How Does the Degree of Guidance Support Students’ Metacognitive and Problem Solving Skills in Educational Robotics?

Educational robotics (ER) is an innovative learning tool that offers students opportunities to develop higher-order thinking skills. This study investigates the development of students’ metacognitive (MC) and problem-solving (PS) skills in the context of ER activities, implementing different modes of guidance in two student groups (11–12 years old, N1 = 30, and 15-16 years old, N2 = 22). The students of each age group were involved in an 18-h group-based activity after being randomly distributed in two conditions: “minimal” (with minimal MC and PS guidance) and “strong” (with strong MC and PS guidance). Evaluations were based on the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory measuring students’ metacognitive awareness and on a think-aloud protocol asking students to describe the process they would follow to solve a certain robot-programming task. The results suggest that (a) strong guidance in solving problems can have a positive impact on students’ MC and PS skills and (b) students reach eventually the same level of MC and PS skills development independently of their age and gender.     

Networks of Encouragement: Who’s Encouraging Latina/o Students and White Students to Enroll in Honors and Advanced-Placement (AP) Courses?

Using affiliation network data collected at a large high school, this study examined differences between who encourages Latina/o and White students to enroll in advanced courses. Previous research has shown a positive association between emotional support and academic achievement, and thus, this study shifts the focus from who informs students to who encourages them. This study revealed that on average, Latina/o and White students have different networks of encouragement.     

Alien or Alike? How the Perceived Similarity Between the Typical Science Teacher and a Student’s Self-Image Correlates with Choosing Science at School

By applying the self-to-prototype matching theory to students?? academic choices, this study links the unpopularity of science in many industrialized countries with the perceived gap between typical persons representing science (e.g. physics teachers) on the one hand and students?? self-image on the other. A sample of N?=?308 Dutch and German students described both themselves and typical teachers representing different school subjects using 65 trait adjectives. The following hypotheses were tested: The typical hard sciences teacher and the typical languages teacher will be perceived as differing in their personal characteristics. The typical physics teachers will be perceived as being less similar to students' own self-image than teachers representing languages. Actual choices students make during secondary school should correlate with the perceived fit between students?? self-image and the prototype of teachers representing different school subjects, especially in the less frequent and less popular choices of a math or physics major/profile. The findings supported these hypotheses. The discussion stresses that students acquire not only knowledge about science but also about science culture (sensu Aikenhead) in their science classes and that students?? image of science teachers can influence their academic choices.     

Assessment for learning in constrained contexts: How does the teacher’s self-directed development play out?

This qualitative case study explores how a teacher directed himself in implementing assessment for learning (AfL) among his students in a constrained context (i.e., a lack of institutional support in offering effective teacher education programs). The data included a Chinese college English writing teacher’s reflections over two courses, interviews, and dialogues with the students, coupled with field notes. The qualitative analysis shows that in a constrained context, self-directed AfL was buttressed by the teacher's existent pedagogical knowledge. In the process, the teacher’s self-agency empowered him in synergizing existent knowledge with external resources and revamping his teaching based on the students’ needs as reflected through AfL. These student-centered practices contributed to reduced complexity of AfL implementation, and yielded a more or less beginning cycle: the students echoed the teacher’s purpose of assessment, which considered knowledge appropriation as pivotal, and the teacher felt professionally rewarded from self-directed development using assessment-based information to improve his instruction and benefit his students.     

Satisfaction with adult children’s achievements is associated with depression and loneliness in later-life: the mediating roles of children’s support and gratitude

We examined the mediating roles of gratitude and children support in the relationship between satisfaction with adult children’s achievements, and depression/loneliness in a sample of 465 community elders of Ekiti State, Nigeria. The sample includes 294 women and 171 men with mean age 74.18 (SD = 9.42) selected by means of multistage sampling method. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results suggested that satisfaction with adult children’s achievements was negatively associated with depression and loneliness. However, these relationships were found to be successively mediated by children’s support and gratitude. Specifically, gratitude fully mediated the relationship between satisfaction with adult children’s achievements and loneliness while children’s support was a partial mediator. Also, gratitude partially mediated the relationship between satisfaction with adult children’s achievements and depression while children’s support did not. The fit indices for the mediation model achieved the acceptable cuff-off for model fitness, CFI = .95, RMSEA = .042, 90% CI = (.033, .05, SRMR = .05, with 46% and 28% variance in depression and loneliness, respectively. In the management of geriatric depression and loneliness, mental health professionals may assess satisfaction with adult children’s achievements and utilize gratitude interventions for a happy and successful aging.     

An Exploration of Reasons for Shanghai’s Success in the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009

The outstanding performance of Shanghai students in the 4th Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2009) gained widespread attention at home and abroad. In this paper, the authors attribute this outstanding performance to three traditional factors and six modern factors. The traditional factors are high parental expectations, belief in the power of effort, and the mechanisms of personnel selection. The modern factors are the openness of Chinese education, curriculum and teaching reform, teacher training, improvement of comparatively poor schools, the financial resources allocation mechanism in compulsory education, and the reform of high school enrollment.     

How working memory relates to children’s reading comprehension: the importance of domain-specificity in storage and processing

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of phonological and semantic storage, and phonological and semantic processing to reading comprehension in 123 Dutch children in fifth grade. We conducted regression and mediation analyses to find out to what extent variation in reading comprehension could be explained by storage and processing capacities in both the phonological and the semantic domain, while controlling for children’s decoding and vocabulary. The analyses included tasks that reflect storage only, and working memory tasks that assess processing in addition to storage. Regression analysis including only storage tasks as predictor measures, revealed semantic storage to be a better predictor of reading comprehension than phonological storage. Adding phonological and semantic working memory tasks as additional predictors to the model showed that semantic working memory explained individual variation in reading comprehension over and above all other memory measures. Additional mediation analysis made it clear that semantic storage contributed indirectly to reading comprehension via semantic working memory, indicating that semantic storage tapped by working memory, in addition to processing capacities, explains individual variation in reading comprehension. It can thus be concluded that semantic storage plays a more important role in children’s reading comprehension than previously thought.     

Changes in the basic ICT skills of freshmen between 2005 and 2009: Who’s catching up and who’s still behind?

In the last decade, ICT use has expanded enormously in most Western countries. In line with this development, we hypothesised that freshmen at university would not only have mastered more ICT skills, but would also use computers more often than their counterparts of 5 years previously. To compare students’ opinions and behaviour between 2005 and 2009, responses to two online questionnaires (N = 714 in 2005 and N = 1529 in 2009) offered at a large university were compared. The main variables of the Technology Acceptance Model (as well as facilitating factors, study motivation and some contextual variables) were used as predictors to explore the possible changes between 2005 and 2009 in the mastering of 19 ICT skills, and the frequency of the use of computers for six different tasks. The results of the study show that freshmen became more proficient in some ICT skills, while proficiency in other skills did not change or even dropped. Gender is still an important factor to predict ICT skills and the frequency of using computers, but it is shown that for some skills female students have caught up with their male counterparts.     

Student teachers go online; the need for a focus on human agency and pedagogy in learning about ‘e-learning’ in initial teacher education (ITE)

This paper argues that student teachers’ developing pedagogical approaches achieve expression within the virtual classroom in much the same way as they would in the ‘real’ classroom; that is to say through language as the primary tool of mediation. Whilst the advent of new communications technologies affords new arenas in which learning can take place—Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), online communities, Managed Learning Environments—the importance of human agency and the significance of language remains pivotal to the effective use of such technologies. As such it is argued that student teachers need opportunities to engage in authentic online dialogue with children as they endeavour to find their online pedagogical voice. The key findings emerge from a case study carried out with a group of Year 3 ICT specialists on an undergraduate initial teacher education (ITE) degree course in the UK, leading to qualified teacher status (QTS) in the primary and lower secondary phases of education. Funding from the University of Brighton, Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP), was used to design and resource a module, which facilitated opportunities for student teachers to engage in online learning dialogues with children from a local primary school, having initially met with the children face-to-face. Fourteen student teachers participated in the study. Interviews were carried out and their online dialogues with the children were analysed to establish both the issues and potential advantages of such a situated approach to learning about the educational use of new communications technologies with children.     

Student teachers’ views of practicums (teacher training placements) in Turkish and English contexts: a comparative study

How student teachers experience their transformation into serving teachers in the liminal social spaces of the school-based practicum (teaching practice) is of key importance to them, their future students and their educators. The practicum is a challenging experience for student teachers, even with help from university and school-based mentors, as their knowledge of practice, power and culture in schools lacks sophistication. The practicum, an under-researched but important aspect of education, was investigated by this study by asking 480 student teachers in three universities in Turkey and England in 2010–2011 about how well their universities prepared them for the practicum, what made practicums successful and how practicums fostered their professional development. Participants generally thought the practicum helped them to develop skills in student and classroom management, in meeting students’ diverse learning needs, in recognising multiple students’ perspectives and in grounding their understanding of what it meant to be a teacher ‘for real’.     

Forming Views towards People of Different Faith: School’s Religious Culture and the Perceptions of Students who Experience Conflict in Mindanao

Abstract

Young people living in conflict-ridden areas in the southern part of the Philippines, Mindanao, experience hostility from communities motivated by religious ideologies and political beliefs. With this premise, this study will uncover emerging themes on the way students form their views towards people who have a different faith based on three distinct religious cultures of six schools situated in conflict-ridden areas in Mindanao. Guided by the precepts of phenomenology, this study utilized focused-group discussion with art-based activities and in-depth interviews to show the three dominant religious cultures in schools have distinct influences on their students’ perspectives of others.     

Certainty of Punishment and Criminal Thinking: Do the Rational and Non-rational Parameters of a Student’s Decision to Cheat on an Exam Interact?

The purpose of this study was to determine whether criminal thinking interacts with the rational requirements of human decision-making in a group of college students. A convenience sample of 315 undergraduates (114 males, 201 females) completed self-report measures of criminal thinking and estimated their likelihood of cheating on an exam given different levels of certainty of apprehension. A repeated-measures analysis of covariance revealed that students were significantly more likely to seize on the opportunity to cheat when the certainty of getting caught was 10% than when it was 50% and that students with higher levels of criminal thinking were more likely to take the opportunity to cheat than students with lower levels of criminal thinking. In addition, students exhibiting moderate proactive criminal thinking and moderate to high reactive criminal thinking were significantly less likely to be deterred from cheating when the odds of getting caught were low.     

How important is it to my parents? Transmission of STEM academic values: the role of parents’ values and practices and children’s perceptions of parental influences

The success of science education in classroom and out-of-school settings can be influenced by parents’ behaviours and STEM-related values. The present study investigated pathways in parent-to-child transmission of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) values by examining at same time parents’ values and behaviours, along with their children’s perceptions of these parental influences. The study included 1071 students (M_age?=?12.15) and the same number of their parents. Path analysis revealed that children’s importance value of the STEM school fields was best explained by their perceptions of parental values and behaviours in STEM. On the other hand, parents’ self-reported values and behaviours had a weak effect in predicting children’s values, which can be explained by inaccurate children’s perceptions of their parents. The results suggest that parents more easily convey beliefs about the utility than the attainment value of STEM. Namely, parents’ utility value had a larger effect in predicting children’s value, partly mediated through children’s perception of parents’ encouragement of STEM interests. The study highlights the role of children’s perceptions of their parents’ beliefs and behaviours and the importance of communicating STEM-related values within the family. Practical implications for parents and science educators are discussed.     

“Having Students is Entirely Necessary”: Tutors’ feedback of experiential learning in an MPharm programme (TELL Project)

There is an increased reliance on experiential learning tutors and placement sites, and as such there is a need to determine tutors’ perceptions about experiential learning as well as identify their needs. A mixed-methods study was undertaken involving tutors in hospitals and community pharmacies. There were 58 responses to the online survey. Five focus groups consisting of 25 hospital tutors, and 11 one-on-one interviews with community tutors were conducted. Experience as a tutor was dependant on students’ attitudes and engagement, with poor attitude highlighted as a challenge. Limited time and placement duration were also identified as challenges, while a benefit noted was opportunities for staff recruitment. There was good support for students being sent to primary care for placements. Programme improvement is needed, involving both tutors and students in the co-design of EL to address gaps and avoid future dissatisfaction as well as ignite a sense of ownership by all parties.     

‘Mature regionalism’ and the genesis of ‘functional projects’: ‘educational regionalism’ in small (and micro-states)

This article advances that the movement towards ‘deeper’ Caribbean integration has generated a shift from ‘immature’ regionalism to a ‘mature’ form of regionalism. Thus, mature regionalism, a new governance mechanism, in regulating the institutional and legal framework of Caribbean Single Market and Economy is drastically altering national education governance within the Caribbean Community. In focusing on the functional aspects integration, this article suggests that mature regionalism in education is built upon collaborative governance and encompasses multipartner governance arrangement – with the state, private sector, civil society, and the community as well as hybrid public–private and private–social partnerships and co-management regimes. It concludes that the instrumentalisation of mature regionalism in education is giving way to ‘educational regionalism’ defined by the movement towards structured institutional mechanisms, to facilitate the deepening of Caribbean integration.     

Na?ve Students’ Conceptual Development and Beliefs: The Need for Multiple Analyses to Determine what Contributes to Student Success in a University Introductory Physics Course

This research involved na?ve physics learners who were interested in majoring in science or engineering. In a semester-long quasi-experimental study, open-ended pretests and weekly interviews were used to analyse the progressive development of students’ conceptions relating to sound and wave motion. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted to elucidate: (1) how their conceptions developed from everyday conceptions to unclear scientific conceptions to scientific conceptions, and (2) their beliefs of physics knowledge. Despite efforts to enable these students to learn physics, the findings showed that only two out of ten students developed acceptable physics conceptions during the course that would enable them to pursue the subject to a higher level. Also, students’ conceptual development was found to be related to their cognitive understanding and to epistemological beliefs of physics. Therefore, to facilitate na?ve physics learners’ success in a general physics course, in addition to the acquisition of content knowledge, explicit emphasis needs to be placed on the nature of physics knowledge.     

Prisoners of Childhood? Child Abuse and the Development of Heroes and Monsters in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ender’s Game</Emphasis>

Alice Miller’s work provides a theoretical framework to assess the effects of child abuse and its relationship to the development of creativity, hatred, and violence in the novel Ender’s Game. Analysis focuses on the extent to which children are manipulated in order to meet the needs of adults, the presence of behaviors such as the repression of feelings and memories, the idealization of perpetrators, blind obedience to authority, and the expression of repressed feelings in destructive acts, and identification of a helping witness as predictors for the actions and outcomes in this story.