Learning from WebQuests

WebQuests are activities in which students use Web resources to learn about school topics. WebQuests are advocated as constructivist activities and ones generally well regarded by students. Two experiments were conducted in school settings to compare learning using WebQuests versus conventional instruction. Students and teachers both enjoyed WebQuest instruction and spoke highly of it. In one experiment, however, conventional instruction led to significantly greater student learning. In the other, there were no significant differences in the learning outcomes between conventional versus WebQuest-based instruction.     

Sexual abuse prevention education for young children: A comparison of teachers and parents as instructors

The purpose of this study was to compare teachers and parents as instructors of a personal safety program. One hundred seventy-two Head Start preschoolers were randomly assigned to a personal safety program taught by their teachers, parents, both teachers and parents, or to a general safety control program. Following program participation, children taught the personal safety program by their teachers, parents, or both, demonstrated greater knowledge about sexual abuse and higher levels of personal safety skills compared with those in the control group. Gains in knowledge and skills were maintained at the 5-month follow up. Children taught by their parents showed greater improvements in recognizing inappropriate-touch requests and in their personal safety skills compared with children taught by their teachers, and children who received the program both at home and school were better able to recognize appropriate-touch requests and to demonstrate higher levels of personal safety skills compared with children taught only at school. The emotional costs associated with participating in the program were minimal, and both parents and children rated the program positively. The advantages of home-based instruction for young children are discussed and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Polyvocal Play: A Poetic Bricolage of the Why of Our Transdisciplinary Self-Study Research

ABSTRACT

We have come to conceptualize our transdisciplinary, transnational, and transcultural interaction and reciprocal learning through self-study research as polyvocal professional learning. Our conceptualization of polyvocality has made visible how dialogic encounters with diverse ways of seeing, knowing, and doing can deepen and extend professional learning in self-study research. For this collaborative self-study, we created a poetic bricolage composed of frequently used words in three of our published research poems as we asked, “Why? Why does our work together exist? And why should anyone care?” What emerged became an organic abstract of the impetus for our collaborative learning over time. Through inventing a poetic bricolage, we were able to make visible and available how our multiple interests, practices, and methods have come together to support fluid, dialogic co-learning, and re-learning. Discovering the why of our work included unearthing our gravitation toward transdisciplinary scholarship, which offers university faculty a wide range of possibilities for co-learning and co-creativity. Our demonstration of methodological inventiveness in action through poetic bricolage will be useful to others interested in exploring the promise and tensions of plurality, interaction and interdependence, and creative activity in self-study methodology.     

School‐based support for GLBT students: A review of three levels of research

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) students experience harassment, alienation, and violence in schools. Several school‐based interventions have been suggested to provide a safe and effective learning environment for these students, but few have been evaluated or investigated experimentally. This review utilizes A.K. Ellis' (2001) model to review the research on school‐based interventions for GLBT youth at the levels of theory, applied investigation, and widespread implementation. Results suggest that, although the research base for psychological needs of GLBT youth is well established, applied investigation of small‐ and large‐scale implementation is in the early stages. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 44: 839–848, 2007.     

Temporal specificity in patterning of the rabbit nictitating membrane response

Rabbits were trained in either positive patterning (AX+, A−, X−) or negative patterning (A+, X+, AX−) using one of four intervals between the onset of A and the onset of X on AX trials. These intervals were 0, 800, 2,400, and 5,600 msec. In each task, all groups acquired an appropriate pattern of discriminative responding. Following acquisition, all rabbits were tested with the four different A-X intervals. All positive patterning groups showed an excitatory gradient, in which the highest level of responding occurred at the interval used in training. Conversely, all but one of the negative patterning groups showed an inhibitory gradient, in which the lowest level of responding occurred at the interval used in training. The one exception was the negative patterning group trained with simultaneous AX stimuli (0 msec), which showed a low, broad gradient, indicating transfer of inhibition across all the intervals. The results are discussed with respect to temporal encoding mechanisms and accounts of conditional discriminations.     

Bilingual and special educational needs in inclusive classrooms: some critical and pedagogical considerations

In the light of educational reforms aimed at promoting greater inclusive policies and practices, it is important to put a more pronounced emphasis on the needs of English language learners (ELLs) with special educational needs and/or disabilities. Simultaneously, a focus should also be placed on understanding and dealing with the disproportional representation of English language learners in special education categories. This dual and arguably sometimes mutually reinforcing phenomenon, along with its potential implications for education policy and practice, needs to be discussed against a convergent analytical framework drawn from bilingual and special education. The cross‐fertilisation of these disciplinary fields can provide a multimodal and comprehensive approach to meeting the intersectional needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students with special educational needs. To this end, it is important that issues of culture and language should become indispensable aspects of the special education knowledge base in inclusive classrooms.     

Conducting Research into European Union Education and Training Policy: some theoretical and methodological considerations

This paper has several purposes. It introduces a new project funded by the European Commission within its Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) programme; it describes the research design of the Oxford part of that project, which is now beginning, and of a comparative study which was already being undertaken in Oxford on the implementation of the ‘European Dimension’ in education in England, Scotland and Wales; and it describes a number of theoretical and methodological problems we anticipate having to address as the studies proceed.     

Commentary: How readily can findings from basic cognitive psychology research be applied in the classroom?

The commentary discusses phenomena highlighted in the studies of the special issue such as the hypercorrection effect, overconfidence, and the efficiency of interventions designed to increase monitoring accuracy. The discussion is based on a broader theoretical framework of self-regulation of learning that stresses the inferential character of metacognitive experiences, as posited by the cue utilization approach, the interrelations of metacognition with affect, and the influence of prior knowledge and individual differences factors on monitoring accuracy. The implications of the findings of the studies for learning in the classroom are also pointed out.     

Food Insecurity Among Community College Students: Prevalence and Association With Grade Point Average

This study investigated the prevalence of food insecurity among community college students (N = 301) and the relationship between food insecurity and student grade point average (GPA). It employed a cross-sectional intercept survey, utilizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Household Food Security Survey Module, student self-reported GPA, and demographic variables. The research setting was two community colleges in Maryland—one located in a low income urban area and one located in an affluent suburban area. Results demonstrate that 56% of the students in the overall sample were classified as food insecure. Students at higher risk of food insecurity included those who reported living alone and those who reported being single parents. Students identifying themselves as African American or as multiracial were also at increased risk for food insecurity. Food insecure students were more likely than food secure students to report a lower GPA (2.0–2.49) versus a higher GPA (3.5–4.0). Data suggest that food insecurity is an issue for a large percentage of the community college student sample. Food insecurity may have adverse effects on student academic performance and is a factor to be considered by college administrators, faculty, and students.