Response-to-intervention (RTI) as a model to facilitate inclusion for students with learning and behaviour problems

Many students with learning and behaviour problems are routinely excluded from regular education. Although calls have been made to educate students with these problems in the same settings as their typically developing peers, it remains unclear how best to support their needs for academic and behavioural support. We address this question first by describing response-to-intervention (RTI), a specific model of prevention and early intervention for learning and behaviour problems. A comprehensive summary of the RTI literature is provided. Second, we will discuss the feasibility and applicability of RTI as one approach to facilitate inclusion of students with learning and behaviour problems. Specifically, we will demonstrate how RTI can be used to address at least four barriers to inclusion by (1) providing a clear implementation strategy for inclusion practices; (2) clearly defining the roles, responsibilities and collaboration of general and special education teachers; (3) enabling the allocation of resources for instruction and intervention; and (4) avoiding early and unnecessary labelling of students with learning and behaviour problems. Third, limitations of RTI as a model to facilitate inclusion will be discussed.     

Makerspace in STEM for girls: a physical space to develop twenty-first-century skills

Makerspace has been lauded as a new way forward to create communities, empower students and bring together enthusiasts of all ages and skill levels “to tinker” and create. Makerspace education has been touted as having the potential to empower young people to become agents of change in their communities. This paper examines how a Makerspace approach can capture the imagination and creativity of female primary school students, and engage them in integrated STEM-based projects. The study scaffolded female tertiary undergraduate students to mentor small groups of girls to complete a project in a STEM Makerspace situated in classrooms. The data generated and analysed from this study were used to determine how Makerspace STEM-based projects were enacted, how they engaged and supported the girls’ learning, and considers the future of a Makerspace approach as a way to progress integrated STEM education.     

Linking mathematics with engineering applications at an early stage – implementation,experimental set-up and evaluation of a pilot project

Too difficult, too abstract, too theoretical – many first-year engineering students complain about their mathematics courses. The project MathePraxis aims to resolve this disaffection. It links mathematical methods as they are taught in the first semesters with practical problems from engineering applications – and thereby shall give first-year engineering students a vivid and convincing impression of where they will need mathematics in their later working life. But since real applications usually require more than basic mathematics and first-year engineering students typically are not experienced with construction, mensuration and the use of engineering software, such an approach is hard to realise. In this article, we show that it is possible. We report on the implementation of MathePraxis at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. We describe the set-up and the implementation of a course on designing a mass damper which combines basic mathematical techniques with an impressive experiment. In an accompanying evaluation, we have examined the students' motivation relating to mathematics. This opens up new perspectives how to address the need for a more practically oriented mathematical education in engineering sciences.     

Placing Students at the Centre of the Decolonizing Education Imperative: Engaging the (Mis)Recognition Struggles of Students at the Postapartheid University

Misrecognition of South African university students is at the heart of this article. Misrecognition refers in this article to the exclusionary institutional discourses and practices of this country’s universities, which continue to prevent the majority of their (Black) students’ from achieving a successful education. It is a conceptual account of the ways in which these misrecognized students develop a complex educational life in their quest for a university education. The article argues that at the heart of students’ university experiences is an essential misrecognition of who they are, and how they access and encounter their university studies. I suggest that gaining greater purchase on their (mis)recognition struggles may place the university in a position to establish an engaging recognition platform to facilitate their educational success. Divided into four sections, the article starts with a rationale for bringing the institutional misrecognition of students into view. This is followed by a theoretical consideration of the notion of recognition, which opens space for what I call the recognitive agency of the education subject, who remains largely unknown to the university. The third section provides an account of the nature and extent of Black students’ survivalist educational navigations and practices in their family, community, school, and university contexts. The final and concluding section of the article presents a normative argument for developing an education platform for facilitating a productive encounter aimed at animating students’ educational becoming. This, I argue, should proceed on the basis of a decolonizing knowledge approach, involving curriculum recognition, which would accord students the conceptual tools for developing the epistemic virtues necessary for complex decolonized living.     

Developing knowledge intensive ideas in engineering education: the application of camp methodology

Background: Globalization, technological advancement, environmental problems, etc. challenge organizations not just to consider cost-effectiveness, but also to develop new ideas in order to build competitive advantages. Hence, methods to deliberately enhance creativity and facilitate its processes of development must also play a central role in engineering education. However, so far the engineering education literature provides little attention to the important discussion of how to develop knowledge intensive ideas based on creativity methods and concepts.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to investigate how to design creative camps from which knowledge intensive ideas can unfold.

Design/method/sample: A framework on integration of creativity and knowledge intensity is first developed, and then tested through the planning, execution and evaluation of a specialized creativity camp with focus on supply chain management. Detailed documentation of the learning processes of the participating 49 engineering and business students is developed through repeated interviews during the process as well as a survey.

Results: The research illustrates the process of development of ideas, and how the participants through interdisciplinary collaboration, cognitive flexibility and joint ownership develop highly innovative and knowledge-intensive ideas, with direct relevance for the four companies whose problems they address.

Conclusions: The article demonstrates how the creativity camp methodology holds the potential of combining advanced academic knowledge and creativity, to produce knowledge intensive ideas, when the design is based on ideas of experiential learning as well as creativity principles. This makes the method a highly relevant learning approach for engineering students in the search for skills to both develop and implement innovative ideas.     

Mexican Immigrant Students' Schooling Experiences and the Construction of Disengagement in Mathematics Learning Contexts

Through an ethnographic and narrative inquiry approach, this study draws attention to the plight of 4 Mexican immigrant high school students and their pursuit of education and mathematics learning. Their elementary school stories and experiences show a deep relationship between the learning contexts in which these students largely do school (i.e., an English learner context) and the nature of students' relationships (or lack thereof) with teachers and their process of disengagement from mathematics learning and school. Doing school is used to convey a key distinction from simply attending school. Attending school assumes uniformity/neutrality in how students might experience schooling and is a passive way of describing student participation in school. Doing school implies that students make sense of and respond to their schooling experiences in different ways and accounts for how these experiences are shaped and/or influenced by other forces (e.g., structural forces, social forces) in and out of school.     

“I ‘feel’ like I am at university even though I am online.” Exploring how students narrate their engagement with higher education institutions in an online learning environment

This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to story their experiences of this virtual environment, providing a snapshot of how learning is experienced by those undertaking online studies. The study explores what impacted upon students’ engagement in this environment and how different facets of their learning experience made a qualitative difference to how individuals enacted engagement. Drawing upon Sharon Pittaway’s engagement framework, the article seeks to foreground student voice as the learners define their engagement in learning, the strategies they employed to assist this process and how engagement was enacted at an individual level. The students’ reflections presented in this article can be used to inform teaching and learning strategies designed to improve engagement in the online environment within the higher education sector.     

Living drawing: Aesthetic teaching for moral artists

With its inherent attributes such as qualitative immediacy, imaginativeness, and embodiment, John Dewey’s concept of aesthetic experience makes a difference in moral education, in the ways of empathetic moral perception, moral reasoning, and moral action. If it matters then how can we help students gain aesthetic experience? By analyzing teacher Ho-Chul Lee’s approach to teaching drawing, called living drawing, this question is examined in terms of aesthetic style of teacher and teaching, and the aesthetic educational environment. This article will provide insights into how living drawing as an approach promotes aesthetic experiences and how it influences students’ moral experiences.     

Science Education and Health Education: Locating the Connections

Context-based chemistry education aims to improve student interest and motivation in chemistry by connecting canonical chemistry concepts with real-world contexts. Implementation of context-based chemistry programmes began 20 years ago in an attempt to make the learning of chemistry meaningful for students. This paper reviews such programmes through empirical studies on six international courses, ChemCom (USA), Salters (UK), Industrial Science (Israel), Chemie im Kontext (Germany), Chemistry in Practice (The Netherlands) and PLON (The Netherlands). These studies are categorised through emergent characteristics of: relevance, interest/attitudes/motivation and deeper understanding. These characteristics can be found to an extent in a number of other curricular initiatives, such as science-technology-society approaches and problem-based learning or project-based science, the latter of which often incorporates an inquiry-based approach to science education. These initiatives in science education are also considered with a focus on the characteristics of these approaches that are emphasised in context-based education. While such curricular studies provide a starting point for discussing context-based approaches in chemistry, to advance our understanding of how students connect canonical science concepts with the real-world context, a new theoretical framework is required. A dialectical sociocultural framework originating in the work of Vygotsky is used as a referent for analysing the complex human interactions that occur in context-based classrooms, providing teachers with recent information about the pedagogical structures and resources that afford students the agency to learn.     

Understanding stories of professional formation during early childhood education and care practice placements

Narrative inquiry as a methodological approach enables us to examine how people represent their experiences and selves through storytelling (Chase, S. E. 2005. ‘Narrative Inquiry: Multiple Lenses, Approaches, Voices.’ In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 651–679. London: Sage). To understand these constructions, other kinds of knowledge are required. Theories of social life, for example, help to interpret areas which narrative inquiry is good at revealing about human experiences such as the animation of temporality, sociality and place (Clandinin, J., V. Caine, A. Estefan, J. Huber, M. S. Murphy, and P. Steeves. 2015. ‘Places of Practice: Learning to Think Narratively.’ Narrative Works 5 (1). Accessed November 30, 2017. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/NW/issue/view/1799). Drawing on interviews with practice educators and final-year undergraduate early childhood education and care (ECEC) students in North-West Ireland, this paper considers how narrative inquiry and education theories work together to illuminate key learning experiences of ECEC undergraduate students during 12-week practice placements. In this paper I attempt to show how two education theories – ‘Threshold Concepts’ and ‘Communities of Practice’ – shed light on the nature of these key learning experiences. The paper suggests that narrative inquiry offers an emancipatory research approach by uncovering human and reflective elements of learning journeys made by ECEC students during their practice placements.     

Using critical policy analysis to examine competing discourses in zero tolerance legislation: do we really want to leave no child behind?

The increasing use of zero tolerance discipline policies in the USA has led to a ‘discipline gap,’ in which minoritized students receive harsher and more frequent suspensions and expulsions than their peers from dominant cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Though disciplinary decisions are made by educators at the school level, mandates regarding the disciplinary infractions that must result in exclusionary discipline are made at the federal and state levels. Using a theoretical framework that distinguishes the discourse of safety from the discourse of equity, this critical policy analysis examines how state-level zero tolerance legislation portrays educators, students, and school discipline and reflects neoliberal influence. Findings show that these policies narrowly define schools’ roles as developing academic, but not behavioral, skills. Students are portrayed as rational actors who deserve the punishment meted out by educators when students choose to behave disruptively; and educators have absolute power and their decisions regarding student discipline are reflected as being consistent and objective. Nevertheless, legislation in some states also acknowledges students’ needs for a more holistic approach to their education and mandate continued education and support services to help them after they are removed from school. An example from one California district illustrates findings and demonstrates how both discourses are inadequate in challenging neoracism.     

Developing a Vision for Teacher Education Programmes: A Values‐based Approach

This article presents one approach to the development of initial teacher education programmes that are based on a vision, premissed on values shared consensually by faculty staff and students. The article first provides a brief historical background of the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta, where this values‐based approach was attempted. It addresses some of the key problems faced in the development of a coherent and organic course of studies with students following graduate and post‐graduate courses, and gives an account of the way some of these problems were addressed. It is claimed that the approach adopted at the University of Malta can help other teacher educators in clarifying objectives as they set out to create coherent programmes that provide a sense of mission based on identifiable values and principles.     

Moving out of conflict into reconciliation – Bildung through philosophical dialogue in intercultural and interreligious education

The empirical basis of this article is the reconciliation process in a destructive conflict between students of different cultural and religious backgrounds in upper secondary education in Norway. The Dialogos approach to dialogical philosophizing was tried out through an action research process in order to bring about reconciliation, letting the students explore existential, ethical, religious and emotional topics together. The empirical reconciliation process is discussed in relation to elements of the philosophical concept Bildung, aiming at answering the following overarching questions: how did the movement from conflict to reconciliation come about through the action research process; to what extent might the Reconciliation Project be understood as a process of Bildung towards human maturity and wisdom; and how might philosophical dialogues become an institutionalized part of interreligious and intercultural education?     

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.     

Investigating Finnish teacher educators’ views on research‐based teacher education

In this article, we examine teacher educators’ views on research‐based teacher education. Finnish research‐based teacher education has four characteristics: (1) the study programme is structured according to a systematic analysis of education; (2) all teaching is based on research; (3) activities are organized in such a way that students can practice argumentation, decision‐making and justification when inquiring about and solving pedagogical problems; and (4) the students learn formal research skills during their studies. According to the results, teacher educators appreciate the research‐based approach to which the university is committed, although they were sceptical about how well this vision transfers to the students.     

Beyond the tools: analysing personal and group learning environments in a university course / Más allá de la tecnología: análisis de los entornos de aprendizaje personales y grupales de estudiantes en una asignatura universitaria

Abstract

In this paper we present the results of a naturalistic study carried out with higher education students which describes their learning environments when working on academic tasks in groups and individually. In this study we want to analyse how they organize their learning activities and knowledge processes (reading, reflecting and sharing) and how these learning processes are integrated into their Personal Learning Environments (PLE). In order to achieve that, students had to reflect about the basic ‘components’ that make up their learning process: reading (using not only by text but also multimedia), doing/reflecting (creating cognitive artefacts) and sharing (discussing, showing, and offering and receiving feedback from and to a community of reference). Students formed relationships between those components and any technological tools they used and created mind maps to represent their PLEs. The main objective is to try to understand how PLEs are organized and how they are perceived by learners, not from a technological perspective but from a learning perspective. The main results confirm the strong nature of PLEs as a pedagogical approach with a strong technological base. In addition, those results suggest a close relationship between students’ beliefs and expectations regarding academic tasks as well as the importance they give to each component in their learning process.     

Suzhi,Relevance, and the New Curriculum

There have been ongoing discussions about the most recent curriculum reform in China. The new curriculum aims at a more quality-oriented (suzhi) education and producing more well-rounded citizens to meet the challenges of global competition. However, it is questioned how suzhi education is possible with entrance examination still being the sole sorting mechanism. A semester-long ethnography in a rural middle school in northwest China reveals how rural students face many challenges with the new curriculum. Based on interviews, analyses of textbooks, and observations of classroom teaching, the study examines how rural students question the relevance of their curriculum and further the meaning of formal schooling. In addition to the dichotomy between an exam-oriented and quality-oriented curriculum, students are also troubled by the dichotomy between general/academic education and relevant/practical education. The study raises concerns about the urban-centered curriculum and how the rural community's absence in the picture has led to rural students' increasing disengagement in schooling and even dropout. It also reveals how the substance of suzhi education and the new curriculum have further reduced rural students' chance to move upward socially. The article concludes by pushing for discussions on how formal schooling can better serve rural children and youth.     

“… It’s like the immigrants stick together,the stupid ones,and the ones who want to learn something”: dynamics of peer relations,social categories,and dropout in vocational educational training

This paper discusses how student identities are constituted through social categories and how this affects students’ educational trajectories. Dropout is often described as a sudden event but this paper demonstrates how dropping out is a long-term process involving social interactions between the students. It is based on a field study in which the author was enrolled as a student at the car mechanic program at a vocational education and training school. The various social categories emerge in contrast with each other and have fundamental influences in defining the students’ scope of action. Divisions between the students were based on discourses of ethnicity and seriousness. Four portraits of individual students, each belonging to a different peer group, are presented to describe the individual level of the peer-related dropout processes. The discussion calls for awareness of reproducing effects of taken-for-granted logics and discriminatory practices and for including identity-related perspectives on peer relations, when studying dropout.     

Functioning and participation problems of students with ADHD in higher education: which reasonable accommodations are effective?

Abstract

Students with ADHD struggle in higher education as a result of various functioning and participation problems. However, there are remaining gaps in the literature. First, it remains unclear how often and during which teaching and evaluation methods problems arise. Second, we do not yet know which reasonable accommodations are most effective to deal with the functioning. And third, we do not know which accommodations are most effective to address participation problems of students with ADHD in higher education. This study addresses these three gaps in literature. In total, 86 students with ADHD, 42 student counsellors and 86 students without a disability participated in a survey-based study. The results show that students with ADHD most frequently experience problems with sustaining and focusing attention and it is demonstrated that most problems arise during classical teaching or evaluation methods. Finally, the perception of the effectiveness of reasonable accommodations is strongly dependent on which problems students experience in higher education. These findings suggest that it is important to consider both personal and environmental characteristics when selecting and implementing reasonable accommodations.