Science Students’ Classroom Discourse: Tasha’s Umwelt

Over the past twenty-five years researchers have been concerned with understanding the science student. The need for such research is still grounded in contemporary issues including providing opportunities for all students to develop scientific literacy and the failure of school science to connect with student’s lives, interests and personal identities. The research reported here is unusual in its use of discourse analysis in social psychology to contribute to an understanding of the way students make meaning in secondary school science. Data constructed for the study was drawn from videotapes of nine consecutive lessons in a year-seven science classroom in Melbourne, post-lesson video-stimulated interviews with students and the teacher, classroom observation and the students’ written work. The classroom videotapes were recorded using four cameras and seven audio tracks by the International Centre for Classroom Research at the University of Melbourne. Student talk within and about their science lessons was analysed from a discursive perspective. Classroom episodes in which students expressed their sense of personal identity and agency, knowledge, attitude or emotion in relation to science were identified for detailed analysis of the function of the discourse used by students, and in particular the way students were positioned by others or positioned themselves. This article presents the discursive Umwelt or life-space of one middle years science student, Tasha. Her case is used here to highlight the complex social process of meaning making in science classrooms and the need to attend to local moral orders of rights and duties in research on student language use, identity and learning in science.     

Students’ Citizenship Competence Learning in China’s Yangzhong City

ABSTRACT

With specific reference to Yangzhong city in China, this study investigates students’ citizenship competence learning – political identity, scientific spirit, legal awareness and public participation. The study uses a mixed methodology of questionnaires, classroom observations, document analyses and interviews to collect data and identifies three patterns of students’ citizenship competence learning. This study provides empirical data that supplements the existing literature on citizenship-as-practice in the context of China.     

Master’s Students’ Experiences in a Multicultural Counseling Role-Play

This study examined the experiences of master’s students in regard to their participation in a multicultural role-play and review process (Jencius et al. 2004). Whereas the literature has supported the use of role-plays as a multicultural training technique (Alvarez and Miville 2003; Vazquez and Garcia-Vazquez 2003), there is a distinct lack of information on the actual role-play experience itself. The data analyzed from participants’ reported experiences about their student counselor and student client roles in this study offers valuable feedback to those who teach multicultural counseling. Participants reported qualitatively different experiences based on which particular role they held.     

Discussion on College Teacher’s Role in Students’Autonomous Learning

In recent years,with the shift from traditional teacher-centered model to new learner-centered model in foreign language teaching,autonomous learning has become a research hotspot in foreign language circle.Although the researches on this issue are supposed to be prosperous,the attempt to look into the change of teachers’role on learner autonomy seems fairly limited.Therefore,this paper aims to deal with the changing of teachers’role in college students’autonomous learning.The significance of this paper is to make teachers adapt to their new roles so as to further improve their college teaching efficiency.     

The Accuracy of Students’ Judgments of Their Teacher’s Opinions

Monte Carlo methods were employed to evaluate the degree to which canonical function and structure coefficients may be differentially sensitive to sampling error. Sampling error influences were investigated across variations in variable and sample sizes, across variations in average within-set correlation sizes, and in across-set population correlation sizes. Sixty-four different research situations were investigated, and for each situation 1,000 random samples were drawn. Results suggest that both sets of coefficients are roughly equally influenced by sampling error, except perhaps when some intradomain correlation coefficients are quite large. Thus, the case for emphasizing interpretation of structure coefficients must be made on a psychometric basis rather than on the grounds that structure coefficients are less sensitive to sampling error influences, notwithstanding the positions previously taken by some theorists.     

The Effective Teacher’s Characteristics as Perceived by Students

Tertiary Education and Management - Students (N = 1,883) from 10 European countries answered a web questionnaire pertaining to three dimensions of what they expect and what they experience from...     

Teacher’s Role in Students’Group Work in College English Classroom

The implementation of group work in China is aroused by the teaching reform and proposal of the New Curriculum Standard, in order to improve the language teaching and learning. However, in many cases group work is far less effective and desirable than it should have been. The effectiveness of group work depends on many factors in real language classroom setting. This paper mainly focuses on the factor of teacher’s role. The main implication of this paper is to suggest the appropriate teacher role in students’group work and put forward some skills in organizing group work in order to make group work more effective and significant.     

Exploring Grade 7 Students’ Responses to Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree

As art objects, picturebooks have the potential to contribute to readers’ aesthetic development. Many scholars and practitioners have recognized how using picturebooks with older students can augment their reading motivation and extend their understanding of visual elements of art and design, as well as develop their literacy, language, and thinking skills. The Red Tree (Tan, 2001) was one of the picturebooks used during two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects with Grade 7 students. The studies explored how the students responded to and interpreted picturebooks and graphic novels with metafictive devices, and examined how the students transferred their knowledge and understanding of various literary and art elements when creating their own multimodal print texts. Overall, the content analysis of the students’ written responses to The Red Tree revealed an adoption of an “aesthetic attitude” (Doonan, Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, 1993, p. 11) towards the picturebook. The students’ responses reflected how they positioned themselves as active readers who looked closely at Tan’s sophisticated and metaphorical paintings, and who embraced a co-authoring role as they interpreted the emotional landscapes and textual fragments in the picturebook. The article concludes with a discussion of several pedagogical issues associated with using picturebooks in middle years’ classrooms.     

Keeping Students Out of Mary’s (Class)room

Science & Education - Whilst many science educators, it is reported, associate knowledge with justified true belief (JTB), epistemologists have observed that the JTB model is an incomplete...     

Cost-Benefit Evaluation: Students’, Faculty’s,and Staff’s Willingness to Pay for a Campus Safety App

Many universities began to explore possibilities of launching campus safety apps beyond blue light emergency towers to improve campus security. However, no previous studies exist regarding whether the apps have more benefits beyond their annual fees, compared to their annual fees of blue light emergency towers. This study conducted a choice experiment to measure students’, faculty’s, and staff’s marginal willingness to pay for a campus safety app at a large public university in the United States. As a result, a total of these groups’ values of the app was shown to be at least $30,205 per year. This result indicated that their values were three times larger than the actual annual fee of the campus safety app, and cost-effectiveness compared to blue light emergency towers.     

Geoethics: Master’s Students Knowledge and Perception of Its Importance

In the 1990s, the field of geoethics started its development, associated with a set of ethical principles that regulate the profession of geologists in their relationship with society and with nature. Given the importance of this field, but also its youth, 36 higher education students attending a Master’s of Geology course were surveyed (20 were from an educational branch and 16 were from a scientific branch). The questionnaire applied to them aimed to achieve the following goals: (a) to identify the knowledge of the respondents about this new field and to verify their position about the inclusion of geoethics in the curriculum, (b) to understand how they consider the importance of geological knowledge in political decisions and (c) to investigate possible differences in the thinking of the respondents, given the specificities of their educational branches. The study concluded that the field of geoethics is unknown to the majority of the respondents. However, the recognition of its importance was also verified, after getting familiar with the definition of the concept, as well as the need for its inclusion in formal education. The respondents also considered relevant the creation of a deontological code that could provide geologists with ethical guidance. They also considered that geology should influence political decisions, but they did not consistently recognise the limits of its influence, which seems to reveal the need of a deeper understanding of the specific nature of geological knowledge when compared with other sciences. Almost all the results were similar in both groups, but the students from the educational branch offered more elaborate answers about the issues present in the questionnaire.     

What Every Educator Needs to Know about America’s Homeless Students

The number of American homeless youth has skyrocketed in the twenty-first century. In 2015, for example, this number reached a record high, becoming twice as high as it was before the recession. Educators should be concerned about this problem because homelessness is more harmful to children than to adults and interferes dramatically with their education. This article offers guidelines for educators on how to deal with this problem effectively. It also includes an example of a policy that would reduce this problem in America.     

Students’ preferences for lecturers’ personalities

The present study set out to examine students’ preferences for lecturers’ personality as a function of their classroom behaviour, core self-evaluations and self-rated character strengths. Various hypotheses were tested: first, students’ Big Five traits would significantly predict corresponding personality preferences for lecturers (the matching hypothesis); second, students’ core self-evaluation scores would significantly predict preferences for extraverted, agreeable and conscientious lecturers; and third, self-rated character strengths would also significantly predict extraverted, agreeable and conscientious lecturers. We also investigated difference in preferences among two ethnic groups (South East Asian/Chinese versus Caucasian/British). In all, 264 British students completed four questionnaires. Conscientiousness was the most desired trait in lecturers, followed by agreeableness, extraversion and openness; neuroticism was the least desired trait. Preference for agreeable lecturers was best predicted by all individual difference variables. Caucasian students had a stronger dislike for neurotic lecturers, while Asians had higher preferences for extraverted, open and agreeable lecturers. There was some evidence of the student–lecturer personality match. Limitations and further research options were discussed.     

A Simple Study of the Teacher’s Influence on Students’ Psychology in English Learning

This paper analyzes the teacher’s influence on students’psychologyin English learning from two aspects and emphasizes the importance of English teachers’role in helping students establish healthy psychology in English learning.     

Students’ images of mathematics

Students’ judgments about “what counts” as mathematics in and out of school have important consequences for problem solving and transfer, yet our understanding of the source and nature of these judgments remains incomplete. Thirty-five sixth grade students participated in a study focused on what activities students judge as mathematical, and how they make their judgments. Students completed a photo sorting activity; took, viewed, and captioned their own photos of mathematics; viewed and commented on classmates’ photos; and participated in a small group discussion. Across multiple sources of data, findings showed that students attended to two major features of photos and activities when making judgments: surface cues present in the photos, such as numbers and money, and the possibility for mathematical action. Some students looked for the possibility of mathematics, while others asked if mathematics was necessary. Students also gave higher ratings to activities with which they had personal experience. The article concludes with possible implications for practice.     

Students’ Classroom Communication Effectiveness

Instructional communication research has frequently examined effective teacher communication, but has ignored effective student communication. This study draws on the transactional model of communication to hypothesize that students who are effective communicators will be more successful in the classroom. Participants reported their level of interaction involvement, socio-communicative orientation, and out-of-class communication in regard to a specific class. Additionally, participants reported recently received grades, their level of state motivation to study, affective learning, performance of learning indicators, and satisfaction with instructor communication. Overall, students’ communication effectiveness was positively associated with positive learning outcomes.     

On Improving Students’ Interest

In schools,many students aren’t interested in English and they don’t like studying English.This is a great problem that needs to be solved by teachers.’Interest is the best teacher’.This paper provides four main teaching methods to develop the students’ interest:situational teaching,games,songs and humor.     

Advocating Students’ Individual Learning

A new approach formed with the application of modern teaching facilities makes English teaching and learning more collaborative and individualized through using computers,the Internet,and multimedia.Therefore,students’individual English learning,teaching and learning environment,and conditions that students need in their individual learning are discussed.     

Canada’s Implementation of the Right to Education for Students with Disabilities

This article analyses the content and legal implementation of the right to education as a human right in Canada. It seeks to expose the extent to which Canadian legislative mechanisms have succeeded in protecting the right to education of students with disabilities by using students with epilepsy as a test case. To that end, the article examines the barriers faced by students with epilepsy in realising their right to education. It explores the content of the right to education in international law so as to provide an ideal against which the legal implementation of the right to education in Canada can be measured. In examining the degree to which legal implementation of the right to education for students with disabilities lives up to the ideals espoused in international law, the article analyses the effectiveness of the legal mechanisms that implement the right to education for students with epilepsy in addressing the three types of barriers faced by these students. The revelation of where students with epilepsy fall through the cracks serves as a reflection of the limits of current legal mechanisms in protecting the right to education for students with disabilities.