Peer assessment accounting for student agreement

Peer assessment has been gaining significant ground as a means of fostering an environment of accountability and responsibility for group projects in higher education. A popular peer assessment method assigns individual grades via a linear relationship to peer assessment scores. Using this method, a group member who receives his or her group’s average peer assessment score is assigned the instructor‐given group grade; the group member who receives a total peer assessment score of zero is assigned an individual grade of zero. Unfortunately, applying this method often requires time‐consuming exploratory data analysis because of the potential for the method to yield a high spread of grades, including grades over 100%. The present study proposes a modification, which accounts for the degree of student agreement. When the modified procedure results in a change from the group grade, the direction of change is always the same, but with smaller magnitude, requiring less subsequent data analysis and instructor time demands. Easy‐to‐modify SAS code for applying the method is presented in the Appendix.     

The Use of Newspaper Articles as a Tool to Develop Critical Thinking in Science Classes

The aim of this research is to identify the difficulties experienced by secondary school students (aged 15–16) with the critical reading of newspaper articles with scientific content. Two newspaper critical reading activities in relation to the study of various scientific contents were designed and carried out in two schools (61 students in total), one with a student population from a medium to high social and economic bracket and the other with students from a medium to low social and economic bracket. These activities were designed taking into account the phases of the reading process: before, during and after reading. In order to analyse the difficulties ‘Elements of science critical reading’ were identified on the basis of the ‘Elements of reasoning’ of Paul and Elder and the categories proposed by Bartz C.R.I.T.I.C. questionnaire and a scale was drawn up. The results show that the activities designed were useful in helping students to read critically. We also rated very positively the instrument created to assess the students' answers: the scale based on the performance indicators of Paul and Elder. This instrument enabled us to detect the aspects of critical thinking where students have the most difficulties: identifying the writer's purpose and looking for evidence in a text. It was also shown that the stance taken in the articles also had an influence on the results.     

Acción y representación en el niño: La autorregulación en una tarea motriz

Resumen

En este trabajo se analizan las relaciones entre la acción y la representación en el niño considerando que se trata de un campo de problemas en el que las aportaciones de Piaget y de los psicólogos soviéticos, especialmente Vygotski, pueden converger. Se presentan dos experimentos para determinar si los cambios que se producen en la representación infantil, como consecuencia de un proceso de aprendizaje orientado a facilitar la toma de conciencia de una acción motriz y automatizada, llevan consigo cambios en la actividad del niño cuando, posteriormente, realiza acciones similares. Participan 30 niños entre 4,0 y 8,4 años. El objetivo del primer estudio es determinar un código de categorías que permita evaluar la conducta infantil en situaciones que exigen al niño «tomar conciencia» de una actividad motriz; en el segundo se analizan los cambios que se producen en tres dimensiones de la conducta en función del aprendizaje orientado a favorecer la toma de conciencia: la representación del propio cuerpo en movimiento, la verbalización de la acción y la habilidad ae autocontrol. Se alude, finalmente, a las posibles implicadones educativas del tema.     

Contexto y aprendizaje: el papel de la interacción en diferentes tipos de tareas

Resumen

Este trabajo analiza la incidencia del contexto material y social en el aprendizaje de niños entre cinco y ocho años. Se asume que puede existir una interacción entre estas dos dimensiones del contexto. Se presentan datos relacionados con el aprendizaje en una tarea causal y otra lógico-matemática considerando la eficacia de la interacción del niño con el adulto y/o los iguales. La muestra está formada por 96 niños, distribuidos en un grupo de control y dos grupos experimentales. Se realizan análisis cuantitativos y cualitativos. Los resultados muestran que la interacción individual con el adulto resulta especialmente eficaz en la tarea causal y, sobre todo, en los niños que tenían un nivel más bajo al comenzar el proceso de aprendizaje. Por otra parte, la interacción con los iguales produce mejores resultados en ambas tareas cuando los niños interactúan con otros niños más hábiles en la tarea. Finalmente, se observan diferencias en la eficacia de las estrategias de instrucción que utiliza el adulto en función del tipo de tarea.     

Barriers,Successes and Enabling Practices of Education for Sustainability in Far North Queensland Schools: A Case Study

There are many documented barriers to implementing school-based sustainability. This article examines a) the barriers faced by principals and staff in two regional primary schools in Far North Queensland, Australia, well known for their exemplary practice, and b) ways the barriers were overcome. Through interviews conducted with principals and key staff, the authors found lack of time, direct funding for innovation, teacher conceptual understanding, resistance from some fellow staff to sustainability education, and being positioned as a “greenie” were presented as barriers to effective practice. The research reveals how innovation, determination, trust, and active principal support enabled the teachers to push ahead. Other educators experiencing difficulties with implementing sustainability education will likely find the discussion useful.     

Polychronicity: review of the literature and a new configuration for the study of this hidden dimension of online learning

Polychronicity is the natural tendency or preference for structuring time that has an influence on people’s behaviors. Highly polychronic individuals are involved in everything, doing many things at once because they value human relationships and interactions over arbitrary schedules and appointments. In contrast, highly monochronic individuals focus on one thing at a time, perceive other events as interruptions, and stress a high degree of scheduling, and promptness in meeting obligations and attending appointments. Although time is an important variable in educational contexts, and in particular in online learning, there is a lack of studies on polychronicity in educational research. This article reviews, summarizes, and extends the literature on polychronicity conceptualization and assessment; it discusses the limitations of the results and offers a multidimensional proposal for a polychronicity construct. Finally, the implications of students’ time differences and their impact on instructional situations are discussed.     

The substantialisation of properties in pupils' thinking and in the history of science

The ideas used by some 13 year old pupils to explain the properties of substances and their changes are analysed and discussed in this paper. A significant number of pupils use explanations which have been categorised as substantialisation of properties. This categorisation has been justified in this paper on the basis of a study of the history of science. An analysis of the consistency with which students use this type of explanation, and factors favouring its use, has been carried out.     

The different impact of a structured peer-assessment task in relation to university undergraduates’ initial writing skills

This article presents an empirical evaluation of the validity and reliability of a peer-assessment activity to improve academic writing competences. Specifically, we explored a large group of psychology undergraduate students with different initial writing skills. Participants (n?=?365) produced two different essays, which were evaluated by their course peers and professors using a specific grading instrument (rubric). The validity of the task was demonstrated by a high inter-grader agreement and a strong degree of consistency between the ratings of the peers and professors. Although all students did not improve their writing skills between their first and second essays, the peer-assessment activity enhanced the writing abilities of low but not high-achieving participants. The pedagogical implications of these results are discussed.     

Sub-field normalization in the multiplicative case: Average-based citation indicators

This paper investigates the citation impact of three large geographical areas – the U.S., the European Union (EU), and the rest of the world (RW) – at different aggregation levels. The difficulty is that 42% of the 3.6 million articles in our Thomson Scientific dataset are assigned to several sub-fields among a set of 219 Web of Science categories. We follow a multiplicative approach in which every article is wholly counted as many times as it appears at each aggregation level. We compute the crown indicator and the Mean Normalized Citation Score (MNCS) using for the first time sub-field normalization procedures for the multiplicative case. We also compute a third indicator that does not correct for differences in citation practices across sub-fields. It is found that: (1) No geographical area is systematically favored (or penalized) by any of the two normalized indicators. (2) According to the MNCS, only in six out of 80 disciplines – but in none of 20 fields – is the EU ahead of the U.S. In contrast, the normalized U.S./EU gap is greater than 20% in 44 disciplines, 13 fields, and for all sciences as a whole. The dominance of the EU over the RW is even greater. (3) The U.S. appears to devote relatively more – and the RW less – publication effort to sub-fields with a high mean citation rate, which explains why the U.S./EU and EU/RW gaps for all sciences as a whole increase by 4.5 and 5.6 percentage points in the un-normalized case. The results with a fractional approach are very similar indeed.