Science Students' Perceptions of Engaging Pedagogy

During their years of schooling, students develop perceptions about learning and teaching, including the ways in which teachers impact on their learning experiences. This paper presents student perceptions of teacher pedagogy as interpreted from a study focusing on students' experience of Year 7 science. A single science class of 11 to 12 year old students and their teacher were monitored for the whole school year, employing participant observation, and interviews with focus groups of students, their teacher and other key members of the school. Analysis focused on how students perceived the role of the teacher's pedagogy in constructing a learning environment that they considered conducive to engagement with science learning. Two areas of the teacher's pedagogy are explored from the student perspective of how these affect their learning: instructional pedagogy and relational pedagogy. Instructional pedagogy captures the way the instructional dialogue developed by the teacher drew the students into the learning process and enabled them to “understand” science. How the teacher developed a relationship with the students is captured as relational pedagogy, where students said that they learned better when teachers were passionate in their approach to teaching, provided a supportive learning environment and made them feel comfortable. The ways in which the findings support the direction for the middle years and science education are considered.     

When is student teaching teacher education?

This paper presents a conceptual framework that relates empirical aspects of student teaching (facts about the experience) to considerations of value (what student teachers ought to learn). First, the authors explain what they mean by calling student teaching an “occasion for teacher learning.” Next based on their observational and interview data, the authors present two cases of student teaching to illustrate how the relative influence of program, setting, and participants interact to shape opportunities for teacher learning. One teaching episode that elicited considerable pride in each student teacher is presented to highlight how and what the students teachers learned. The conclusion appraises the lessons learned in student teaching in terms of the framework and suggests how teacher educators can increase the educative power of the student teaching experience.     

Concept maps for assessing change in learning: a study of undergraduate business students in first-year marketing in China

This paper explains the application of concept mapping to help foster a learning-centred approach. It investigates how concept maps are used to measure the change in learning following a two-week intensive undergraduate Marketing Principles course delivered to 162 Chinese students undertaking a Bachelor of Business Administration programme in China. Using four scoring procedures (breadth of knowledge, relational quality, structural quality and holistic quality), student learning is assessed in terms of prior and new knowledge, as well as improvement in knowledge structure. Concept map scores are correlated with conventional measures of overall student performance. The results provide strong evidence for improvement in students’ ability to externalise new learned concepts resulting from intensive instruction. Incorporating concept maps as a contemporary method of learning in the curriculum potentially enriches student learning, provides a measure of the impact of teaching on students’ learning and adds value to students’ higher education experience.     

The role of culturally responsive teaching for supporting ethnic diversity in British University Business Schools

Research into cultural differences in higher education is a growing phenomenon, and there is a need to establish a theoretical framework that supports Business Schools in the personalisation of the pedagogical process. This article investigates the role of Business School academics in shaping the pedagogical process that is culturally responsive to the unprecedented diversity in higher education. This article attempts to uncover the pedagogical machinations that govern how academics teach, interact and engage with their culturally and ethnically diverse students. The article argues that University Business Schools should consider a culturally responsive approach when formulating pedagogy, which takes into account prior student experience as part of the student learning. The notion of culturally responsive teaching that shapes this research is influenced by US research on education and diversity. Such a perspective begins with an acceptance of the rights of not only teachers but also learners.     

In search of a consistency model for evaluation of student performance in nontraditional education

In nontraditional education we believe that learning how to learn should be the major objective. Helping students learn how to learn should be a major teaching objective and a major teaching skill. This skill involves helping a student recognize that learning involves personal change and that no one is so knowledgeable and so skilled that he or she need not learn. One of the major problems in learning how to learn for educators is being able to play a concurrent role—that of an evaluator and that of an academic advisor. Inherent in this double role is the concept that an evaluator should provide a learning experience that is planned as an integral and continuous part of a student's education. Evaluation processes, both in planning and implementation, should be consistent with knowledge, values, and goals of nontraditional education. Their basis should be a theory of adult learning.     

Enhancing Teachers' Technological Knowledge and Assessment Practices to Enhance Student Learning in Technology: A Two-year Classroom Study

This paper reports on a two-year classroom investigation of primary school (Years 1–8) technology education. The first year of the project explored emerging classroom practices in technology. In the second year intervention strategies were developed to enhance teaching, learning and assessment practices. Findings from the first year revealed that assessment was often seen in terms of social and managerial aspects, such as teamwork, turn taking and co-operative skills, rather than procedural and conceptual technological aspects. Existing formative interactions with students distorted the learning away from the procedural and conceptual aspects of the subject. The second year explored the development of teachers' technological knowledge in order to enhance formative assessment practices in technology, to inform classroom practice in technology, and to enhance student learning. Intervention strategies were designed to enhance the development of procedural, conceptual, societal and technical aspects of technology for teachers and students. The results from this intervention were very positive. This paper highlights the importance of developing teacher expertise pertaining to broad concepts of technology, detailed concepts in different technological areas and general pedagogical knowledge. The findings from this research therefore have implications for thinking about teaching, learning and assessment in technology.     

任务型教学在高职商务英语口译课堂中的运用

任务型教学法强调以学生为中心,具有明确的目标和任务。结合高职商务英语口译课程和专业学生的特点,任务型教学具有可行性。分析任务型教学在高职商务英语口译课堂中的实施,包括任务前阶段、任务链阶段、语言分析阶段。任务型教学的实施能激发学生的学习热情和团队合作意识,促进学生的自主学习,提高口译交际能力,提高教学效果。     

Public Administration Education in Britain

Abstract

Students, quality assessment bodies established by the Government to determine output‐related funding, and other groups in society are placing more and more pressure on tertiary institutions to improve the quality of their teaching practices. Some institutions are responding to this pressure by implementing student‐centred approaches to teaching, where the students and course leaders become equal partners in determining the course work assessment process, teaching methods and learning outcomes. To a certain extent the learning outcomes are set by the Government's quality assessment bodies. However the course work assessment process, teaching methods and interpretation of these pre‐specified learning outcomes, can still be negotiated with the students in a student‐centred manner.

Many disciplines in tertiary institutions currently face, or can expect to face in the future, extremely large class sizes. Many argue that it is not possible to implement a student‐centred approach in the large class setting. Indeed, they suggest that there is a negative relationship between class size and the quality of the learning experience.

This paper examines the application of a student‐centred approach to a final year business studies course involving over 100 students completing their BSc (Hons). A survey of the students at the end of the year indicated that, relative to the other courses being taken by the students, this course achieved an unusual treble: higher levels of student learning, higher student workload, and yet, higher levels of student enjoyment. These results would tend to dispel the myth that student‐centred approaches can only be successful in the smaller class setting.     

Teacher's experiences in PBL: implications for practice

Project-Based Learning (PBL) has been implemented in the first year of the Industrial Engineering and Management programme at the University of Minho, Portugal, since 2004/2005. The purpose of this paper is to analyse and discuss teachers' experiences in PBL in this programme and to explore its implications for student learning and for teaching practices in higher education. For data collection, the research method used was written narratives to these teachers, at the end of the PBL semester. Findings suggest that teachers express a positive view of PBL as a learning approach. They identify student motivation and engagement, along with a better understanding of the application of concepts in real-life situations, as important outcomes of the project for students. Besides this, teachers also highlight the importance of the development of transversal skills by students throughout the project. Recommendations for future work and implications for practice will also be discussed.     

“What if students revolt?”—Considering Student Resistance: Origins,Options, and Opportunities for Investigation

Instructors attempting new teaching methods may have concerns that students will resist nontraditional teaching methods. The authors provide an overview of research characterizing the nature of student resistance and exploring its origins. Additionally, they provide potential strategies for avoiding or addressing resistance and pose questions about resistance that may be ripe for research study.

“What if the students revolt?” “What if I ask them to talk to a neighbor, and they simply refuse?” “What if they do not see active learning as teaching?” “What if they just want me to lecture?” “What if my teaching evaluation scores plummet?” “Even if I am excited about innovative teaching and learning, what if I encounter student resistance?”

These are genuine concerns of committed and thoughtful instructors who aspire to respond to the repeated national calls to fundamentally change the way biology is taught in colleges and universities across the United States. No doubt most individuals involved in promoting innovative teaching in undergraduate biology education have heard these or variations on these fears and concerns. While some biology instructors may be at a point where they are still skeptical of innovative teaching from more theoretical perspectives (“Is it really any better than lecturing?”), the concerns expressed by the individuals above come from a deeply committed and practical place. These are instructors who have already passed the point where they have become dissatisfied with traditional teaching methods. They have already internally decided to try new approaches and have perhaps been learning new teaching techniques themselves. They are on the precipice of actually implementing formerly theoretical ideas in the real, messy space that is a classroom, with dozens, if not hundreds, of students watching them. Potential rejection by students as they are practicing these new pedagogical skills represents a real and significant roadblock. A change may be even more difficult for those earning high marks from their students for their lectures. If we were to think about a learning progression for faculty moving toward requiring more active class participation on the part of students, the voices above are from those individuals who are progressing along this continuum and who could easily become stuck or turn back in the face of student resistance.Unfortunately, it appears that little systematic attention or research effort has been focused on understanding the origins of student resistance in biology classrooms or the options for preventing and addressing such resistance. As always, this Feature aims to gather research evidence from a variety of fields to support innovations in undergraduate biology education. Below, we attempt to provide an overview of the types of student resistance one might encounter in a classroom, as well as share hypotheses from other disciplines about the potential origins of student resistance. In addition, we offer examples of classroom strategies that have been proposed as potentially useful for either preventing student resistance from happening altogether or addressing student resistance after it occurs, some of which align well with findings from research on the origins of student resistance. Finally, we explore how ready the field of student resistance may be for research study, particularly in undergraduate biology education.     

Teaching–research relations,cross-disciplinary collegiality and student learning

University students experience of cross-disciplinary collegiality and interaction with research-active teachers are explored using the results from two separate, but related, studies. In the first study, variation in students understanding of collegiality and how it is experienced is investigated. The second (quantitative) study explores the relations between students perceptions of collegiality in their learning environment and their learning outcomes and satisfaction. Within the collegiate system of the University of Oxford, students describe collegiality as encompassing a sense of allegiance and as a set of interactions with important others. Interactions were common between students in one disciplinary area and those in other disciplines. They are also found between students in one subject and other students in the same discipline, in the same and a different year of study and, in terms of learning, most effectively between students and research-active teaching staff. Where engagements of these sorts are described as beneficial to learning, students self-report that they adopt deeper approaches to learning, with the strongest correlations being between approach to learning and feelings of benefit derived from being in contact with active researchers. This result, from a student perspective, is a significant contribution to the debate on teaching–research relations in higher education within and beyond Oxford University as it bypasses teaching and focuses on the more important relations between university research and student learning.     

PBL(Project-based Learning)教学模式在高职英语自主学习课程中的应用研究

本文采用行动研究的方法,以武汉职业技术学院的英语听说过级自主学习课程为例,探讨如何在自主学习课程中应用PBL的教学模式改进自主学习课程的考核方式,提高学生的自主学习能力和意识。文章首先分析了自主学习课程在实施过程中遇到的问题,详细描述了PBL教学模式的总体设计构想和具体的实施步骤,并对实施的结果进行了讨论。经过统计和问卷调查结果发现,应用PBL模式后,实验班的学生的学习兴趣有了很大的提高,有利于培养他们的自主学习能力和合作精神。同时,试验前后的听力测试表明,实验班听力成绩较对照班也有了显著的提高。可见,PBL模式的应用能在一定程度上改进目前在自主学习课程中所遇到的一些问题。     

Portfolio People: Teaching and Learning Dossiers and Innovation in Higher Education

As teaching portfolios have become more commonplace in higher education, interest has grown in student portfolios. Both innovations embody the same core process—reflection—and both have similar potential benefits and similar drawbacks. This paper commends portfolios as innovative in themselves and as a response to the new mandates that are confronting higher education. Accounts of the potential of and problems with portfolios are summarized, and attention is then given to key issues in successfully introducing them. The underlying position is that students can best gain from their years of study when the systemic reflection that is characteristic of portfolios engages them (through learning portfolios) and their teachers (through teaching portfolios). Embedding such thinking in practice is, itself, a powerful and innovative approach to re-framing the curriculum.     

Impact and educational outcomes of a small group self‐directed teaching strategy in a clinical neuroscience curriculum

The complexity of the material being taught in clinical neuroscience within the medical school curriculum requires creative pedagogies to teach medical students effectively. Many clinical teaching strategies have been developed and are well described to address these challenges. However, only a few have been evaluated to determine their impact on the performance of students studying clinical neuroscience. Interactive, 2‐hour, self‐directed small‐group interactive clinical case‐based learning sessions were conducted weekly for 4 weeks to integrate concepts learned in the corresponding didactic lectures. Students in the small groups analyzed cases of patients suffering from neurological disease that were based on eight learning objectives that allowed them to evaluate neuroanatomical data and clinical findings before presenting their case analysis to the larger group. Students’ performances on the formative quizzes and summative tests were compared to those of first‐year medical students in the previous year for whom the self‐directed, small‐group interactive clinical sessions were not available. There was a significant improvement in the summative performance of first‐year medical students with self‐directed clinical case learning in the second year (Y2) of teaching clinical neuroscience (P < 0.05) when compared with first‐year students in the first year (Y1) for whom the self‐directed learning approach was not available. Student performance in the formative assessments between Y1 and Y2 was not significantly different (P = 0.803). A target of ≥70% student scoring above 80% in the final summative examination was met. The current study revealed evidence for the impact and educational outcomes of a self‐directed, clinical teaching strategy in a clinical neuroscience curriculum for first‐year medical students. Anat Sci Educ 11: 478–487. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.     

Early impact and outcomes of an institutionally aligned,student focused learning perspective on teaching quality assurance1

This paper describes an evidence‐based quality assurance system for teaching and learning, which takes as its starting point a well‐researched theoretical perspective on student learning in higher education. We argue this explicit use of a relevant theoretical base promotes coherence between quality assurance and improvement processes. We outline the principal features of our university's quality assurance strategy, systems and processes, and describe how the university's teaching quality assurance policy and systems have been implemented. We then consider the extent to which the project has achieved its goals of fostering an evidence‐based approach to teaching consistent with the student learning perspective on which the policy and systems are based. We also present data on student learning experiences showing reliable changes in the quality of the student learning experience. We discuss the applied significance of these changes, with a particular focus on changes in the experiences of commencing first year university students.     

Student outcomes associated with use of asynchronous online discussion forums in gross anatomy teaching

Asynchronous online discussion forums are increasingly common in blended learning environments but the relationship to student learning outcomes has not been reported for anatomy teaching. Forums were monitored in two multicampus anatomy courses; an introductory first year course and a second year physiotherapy‐specific course. The forums are structured with a separate site for each course module and moderated weekly by staff. Students are encouraged to post to new threads (initial post) and answer queries in threads started by others (reply post). Analysis of forums was conducted separately for each course and included overall activity (posts and views) for a full semester and a detailed analysis for one week in the middle of semester. Students were classified as zero, moderate, or high contributors to the forums based on the number of posts. Final mark for the course was related to level of forum contribution using nonparametric tests. Forum threads were characterized as task‐focused, administrative, or other. A higher proportion of second year (36%) than first‐year (17%) students posted on the forums and the postings were more likely to be task‐focused and student initiated. Second‐year students that posted frequently to the forum gained a higher final mark for the course than those that did not post or only posted a moderate number of times (P < 0.01). This relationship was not evident for first‐year students who had a much higher proportion of administrative threads. Forums in anatomy courses can be powerful learning tools encouraging deeper learning and improved learning outcomes. Anat Sci Educ 6: 101–106. © 2012 American Association of Anatomists.     

From F = ma to Flying Squirrels: Curricular Change in an Introductory Physics Course

We present outcomes from curricular changes made to an introductory calculus-based physics course whose audience is primarily life sciences majors, the majority of whom plan to pursue postbaccalaureate studies in medical and scientific fields. During the 2011–2012 academic year, we implemented a Physics of the Life Sciences curriculum centered on a draft textbook that takes a novel approach to teaching physics to life sciences majors. In addition, substantial revisions were made to the homework and hands-on components of the course to emphasize the relationship between physics and the life sciences and to help the students learn to apply physical intuition to life sciences–oriented problems. Student learning and attitudinal outcomes were assessed both quantitatively, using standard physics education research instruments, and qualitatively, using student surveys and a series of postsemester interviews. Students experienced high conceptual learning gains, comparable to other active learning–based physics courses. Qualitatively, a substantial fraction of interviewed students reported an increased interest in physics relative to the beginning of the semester. Furthermore, more than half of students self-reported that they could now relate physics topics to their majors and future careers, with interviewed subjects demonstrating a high level of ability to come up with examples of how physics affects living organisms and how it helped them to better understand content presented in courses in their major.     

Tools for Successful Student–Teacher–Scientist Partnerships

Student–teacher–scientist partnership (STSP) programs are cooperative relationships in which students, with the support of their teachers, participate in and contribute to the research of scientists. This paper examines one of the world's largest STSPs—an international environmental science education program called GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment)—and proposes recommendations to scientists about how they can get the most out of their research and teaching relationship with students and their teachers. GLOBE is an international K–12 STSP that engages students in Earth's Systems investigations. Extensive training is needed for students to collect and report accurate data to scientists, and special preparatory curricula are needed to make their partnership effective and motivating. Recognizing these issues, this research was conducted specifically to identify and recommend a set of training material design criteria for implementation of STSPs in the elementary and middle school levels. The conclusions—the result of background research, extensive interviews and consultation with teachers—provide guidance to GLOBE and other STSP programs to enhance the development of effective and engaging training materials.     

USING COMPUTER CONFERENCING IN TEACHING

For 3years, I have been teaching neuroscience courses by using computer conferencing to complement the traditional lectures. Typically, the conferencing involved local, on‐campus students, although one semester the class was combined from on‐campus and off‐campus students. For most of my 33‐year teaching career, I had used the teaching approach that most professors use, which is what educational theorists call “instructivist.” Critics call that “stand and deliver.” Lecturing is an efficient way to dispense organized information, but it does not ensure learning nor is it very effective in showing students how to learn on their own.

Instructivism can be enriched by complementing it with “constructivist” approaches. Constructivists argue that there is a direct relationship between the amount of learning that occurs and the extent to which the environment provides a rich source of engaging experiences in which students construct their own knowledge and understanding. I have found that such an environment is readily provided by computer conferencing.

In my teaching of neuroscience, I have used a network software system (FORUM) for small student groups to conduct a variety of constructivist learning activities. Within weekly deadlines, students worked in groups at their own pace and time of convenience. My impression of the advantages of such conferencing for constructivist activities include the promotion of socialization in “cyberspace,” providing an environment for team learning, the reduction of social problems in face‐to‐face instruction, increased teaching and learning efficiency, more comprehensive means for assessing student learning, and improved quality of student work.     

A New Pattern to Research the Learning:From Phenomenography and Constructivism Perspective——The Case of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts

This essay is trying to explore how the arts students experience the teaching and learning context in the English class of the col lege from the phenomenography perspective.The qualitative research methodology of phenomenography has traditionally required a man ual sorting and analysis of interview data.To study the teaching and learning context,the qualitative research method will be applied,and the data collection will base on the face-to-face interview.There are 8 sophomores were interviewed after they had one year study in col lege.The research findings reveal that most student in interview gradually get used to college English class,but never think about changing their learning approach even they study one year in a totally different teaching and learning environment.