Meaningfulness and instruction: Relating what is being learned to what a student knows

Any comprehensive theory of instruction must include ways to optimize the acquisition, organization, and retrieval of new knowledge. An important concern in this regard is making new knowledge meaningful by relating it to prior knowledge. Although meaningfulness is usually thought of in terms of relating new knowledge to prior superordinate knowledge (as with the advance organizer), there are at least six other kinds of prior knowledge that can facilitate the acquisition, organization, and retrieval of new knowledge. Seven kinds of prior knowledge are described below, followed by a section on instructional strategies that an instructional designer or teacher can use to help optimize the learner's use of the seven kinds of prior knowledge for acquiring, organizing, and retrieving new knowledge.     

Handwriting: what do we know and what do we need to know?

Handwriting has a low status and profile in literacy education in England and in recent years has attracted little attention from teachers, policy‐makers or researchers into mainstream educational processes. This article identifies a substantial programme of research into handwriting, including studies located in the domains of special needs education and psychology, suggesting that it is time to re‐evaluate the importance of handwriting in the teaching of literacy. Explorations of the way handwriting affects composing have opened up new avenues for research, screening and intervention, which have the potential to make a significant contribution to children's progress in learning to write. In particular, the role of orthographic motor integration and automaticity in handwriting is now seen as of key importance in composing. Evidence from existing studies suggests that handwriting intervention programmes may have a real impact on the composing skills of young writers. In particular, they could positively affect the progress of the many boys who struggle with writing throughout the primary school years.     

Children's alternative views: alternative to what?

In secondary education, 'energy' is often introduced by distinguishing different 'forms of energy' for different phenomena. Of these forms of energy, only kinetic and potential energy are accepted in current science. The question has been raised whether 'forms of energy' should be eliminated from secondary school science curricula. As a contribution to this discussion we have analysed 'forms of energy' language for inconsistencies and limitations of validity in Part I. In this second part, results are presented of two teaching experiments at university level, each involving five students. In these experiments attempts are made to build on students 'forms of energy' language as well as to challenge its limitations. Details of student and teacher reasoning are presented. The conclusion is drawn that 'forms of energy' language must be reformulated before it can be evaluated with reference to experience. A reformulation in terms of 'value' (cf. Scheler 1997) proved to be productive.     

Good teaching: what matters to university students

Institutions assess teaching effectiveness in various ways, such as classroom observation, peer evaluation and self-assessment. In higher education, student feedback continues to be the main teaching evaluation tool. However, most of such forms include characteristics of good teaching that the institutions deem important and may not adequately reflect what students perceive to be good teaching. This study explored students' understandings of good teaching via a survey with students from two faculties at a Singapore university. Students were asked what characteristics they thought constituted the following categories of teaching: preparation and organization, knowledge, learning and thinking, enthusiasm and delivery. It was found that while distinct characteristics were highlighted for the first four categories, the last saw recurring characteristics of teacher attributes and teaching strategies. These two aspects weigh in significantly in the way students perceive whether the teacher is effective. The study has implications for teacher development programmes and the design of student evaluation forms for more accurate assessments of teacher ability and foci on areas of improvement. This study is potentially useful to teachers, as knowing the characteristics of teaching that matter to students could help teachers determine for themselves how to maintain or improve their performance in the classroom.     

English in classrooms: only write down what you need to know: annotation for what?

The annotation of texts in the school English classroom is central to the curriculum, examination and the history of English as a school subject. In this paper we explore ‘the way it is done’ across two different classrooms. We focus on the relationship between official definitions of annotation offered by national policies and examination syllabuses and its actualization in particular classrooms. The article takes a multimodal approach: attending to all modes of representation and communication in the teaching of English including image, gesture, gaze and the spatial organization of the classroom.     

互联网对青少年的影响分析

网络是一把双刃剑,它既激活了青少年,又困扰着青少年。本文拟从从辩证的角度分析了网络的开放性、平等性给青少年学习方式、交往方式等方面带来的积极影响,也分析了网络的隐蔽性、虚拟性等给青少年带来的许多负面影响。网络是虚拟的,但也是现实的,所以我们不能因为网络的负面作用而拒绝网络。