Using Sociocultural Theory to Understand the Relationship between Teacher Change and a Science-based Professional Education Program

This paper focuses on a model of teacher change based on a study of a science discipline-based professional education program and on an understanding of teacher change in terms of an agency| structure dialectic. Professional education programs should expand teachers' capacity to act in a range of fields. Conducted over one year, this study used socio-cultural theory to examine the role of cultural schema and resources in the enactment of new pedagogical structures by two teachers who demonstrated widely variable responses to their experience of a professional chemistry education program. Hermeneutic and phenomenological methods of study supported the examination of teacher actions and narratives as sources of data. The analyses of these data sources resulted in greater understanding of the relationship between schema, resources and structure and the relationship between structure and teacher agency. Structures are dynamic and if a teacher uses a resource such as an inquiry-based instruction protocol without the attendant cultural schema such as the value of questioning then the structure that is implemented will be different from that the teacher experienced in the professional education program. This understanding supported an explanation of teacher change in terms of teacher agency that constituted our learning from the study and resulted in changes to aspects of the professional education program.     

Relating deaf students' reading and language scores at college entry to their degree completion rates

Graduation patterns were examined for 905 deaf students (1990-1998) at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Students with higher reading and language skills had the best overall graduation percentage. Comparison of recipients of different degrees--bachelor of science (BS) versus fine arts (BFA); associate of applied science (AAS) versus occupational studies (AOS)--showed 92% of BS and 82% of AAS graduates reading at the 9th-grade level or above, versus 65% of BFA and 47% of AOS graduates. Interestingly, 80% of non-degree-earning students read at the 9th-12th grade levels; in absolute terms, they outnumbered graduates with similar reading skills in the AAS and BFA programs combined, and in the BS program. This indicates a need for improved counseling, placement, and retention strategies. Students performed similarly across degree categories, regardless of curriculum requirements and difficulty. Only non-degree-earning students had significantly lower grade averages.     

RESOLV: Readers' Representation of Reading Contexts and Tasks

We introduce RESOLV, a theoretical model to account for readers' construction and management of goals during text comprehension and use. RESOLV focuses on readers' experience of their physical, social, and communicative context prior to actually engaging with texts. RESOLV assumes that readers construct two types of mental models prior to reading: The context model is a representation of the physical and social reading context, whereas the task model is a set of goals and plans that drives readers' decisions and actions in reading. We first present the RESOLV model, and we articulate two core hypotheses. We then present and discuss evidence supporting these hypotheses, from past and more recent research conducted in our labs, as well as in others'. The data support the view that reading decisions and processes are guided by readers' perceptions and attributions regarding the task statement but also more implicit cues from the reading context.     

Transforming engagement: a case study of building intrinsic motivation in a child with autism

This longitudinal case study of a 10‐year‐old girl with autism and severe communication impairment measures the impact of the MORE (Means, Opportunities, Reasons and Expectations) approach to enhancing engagement and communication. Through detailed observation of video data over a period of 28 months, engagement behaviours including interaction with adults and following adult directions increased, while resistant behaviours such as kicking, hitting and pushing adults away decreased. Fluctuation between different ‘states’ demonstrated that the frequency and duration of engagement was influenced by the MORE approach and an emphasis on developing intrinsic motivation. In order to enable further efficacy research, core features of the intervention and the changes in engagement over time are described.     

Developing a communal identity as beginning teachers of mathematics: Emergence of an online community of practice

The aim of this study is to investigate how a community of practice focused on becoming a teacher of secondary school mathematics emerged during a pre-service teacher education programme and was sustained after students graduated and began their first year of full-time teaching in schools. Bulletin board discussions of one pre-service cohort are analysed in terms of Wenger’s (1998) three defining features of a community of practice: mutual engagement of participants, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and development of a shared repertoire for creating meaning. Emergence of the online community was associated with our own role in facilitating professional dialogue, the voluntary and unstructured nature of participation, initial face-to-face interaction that created familiarity and trust, and the convenience of using email rather than logging on to a website. The study shows that the emergent design of the community contributed to its sustainability in allowing the pre-service and beginning teachers to define their own professional goals and values.

Personalized learning in iSTART: Past modifications and future design

Abstract

Computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) provide unprecedented opportunities for personalized learning at scale. One such system, iSTART (Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking) is an adaptive, game-based tutoring system for reading comprehension. This paper describes how efforts to increase personalized learning have improved the system. It also provides results of a recent implementation of an adaptive logic that increases or decreases text difficulty based on students’ performance rather than presenting texts randomly. High school students who received adaptive text selection showed increased sense of learning. Adaptive text selection also resulted in greater pre-training to post-training comprehension test gains, especially for less-skilled readers. The findings demonstrate that system-driven, just-in-time support consistent with the goals of personalized learning benefit the efficacy of computer-based learning environments.     

Hyperactive Grey Objects

Previous papers on grey literature by the authors have described (1) the need for formal metadata to allow machine understanding and therefore scalable operations; (2) the enhancement of repositories of grey (and other) e-publications by linking with CRIS (Current Research Information Systems); (3) the use of the research process to collect metadata incrementally reducing the threshold barrier for end-users and improving quality in an ambient GRIDs environment. This paper takes the development one step further and proposes “intelligent” grey objects. The hypothesis is in 2 parts: (1) that the use of passive catalogs of metadata does not scale (a) in a highly distributed environment with millions of nodes and (b) with vastly increased volumes of R&D output grey publications with associated metadata; (2) that a new paradigm is required that (a) integrates grey with white literature and other R&D outputs such as software, data, products and patents (b) in a self-managing, self-optimizing way and that this paradigm manages automatically curation, provenance digital rights, trust, security and privacy. Concerning (1) existing repositories provide catalogs; harvesting takes increasing time ensuring non-currency. The end-user expends much manual effort/intelligence to utilize the results. The elapsed time of (1) the network (2) the centralized (or centrally controlled distributed) catalog server searches (3) end-user intervention becomes unacceptable. Concerning (2) there is no paradigm currently known to the authors that satisfies the requirement. Our proposal is outlined below. Hyperactive combines both hyperlinking and active properties of a (grey) object. Hyperlinking implies multimedia components linked to form the object and also external links to other resources. The term active implies that objects do not lie passively in a repository to be retrieved by end-users. They “get a life” and the object moves through the network knowing where it is going. A hyperactive grey object is wrapped by its (incrementally recorded) formal metadata and an associated (software) agent. It moves through process steps such as initial concept, authoring, reviewing and depositing in a repository. The workflow is based on the rules and information in the corporate data repository with which the agent interacts. Once the object is deposited, the agent associated with it actively pushes the object to the end-users (or systems) whose metadata indicate interest or an obligation in a workflowed process. The agents check the object and user (or system) metadata for rights, privacy, security parameters, and for any charges and assure compatibility. Alternatively the object can be found passively by end-user or system agents. The object can also associate itself with other objects forming relationships utilising metadata or content. Declared relationships include references and citations; workflowed relationships include versions and also links to corporate information and research datasets and software; inferenced relationships are discovered relationships such as between documents by different authors developed from an earlier idea of a third author. Components of this paradigm have been implemented to some extent. The challenge is implementing—respecting part two of the hypothesis—the integration architecture. This surely is harnessing the power of grey.