Using phenomenography to build an understanding of how university people conceptualise their community-engaged activities

Higher education institutions are seeking greater community engagement through academic, social and civic activity. In response, researcher attention has turned to impacts on students’ education, and benefits to both university and community partners. This phenomenographic study examines how a diverse group of teachers, researchers and administrators at one New Zealand university conceptualised their involvement in community-engaged learning and teaching. We identified an outcome space where university people conceived their community engagement in three ways: within an expert/novice discourse, as advocacy, and in the most complex conception, as reciprocal learning. When working with and within communities, we suggest that university people should be supported to approach community engagement as reciprocal learning rather than adopting approaches that render community partners in passive roles.     

Making global connections: The knowledge,understanding and motivation of trainee teachers

This article begins by noting some of the global concerns that young people have today and highlights the crucial role of global education in responding to such concerns. It then considers the importance of teacher training in such matters and reports on a preliminary study relating to the initial training of teachers in England. In particular this raises questions about the knowledge and understanding that such students bring to their courses. It concludes by identifying some of the consequent dilemmas faced by teacher trainers working in this context.     

Rethinking employability: how students build on interest in a subject to plan a career

Higher Education - An entrepreneurship movement has advanced into higher education. There is a growing expectation that universities demonstrate an economic contribution to the public good by...     

Using invention to change how students tackle problems

Invention activities challenge students to tackle problems that superficially appear unrelated to the course material but illustrate underlying fundamental concepts that are fundamental to material that will be presented. During our invention activities in a first-year biology class, students were presented with problems that are parallel to those that living cells must solve, in weekly sessions over a 13-wk term. We compared students who participated in the invention activities sessions with students who participated in sessions of structured problem solving and with students who did not participate in either activity. When faced with developing a solution to a challenging and unfamiliar biology problem, invention activity students were much quicker to engage with the problem and routinely provided multiple reasonable hypotheses. In contrast the other students were significantly slower in beginning to work on the problem and routinely produced relatively few ideas. We suggest that the invention activities develop a highly valuable skill that operates at the initial stages of problem solving.     

Posing complex problems requiring multiplicative thinking prompts students to use sophisticated strategies and build mathematical connections

While the general planning advice offered to mathematics teachers seems to be to start with simple examples and build complexity progressively, the research reported in this article is a contribution to the body of literature that argues the reverse. That is, posing of appropriately complex tasks may actually prompt the use of more sophisticated strategies. Results are presented from a detailed study of young children working on tasks that prompt multiplicative thinking. It was found that the tasks involving more complex number triples prompted the use of more sophisticated multiplicative thinking.     

提高高职生实践动手能力探析

提高高职生的实践动手能力,培养大批应用型技术人才是高职教育健康发展的生命线,是增强我国在世界上竞争力的重要途径.本文试图在国际国内宏观背景下,通过分析提高高职生实践动手能力的必要性和我国当前高职教育过程中所存在的缺陷与不足,提出提高高职生实践动手能力的主要措施和构建高职生实践动手能力保障体系的建议.     

An empirical framework for understanding how teachers conceptualize and cultivate historical empathy in students

This study reports the results of a case study of four teachers' beliefs about the nature of historical empathy and their means of cultivating such empathy in secondary school classrooms. The results of multiple interviews and lesson observations of history teachers in England suggest that teachers conceptualize empathy in bounded but not parsimonious ways, shaped by the realities of trying to teach it to students; that they select from broad repertoires of strategies, including major activities as well as small‐scale discourse strategies, heretofore largely unexamined; and that they recognize ways in which their empathetic goals exist in tension with other teaching aims, creating dilemmas they must manage rather than definitively resolve. Significant discrepancies between how these teachers actually think and practice and how empathy teaching is discussed in the educational literature suggest that research stands to benefit by attending more closely to teachers' ideas.     

利用现代教育技术构建新型英语教学模式

随着科学技术的迅猛发展,现代教育技术已渗透到英语课堂教学。信息技术在英语教学领域的应用,必将导致教学内容、教学手段、教学方法和教学模式的深刻变革。英语教学要根据学生不同的学习风格,设计不同的教学内容和策略,构建不同的教学模式,为学生创造一个轻松愉快、宽松和谐的学习环境,使每个学生各尽所能,充分发挥自己的能动性。     

From students to teachers: using surveys to build a culture of evidence and inquiry

In an effort to make decisions about teacher education policy and practice that were informed by research and evidence, participants in Boston College's ‘Teachers for a New Era’ Evidence Team (http://www.teachersforanewera.org) designed a portfolio of assessments and studies. This article describes one project in the portfolio – a series of surveys that trace teacher candidates' experiences over time and track shifts in these experiences as respondents progress from students during the pre‐service period to teachers in the first few years of work in the profession. The article illustrates how various constituencies in the teacher education programme and the larger university used survey data to guide practice, shape policies, and raise new questions about the curriculum, relationships with schools, and the performance of teachers and their pupils. The article argues that these surveys helped to create a new ‘culture of evidence and inquiry’ within which decisions about local policy and practice were made in the teacher preparation programme and the larger university.     

Using learning analytics in the Amazonas: understanding students’ behaviour in introductory programming

Tools for automatic grading programming assignments, also known as Online Judges, have been widely used to support computer science (CS) courses. Nevertheless, few studies have used these tools to acquire and analyse interaction data to better understand the students’ performance and behaviours, often due to data availability or inadequate granularity. To address this problem, we propose an Online Judge called CodeBench, which allows for fine-grained data collection of student interactions, at the level of, eg, keystrokes, number of submissions, and grades. We deployed CodeBench for 3 years (2016–18) and collected data from 2058 students from 16 introductory computer science (CS1) courses, on which we have carried out fine-grained learning analytics, towards early detection of effective/ineffective behaviours regarding learning CS concepts. Results extract clear behavioural classes of CS1 students, significantly differentiated both semantically and statistically, enabling us to better explain how student behaviours during programming have influenced learning outcomes. Finally, we also identify behaviours that can guide novice students to improve their learning performance, which can be used for interventions. We believe this work is a step forward towards enhancing Online Judges and helping teachers and students improve their CS1 teaching/learning practices.     

Using metacognitive strategies in teaching to facilitate understanding of light concepts among year 9 students

Background: Enhancing students’ metacognitive abilities will help to facilitate their understanding of science concepts.

Purpose: The study was designed to conduct and evaluate the effectiveness of a repertoire of interventions aimed at enhancing secondary school students’ metacognitive capabilities and their achievements in science.

Sample: A class of 35 Year 9 students participated in the study.

Design and methods: The study involved a pre-post design, conducted by the first author as part of the regular designated science programme in a class taught by him.

In order to enhance the students’ metacognitive capabilities, the first author employed clearly stated focused outcomes, engaging them in collaborative group work, reading scientific texts and using concept mapping techniques during classroom instruction. The data to evaluate the effectiveness of the metacognitive interventions were obtained from pre- and post-test results of two metacognitive questionnaires, the Metacognitive Support Questionnaire (MSpQ) and the Metacognitive Strategies Questionnaire (MStQ), and data from interviews. In addition, pre-test and post-test scores were used from a two-tier multiple-choice test on Light.

Results: The results showed gains in the MSpQ but not in the MStQ. However, the qualitative data from interviews suggested high metacognitive capabilities amongst the high- and average-achieving students at the end of the study. Students gains were also evident from the test scores in the Light test.

Conclusion: Although the quantitative data obtained from the Metacognitive Strategies Questionnaire did not show significant gains in the students’ metacognitive strategies, the qualitative data from interviews suggested positive perceptions of students’ metacognitive strategies amongst the high- and average-achieving students. Data from the Metacognitive Support Questionnaire showed that there were significant gains in the students’ perceptions of their metacognitive support implying that the majority of the students perceived that their learning environment was oriented towards the development of their metacognitive capabilities. The effect of the metacognitive interventions on students’ achievement in the Light test resulted in students displaying the correct declarative knowledge, but quite often they lacked the procedural knowledge by failing to explain their answers correctly.     

Teaching students how to study: a workshop on information processing and self-testing helps students learn

We implemented a "how to study" workshop for small groups of students (6-12) for N = 93 consenting students, randomly assigned from a large introductory biology class. The goal of this workshop was to teach students self-regulating techniques with visualization-based exercises as a foundation for learning and critical thinking in two areas: information processing and self-testing. During the workshop, students worked individually or in groups and received immediate feedback on their progress. Here, we describe two individual workshop exercises, report their immediate results, describe students' reactions (based on the workshop instructors' experience and student feedback), and report student performance on workshop-related questions on the final exam. Students rated the workshop activities highly and performed significantly better on workshop-related final exam questions than the control groups. This was the case for both lower- and higher-order thinking questions. Student achievement (i.e., grade point average) was significantly correlated with overall final exam performance but not with workshop outcomes. This long-term (10 wk) retention of a self-testing effect across question levels and student achievement is a promising endorsement for future large-scale implementation and further evaluation of this "how to study" workshop as a study support for introductory biology (and other science) students.     

Balancing supportive relationships and developing independence: an activity theory approach to understanding feedback in context for master’s students

Abstract

Master’s students are expected to be self-regulating and independent learners. Dialogic feedback has been identified as one way of promoting such independence. There continues to be concern about the extent to which master’s students are achieving this level of functioning. This study aimed to identify feedback practices and contexts which facilitated student engagement and independence. Working with students as co-researchers, interviews were conducted with 27 master’s students from three programmes. Activity theory was used as an analytical tool to generate understanding of feedback in the social context of each programme. Findings indicate there can be tension between factors which promote dialogical feedback and those which promote independence, and that active dialogic feedback with staff may limit student engagement with peer feedback.     

Intimate partner violence and child maltreatment: understanding intra- and intergenerational connections

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to assess the extent to which intimate partner violence and different forms of child maltreatment occur within and across childhood and adulthood for a high-risk group of women. METHOD: Low-income adult women were interviewed, retrospectively, regarding their experiences with intimate partner violence and child maltreatment in childhood and adulthood, and intra- and intergenerational relationships between multiple forms of family violence were identified. RESULTS: Analyses demonstrated weak to moderate associations between various forms of violence within generations. Only weak support was found for the transmission of violence hypothesis that maltreated children are more likely to grow up to maltreat their own children. Stronger support was found for the theory of learned helplessness, whereby children maltreated or witness to violence during childhood are more likely to be victimized as an adult. CONCLUSION: The results from this study suggest that interventions with children who are identified for one form of victimization should be assessed for other forms of victimization, and interventions should also address learned behaviors or beliefs associated with continued or future victimization.     

教会学生发现问题提出问题

本文从揭示课题、利用知识"生长点"、质疑以及联系实际4个方面探讨了在数学课堂教学中如何加强对学生发现问题、提出问题的能力的培养.     

Learning to teach in higher education: how to link theory and practice

In this study the learning process of 12 Dutch novice university teachers was monitored during a five-month induction programme. The teachers were interviewed before and after the programme and were asked to fill in several email logbooks during the programme. A change process was identified, in which experiencing and experimentation played a central role. In particular, modelling by the teacher educator, the observation of video cases, reflection on these with peers and experiencing success in their own practice seemed to be important incentives that encouraged teachers to adopt and eventually implement new pedagogical approaches. On the basis of our data, we think that teachers' conceptions and teaching practice are best developed simultaneously and that the design of induction programmes should support this process.     

请相信孩子

同为教师 ,也许 ,你也曾遇到过这样的困惑 :为什么我声嘶力竭 ,费尽心机地讲解 ,想让孩子们听懂 ,而为什么他们却总是要开小差 ,即使“注意”地听 ,眼神中却无灵气呢 ?也许 ,你曾遇到过这样的情景 :某天 ,你上课 ,教室里出奇地安静 ,你高兴地讲解着。而当你提问时 ,举手者寥若晨星 ,回答者不知所云 ,你也许为此发过火 ,生过气……这些情况的发生 ,在很大程度上都是由于没有激起孩子的兴趣。而要激起孩子的兴趣 ,方法之一是相信孩子。现代教育认为 ,教育应以人为本 ,以学生为本。尊重学生、相信孩子 ,这应是现代教育最起码的原则。教学应从学…     

Human Anatomy: Let the students tell us how to teach

Anatomy teaching methods have evolved as the medical undergraduate curriculum has modernized. Traditional teaching methods of dissection, prosection, tutorials and lectures are now supplemented by anatomical models and e‐learning. Despite these changes, the preferences of medical students and anatomy faculty towards both traditional and contemporary teaching methods and tools are largely unknown. This study quantified medical student and anatomy faculty opinion on various aspects of anatomical teaching at the Department of Anatomy, University of Bristol, UK. A questionnaire was used to explore the perceived effectiveness of different anatomical teaching methods and tools among anatomy faculty (AF) and medical students in year one (Y1) and year two (Y2). A total of 370 preclinical medical students entered the study (76% response rate). Responses were quantified and intergroup comparisons were made. All students and AF were strongly in favor of access to cadaveric specimens and supported traditional methods of small‐group teaching with medically qualified demonstrators. Other teaching methods, including e‐learning, anatomical models and surgical videos, were considered useful educational tools. In several areas there was disharmony between the opinions of AF and medical students. This study emphasizes the importance of collecting student preferences to optimize teaching methods used in the undergraduate anatomy curriculum. Anat Sci Educ 7: 262–272. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.