prior knowledge which has to be modified. This granularity level allows an emphasis on the positive aspects of students' prior knowledge and enables us to construct hypothesis in order to design teaching situations. Making explicit “intermediate notions” in the knowledge to be taught at a rather large level of granularity of knowledge and the positive aspects of students' prior knowledge at a fine level of granularity, are proposed as ways to improve teaching for fruitful learning.     

Student performance in off-campus programs

The quality of degree programs offered off-campus, particularly on military bases, has become an issue affecting many institutions of higher education. This study asked the question: Do students in off-campus programs perform as well as students in on-campus programs? As a basis for comparison, only courses taught on- and off-campus by the same instructor were chosen. Six courses, taught 37 times, by ten instructors, met these criteria. The subjects included the 649 undergraduate students from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale who received letter grades in these courses between 1975 and 1977. As a measure of performance, the grades of on- and off-campus students were compared by means of at-test. The mean grade of off-campus students (3.34) was not significantly different (at the .01 level) from that of on-campus students (3.29). As a control, faculty were interviewed to determine the equivalence in content and rigor of courses they taught in both settings. Faculty generally responded that their on- and off-campus courses were equivalent in content and rigor, supporting the use of grades as a measure of student performance. These results indicate that not only do faculty maintain their standards while teaching off-campus, but that the academic performance of off-campus students equals that of on-campus students.     

An Experiment in Developing Critical Thinking in Children

A three week experiment was conducted comparing the academic achievement of pupils in five classrooms (N = 108) taught in small cooperative groups against that of pupils from five classes (N = 109) taught in the traditional whole-class approach. Special achievement tests were prepared for each grade level, two through six. These tests were constructed with items requiring responses at low and high levels of cognitive functioning. Pupils in grades two, four, and six from small-group classrooms excelled on high level items as predicted. Pupils in the fifth grade produced superior answers on questions requiring original contributions. Achievement scores of both groups did not differ on items measuring low level cognitive functioning.     

Teaching functions in a graphic milieu: What forms of knowledge enable students to conjecture and prove?

In many countries, the first concepts of calculus (such as functions)are taught by looking at examples, noticing their properties and generalizing from them in some implicit ways. Students have no means to discuss the general truth of a statement, or to examine the validity of a theorem, relative to the mathematical field. This knowledge is nonetheless required by teachers at the university level. The question is, therefore, if it is possible to organize activities for beginning calculus students, which would nevertheless lead them to working on statements and validity of theorems. This paper presents a teaching approach related to the concept of function, which aimed at leading students working within a graphic milieu to producing, discussing and testing the validity of mathematical statements and theorems. The intention of the approach was to use the procedural aspect of the graphs to provide a favorable milieu for linking the intuitive and the formal knowledge(such as required at the university for establishing proofs). The approach was experimented with a group of students. After the experiment, the students indeed became able to think of functions as objects and to engage with questions of validity of mathematical statements.This revised version was published online in October 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

TEACHING FOR STATISTICAL LITERACY: UTILISING AFFORDANCES IN REAL-WORLD DATA

It is widely held that context is important in teaching mathematics and statistics. Consideration of context is central to statistical thinking, and any teaching of statistics must incorporate this aspect. Indeed, it has been advocated that real-world data sets can motivate the learning of statistical principles. It is not, however, a straightforward task to take a real-world example and incorporate it into a lesson that will teach important statistical principles. This paper considers issues involved in using real data to exemplify statistical ideas and examines pre-service teachers’ attempts to design teaching activities using such data. Pre-service teachers were supplied with a topical data set and asked to plan lessons that would teach some key statistical idea to year 6 students. The lessons were analysed using a hierarchy for teaching statistical literacy, and great variation was found in the level of statistical thinking demanded in the planned lessons. Teachers who had completed a preliminary activity helping them to think carefully about what might be taught from real data in general produced lessons with stronger statistical content. A key requirement for having lessons with deep consideration of statistical ideas is to identify the actual affordances for teaching contained within a data set; the planning process then benefits from explicit attention to making that content evident in the teaching activities.     

Industry Expects—But Who Should Determine the Curriculum?

This paper begins by looking at the views of industrialists on the kind of mathematics which they believe should be taught to engineering undergraduates. As might be expected, these views are diverse and at times contradictory. Opinions expressed by representatives of chartered institutions and by academics, from both engineering departments and mathematics departments, are also considered. The second part of the paper draws common threads from the collection of opinions and argues the case for mathematics to be regarded as a full engineering subject. Then it takes a critical look at the mathematics being taught and gives a realistic overview of the role of the computer in the teaching of mathematics to engineers. Finally, some broad principles for a future curriculum are stated and a positive way forward is advocated.     

Josiah Willard Gibbs

The foundations of classical thermodynamics, as taught in textbooks today, were laid down in nearly complete form by Josiah Willard Gibbs more than a century ago. This article presents a portrait of Gibbs, a quiet and modest man who was responsible for some of the most important advances in the history of science. V Kumaran is a professor of chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research interests include statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics.     

Beginning Statistics with Cuisenaire Rods

Cuisenaire Rods provide a concrete embodiment for teaching mean, median, and mode to middle schoolers. These statistical concepts are traditionally only taught abstractly, but may be better understood via manipulatives.     

The Pipeline of Engineering Studies in Classical Directions

This paper presents a philosophy for the education of professional engineers in Belgium at university level. The programme taught at the Catholic University of Leuven, and specifically at the Power Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering Department of the Engineering Faculty, serves as an example. This is a typical example of a classical topic suffering from a dearth of students. These are attracted instead by such perceived glamourous study areas as robotics, communications and electronics. We will analyse how modem techniques may be emphasised in classical studies and may help to make these directions more attractive, and how they may help to give students sufficient technical knowledge, without losing emphasis on generalism. We will show how the curriculum must be organised to account for the specific situation of Belgium in a unified Europe. A comparison will be made with the North American situation.     

综合英语课堂利用系统功能语言学模式进行口语教学的实证研究

本研究通过一个学期对比实验,验证了利用系统功能语言学的教学模式在综合英语课堂上进行英语口语教学的可行性和有效性。实验前后对比分析学生的英语演讲成绩,结果显示接受系统功能语言学教学模式的实验组在总体成绩上明显高于沿用普通口语教学模式的控制组,具体表现在词汇和结构两方面水平的显著提高。实验表明,以培养学生掌握语言的意义潜势为目标的系统功能语言学模式可有效帮助学生提高英语演讲水平。     

THE FORECASTING OF ECONOMICS FINALS RESULTS ‐A CASE OF POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC?

This paper sets out to test a popular feeling in University circles that lecturers can predict with some accuracy the final degree classification of students they have taught or known on a personal level. The results of an experiment carried out in the Economics department of the University of Bradford suggest that the magnitude of the forecasting error for these predictions is larger than the staff concerned might have anticipated, especially when compared with some alternative “naive” models. Part of the explanation of this gap might result from the fallacy of retrospective inference from results to causes.     

Evaluation of patterning instruction for kindergartners

Abstract

To determine whether patterning instruction was as useful or more useful than other forms of instruction, kindergarten children (age five) were taught either patterning or early literacy or mathematics or social studies in matched sessions. Instruction was conducted in 15-minute sessions from November through mid-April. Posttests on patterning, mathematics, early literacy, and three executive functions showed that the children taught patterning became significantly better at patterning than those in the other instructional conditions. No differences were found between the children taught mathematics, early literacy, or social studies. Correlational analyses indicated that the relations of patterning ability, working memory, and inhibitory control to mathematics achievement were similar. Cognitive flexibility was not very strongly related to any other measure and the executive functions were relatively independent of each other for the children who were age five.     

Games Teachers Play

An important social concern in mathematics education is that the educational attainment of pupils may be influenced by teachers' competence in the curricular area they are teaching. This paper provides some insight into the relationship between student primary teachers' mathematics subject knowledge and their reported confidence to teach that subject. Eighty Bachelor of Education first year students completed an attitudes survey as well as an online mathematics competence test which consisted of 28 randomly generated questions from a bank of approximately 300 questions based on the attainment targets of the Scottish curriculum 5–14 document at level F with some E. Students were asked to rank teacher attributes. Though 98% of the students ranked basic numeracy skills as the most important, 65% of the cohort did not possess these skills. Moreover 95% suggested confidence was important, but confidence levels were found to be low even among students with higher than minimum entry requirements to the undergraduate primary teaching programme. It is perhaps not the level of mathematics that needs to be changed but the nature of mathematics taught and learned at that level that needs to be addressed. This in turn has implications for the approaches and the programmes deployed by Initial Teacher Education courses.     

Updating RIGs: including the systematic influence of online study on student evaluation of teaching

Based on student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings from 1,432 units of study over a period of a year, representing 74,490 individual sets of ratings, and including a significant number of units offered in wholly online mode, we confirm the significant influence of class size, year level, and discipline area on at least some SET ratings. We also find online mode of offer to significantly influence at least some SET ratings. We reveal both the statistical significance and effect sizes of these influences, and find that the magnitudes of the effect sizes of all factors are small, but potentially cumulative. We also show that the influence of online mode of offer is of the same magnitude as the other 3 factors. These results support and extend the rating interpretation guides (RIGs) model proposed by Neumann and colleagues, and we present a general method for the development of a RIGs system.     

Teaching experiences of students with special educational needs in co‐taught and non‐co‐taught classes

Co‐teaching has gained considerable interest as a service delivery model for promoting the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream classrooms. This study examines whether co‐teaching has an effect on the teaching experiences of 12 students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 10 students with intellectual disability (ID) as compared with the experiences of the same students in non‐co‐taught classes. We implemented 264 structured observations in 22 classes to identify students with SEN grouping arrangements, level of engagement, interactions with teachers and peers, and the nature of the interactions. We also conducted 44 structured interviews with co‐teachers to compound their perceptions with our observations. Observational results indicate that co‐teaching has a strong effect on students' with SEN level of engagement and on the nature of interactions. The grouping arrangements for these students and their interactions with teachers and peers were slightly different between co‐taught and non‐co‐taught classes. More statistically significant differences were identified between the two conditions for students with ASD than for students with ID. Also, co‐teachers reported that co‐teaching had a positive effect on students with SEN in all researched variables. Our study concludes that co‐teaching has some positive effect on the teaching experiences of students with SEN; nevertheless, there is still scope for improving the employment of co‐teaching in Greek mainstream classrooms. Implications of these findings for current practice are discussed.