Does the Visual Appeal of Instructional Media Affect Learners’ Motivation Toward Learning?

While authors like Mayer (2009) suggest that designers should avoid using visuals for the purpose of attracting learners’ interests, some scholars suggest that visuals could influence learners’ emotions. In this study the author investigated whether the perception of the visual appeal of instructional handouts affects learners’ self-reported motivation to learn from the handouts. Two handouts were prepared for this study: a minimalist handout following Mayer’s (2009) Coherence Principle and an appealing handout complying with everyday visual trends. Participants were instructed to look at the handouts in different orders according to groups and were asked about their impressions of the handouts. The appealing handout was perceived as motivating when it was seen after the minimalist handout. However, the group that saw the minimalist handout first did not perceive the appealing handout as motivating. The result implies that not only the design but also the learning context influences learners’ self-reported motivation to engage with the handout.     

Does Private Schooling Affect National Stability?

I employ a year and country-level fixed-effects analytical technique to examine how private schooling could impact national stability using five different measures. I examine 177 different countries across the globe from 1999 to 2014. Most importantly, this technique allows me to conduct a quasi-experimental analysis by controlling for otherwise unobservable and relatively time-invariant characteristics of nation-states such as culture, language, religiosity, and racial diversity. I do not find that contemporaneous changes in private schooling influence perceived control of corruption, stability, or rule of law within a nation-state. Moreover, I do not find any evidence indicating that private schooling fluctuations influence actual terrorist activity or the likelihood of a coup d’état within a country. However, I find evidence indicating that private schooling improves perceived control of corruption and rule of law when students become adults.     

How Does Literature Affect Empathy in Students?

Scholars have suggested that reading literature can foster empathy. However, learning empathy through literature in the classroom is understudied. The primary objective of this study was to assess whether affective and cognitive empathy, as demonstrated in student writing, relates to textual attributes, the style of writing prompt, student writing ability, and whether it changes over time. Students in a college literature classroom were asked to assess texts according to a series of attributes related to engagement and textual difficulty, followed by a series of analytical and creative writing prompts. These responses were scored on a comparative scale according to metrics of empathy and compared with textual attributes, strength of writing, and time using a general linear model. Textual difficulty was identified as the greatest predictor of empathy (inverse relationship) followed by assignment grade (positive relationship). These results indicate that textual attributes, strength of writing ability, and style of writing response play a central role in explaining empathetic responses in students. The furthest-reaching implications of this study may, however, rest in the findings that empathy didn't change over the short time period and that textual accessibility may trump all other aspects in facilitating empathetic responses.     

Student Learning Groups: Does Group Composition Matter?

There has been a shift in university teaching over the past decades to emphasize student achievement and persistence through high-impact practices and collaborative learning. While research supports the efficacy of these pedagogical strategies, it can be difficult to implement them on large campuses. Yet, many criminal justice professors assign students to work in small groups. This study, conducted at a university with a large underrepresented student population, found that the composition of student groups in one criminal justice class can affect the perceived benefits students receive in that class, in other classes, and in general. We found that students placed in a small group with classmates who shared some criminal justice classes reported more student-initiated collaborative learning, expanded support networks, and improved grades in shared courses compared to students in small groups with classmates who shared no classes. This simple intervention has the potential to mimic learning-communities with similar benefits.     

What Does a Culturally Sustaining Learning Climate Look Like?

A solid base of research evidence exists to show that teachers’ assessments of children are impacted by their perceptions of those children. From the Pygmalion in the Classroom experiment which powerfully showed that teacher expectations of students impacted those students’ performance, to more recent research on teachers’ underrating of children based on low SES, race, and language learner status, it is clear that what educators believe about their students has real implications for their educational outcomes. This article examines the learning climate for young children at the intersection of children's immigration status, disproportionality, and teacher perceptions, making an argument for classrooms that are humanizing and culturally sustaining. Given the large and ever growing population of young immigrant students, teachers need tools to develop positive climates within which all students can thrive. This article presents a framework of such tools that can be built into teacher preparation curricula to support the development of early childhood educators.     

Learning radiological appearances of diseases: Does comparison help?

Comparison learning is a promising approach for learning complex real-life visual tasks. When medical students study radiological appearances of diseases, comparison of images showing diseases with images showing no abnormalities could help them learn to discriminate relevant, disease-related information. Medical students studied 12 diseases on chest x-ray images. They were randomly assigned to a group (n = 31) that compared radiographs of diseases with normal images and a group (n = 30) that only studied radiographs of diseases. On a visual diagnosis test, students who compared with normal images during study were better able to diagnose focal diseases (i.e., lesions at one location) than students who could not compare, but for the diagnosis of diffuse diseases (i.e., involving both lungs) there was no significant difference between groups. Results show that comparison with normal images made it easier to discriminate relevant information for focal diseases.     

Does Quantity Affect Quality? Teachers’ Course Preparations and Effectiveness

Abstract

We build on research connecting teaching assignments to teacher effectiveness by examining the characteristics of secondary grades mathematics teachers with more course preparations—both the unique number of courses taught and courses never taught before—and by assessing whether additional course preparations predict teacher value-added. Regarding teacher characteristics, we find a mixed pattern of results. Both better and less well-credentialed teachers have more course preparations. Teachers with higher lagged value-added are assigned to fewer course preparations. Regarding teacher effectiveness, results from teacher fixed-effect models show that additional course preparations are negatively and significantly associated with value-added estimates. Further analyses indicate that teachers’ number of new course preparations fully explain the negative results for total number of course preparations. That is, when teachers have to plan for, learn the content of, and teach a course for the first time, it adversely influences their effectiveness. Our results are slightly smaller than findings from recent teaching assignment studies but take on practical significance given the frequency with which teachers have a new course preparation.     

Does Early Mathematics Intervention Change the Processes Underlying Children's Learning?

Early educational intervention effects typically fade in the years following treatment, and few studies have investigated why achievement impacts diminish over time. The current study tested the effects of a preschool mathematics intervention on two aspects of children's mathematical development. We tested for separate effects of the intervention on “state” (occasion-specific) and “trait” (relatively stable) variability in mathematics achievement. Results indicated that, although the treatment had a large impact on state mathematics, the treatment had no effect on trait mathematics, or the aspect of mathematics achievement that influences stable individual differences in mathematics achievement over time. Results did suggest, however, that the intervention could affect the underlying processes in children's mathematical development by inducing more transfer of knowledge immediately following the intervention for students in the treated group.     

Does Displaying the Class Results Affect Student Discussion during Peer Instruction?

The use of personal response systems, or clickers, is increasingly common in college classrooms. Although clickers can increase student engagement and discussion, their benefits also can be overstated. A common practice is to ask the class a question, display the responses, allow the students to discuss the question, and then collect the responses a second time. In an introductory biology course, we asked whether showing students the class responses to a question biased their second response. Some sections of the course displayed a bar graph of the student responses and others served as a control group in which discussion occurred without seeing the most common answer chosen by the class. If students saw the bar graph, they were 30% more likely to switch from a less common to the most common response. This trend was more pronounced in true/false questions (38%) than multiple-choice questions (28%). These results suggest that observing the most common response can bias a student''s second vote on a question and may be misinterpreted as an increase in performance due to student discussion alone.     

Does Burnout Affect Academic Achievement? A Meta-Analysis of over 100,000 Students

Educational Psychology Review - Burnout is understood to have many adverse consequences for students. However, several equivocal findings in the literature mean that it is currently unclear to what...     

Does Cartoon Violence Beget Aggressive Behavior in Real Life? An Opposing View

A commonly accepted belief is that the violence depicted in television programs, particularly cartoons, has a negative impact on young children’s behavior. However, young children may be less inclined to emulate violent actions seen on television than currently thought. Research indicates that young children have limited comprehension of television content but relatively sophisticated moral reasoning. Children’s understanding of the immorality of violence on television and the distinction between reality and make-believe may mediate these effects, as may the comic aspect of cartoons they view. We review current research concerning the effects of cartoon violence on children’s moral understanding and behavior to with the goal of helping early childhood educators and parents make informed decisions about children’s television viewing.     

What Does Distributed Cognition Tell Us about Student Learning of Science?

This paper reports multi-layered analyses of student learning in a science classroom using the theoretical lens of Distributed Cognition (Hollan et al. 1999; Hutchins 1995). Building on the insights generated from previous research employing Distributed Cognition, the particular focus of this study has been placed on the “public space of interaction” (Alac and Hutchins 2004, p. 639) that includes both participants’ interaction with each other and their interaction with artefacts in their environment. In this paper, a lesson from an Australian science classroom was examined in detail, in which a class of grade-seven students were investigating the scientific theme of gravity by designing pendulums. The video-stimulated post-lesson interviews with both the teacher and the student groups offered complementary accounts (Clarke 2001a) that assisted the interpretation of the classroom data. The findings of this study provide supporting evidence to demonstrate the capacity of Distributed Cognition for advancing our understanding of the nature of learning in science classrooms.     

Learning Together While Designing: Does Group Size Make a Difference?

As the use of project-based learning becomes more frequent in the K-12 science classroom, and in chemistry classrooms in particular, teachers have begun to identify practical questions about implementation that should be addressed empirically. One such question concerns whether there is an ideal group size that fosters individual student achievement. The current project was designed to assess how group size might impact student chemistry content learning in a project-based learning environment, and how well students are prepared to transfer this new knowledge to other relevant areas. The results indicated that particular conditions (e.g. advanced classrooms) interact with group size (a seemingly superficial feature) to differentially influence the depth and level of student learning related to the unit and student’s ability to transfer his/her knowledge outside of the context of a project-based learning unit.