Where the Action Is: How Drama Contributes to the Art of the Teaching and Learning of English

This paper looks at the way drama works to bring a model of an arts curriculum into reality. He also shows how drama is valuable when discussed as a separate, autonomous subject in the school curriculum as opposed to one subsumed within English. He argues for a view of the arts and gives an example of a sequence of work in an English GCSE class based around Arthur Miller's play View from the Bridge. From this he draws out several strands about the relationship of the drama curriculum to the individual students and teachers, the school, and to culture. He also emphasises the primacy of performance in drama education.     

Virtual worlds vs books and videos in history education

In this paper, we investigate an application of virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI) as a technological combination that has a potential to improve the learning experience and engage with the modern generation of students. To address this need, we have created a virtual reality replica of one of humanity's first cities, the city of Uruk and populated this city with AI-controlled 3D avatars, which re-enact everyday life of ancient Sumerians in the period around 3000 B.C. Our hypothesis is that by immersing students into this environment and allowing them to learn by browsing through it and interacting with its virtual citizens can be more engaging and motivating than simply reading the corresponding history text or watching an educational video. To confirm this assumption, we have designed a study with three groups of students. One group was given a historical text about Uruk and everyday life of its citizens (created by our subject matter experts), the second group was shown a documentary video on Uruk and the third group was immersed into virtual Uruk and engaged into interactions with its virtual inhabitants. The outcomes of the study suggest that not only did people in the third group provide much more positive qualitative feedback about the learning experience, but they also showed a better comprehension of the study material by performing (on average) 20% better than the first two groups on the mini-exam that was conducted as a part of this study.     

A jaundiced bodybuilder Cholestatic hepatitis as side effect of injectable anabolic–androgenic steroids

The use of anabolic steroids is prevalent in recreational athletes. This case report describes a young amateur bodybuilder who was referred to our outpatient clinic with jaundice and loss of appetite due to cholestatic hepatitis. Additional tests including a liver biopsy made it likely that the hepatitis was caused by the injectable anabolic steroid trenbolone enanthate. Cholestatic hepatitis may not be limited to the use of oral anabolic–androgenic steroids, as is widely assumed. Therefore, and because of other side effects, the recreational use of all forms of anabolic steroids should be discouraged.     

The role of hypothetico-deductive reasoning and physical analogues of molecular interactions in conceptual change

Two hypotheses about theoretical concept acquisition, application, and change were tested. College biology students classified as intuitive, transitional, or reflective (hypothetico-deductive) reasoners were first taught two theoretical concepts (molecular polarity and bonding) to explain the mixing of dye with water, but not with oil, when all three were shaken in a container. The students were then tested in a context in which they misapplied the concepts in an attempt to explain the gradual spread of blue dye in standing water. Next students were taught another theoretical concept (diffusion), with and without the use of physical analogues. They were retested to see which students acquired the concept of diffusion and which students changed from use of the incorrect polarity and bonding concepts (i.e., the misconceptions) to use of the diffusion concept to correctly explain the dye's gradual spread. As predicted, the experimental/analogy group scored significantly higher than the control group on a posttest question that required the definition of diffusion. Also as predicted, hypothetico-deductive reasoning skill was significantly related to correct application of the diffusion concept and to a change from the misapplication of the polarity and bonding concepts to the correct application of the diffusion concept to explain the gradual spread of the blue dye. Thus, the results support the hypotheses that physical analogues are helpful in theoretical concept acquisition and that hypothetico-deductive reasoning is needed for successful concept application and change. Educational implications are drawn.     

Do We Have It? A Comparative Analysis of Library Journal Holdings and Works Referenced in Faculty Publications

Libraries often wonder if their collections can support their faculty’s research. Large citation databases, such as Scopus or Web of Science, can help automate such a review process. This session will present findings about to what extent faculty were able to complete their journal publications without utilizing interlibrary loan. Using data gathered from Scopus, the range and date of journals referenced by faculty at my home institution will be compared with holdings from my library’s electronic resources knowledge base to determine the level of overlap. Results will be presented by journal discipline to highlight any variation among the science, social science, and arts and humanities divisions. Special emphasis will be given to using this data to inform decisions about purchasing journal backfile collections.     

The rejection of nonscientific beliefs about life: Effects of instruction and reasoning skills

Nine hundred fifty-four students in a large university nonmajors biology course were pretested to determine the extent to which they held nonscientific beliefs in creationism, orthogenesis, the soul, nonreductionism, vitalism, teleology, and nonemergentism. To test the hypothesis that hypothetico-deductive reasoning skills facilitate movement away from nonscientific beliefs, the degree to which those nonscientific beliefs were initially held and the degree to which they were modified during instruction were compared to student reasoning level (intuitive, transitional, reflective). As predicted, the results showed that the less skilled reasoners were more likely to initially hold the nonscientific beliefs and were less likely to change those beliefs during instruction. It was also discovered that less skilled reasoners were less likely to be strongly committed to the scientific beliefs.     

Community Building Through Electronic Discussion Boards: Pre-Service Teachers' Reflective Dialogues on Science Teaching

This research study focuses on an electronic forum for building a community of pre-service teachers to reflect upon new directions in science teaching. The thesis of this paper is to model the notion of community building for teacher reflective practice. Through pre-service teachers' WebCT postings on students' theories in science, we provide evidence of how WebCT discussion board served as a forum for community building to carry out reflective practice. We conclude that WebCT discussion board can serve as a viable tool for building a community of reflective teachers. This study implies that WebCT and similar Internet electronic discussion tools may be effectively used for community building to carry out reflective dialogues in teacher education.     

Environmental Education Network within the EEC

Pascual‐Leone (1972) has conducted task analyses in terms of M‐demand (amount of information processing required by the task) and demonstrated that the phenomenon of ‘horizontal decalages’, described by Piaget, can be accounted for by increasing demands of information processing. It has been shown that formal operational reasoning is required to balance even simple, one‐step chemical equations, while formal reasoning and a sufficiently large M‐capacity are required to balance more complex, multi‐step chemical equations. The objective of the present study is to investigate the relation between functional M‐capacity (M_f) and student performance in solving chemistry problems of increasing M‐demand. It was found that student performance decreased as the M‐demand of the problems increased. Similarly, the correlation coefficients between M_f‐ and student performance increased progressively as the M‐demand of the problems increased.