The influence of on-farm advice on beliefs and motivations for Swiss lowland farmers to implement ecological compensation areas on their farms

Purpose: Farmers hold a key to reaching biodiversity targets, but will only carry out this service to society if they are sufficiently motivated to do so. The aim of this study is to evaluate the potential of on-farm advice as a tool for motivating farmers to take action to preserve or even to enhance biodiversity on their farms.

Design/methodology/approach: To address this aim, we surveyed 133 farmers (response rate 43.9%), of whom 23 had received on-farm advice about farmland biodiversity conservation over a period of six years.

Findings: The results showed that key beliefs and motivations were positively influenced by farmer advisory services. Farmers who had received advice agreed significantly more strongly in the compatibility of biodiversity conservation and production; that biodiversity is important; and that nature conservation on farms is appreciated by society.

Practical Implications: These results allow the conclusion that on-farm biodiversity advice might be a useful way of positively influencing the beliefs and enhancing motivations of farmers to contribute to biodiversity conservation on their farms.

Theoretical implications: Although several papers have examined the influence of agricultural extension on farmer behaviour, the results of this study contribute to explaining some of the contradictions in the literature about the effectiveness of advisory services. Furthermore, this study addresses [Batary, P., L. V. Dicks, D. Kleijn, and W. J. Sutherland. 2015. “The Role of Agri-Environment Schemes in Conservation and Environmental Management.” Conservation Biology 29: 1006–1016.] challenge that there has been insufficient research on the link between farmer advice and the effectiveness of agri-environmental schemes.

Originality/value: This paper is among the first to address these research gaps and is the first to examine the influence of advice on farmer conservation behaviour in the Swiss context.     

Email Reducing Stress for Student Teachers

This paper reports on one aspect of a study which investigated the use of email between student teachers and university lecturers during the final practicum experience in a four year Bachelor of Education pre-service primary teaching course. The paper explores how the nature of electronic communication, together with the students' perceptions of university supervision and their place in the school setting, affected the level of stress experienced by the student teachers in their placements. Student teacher stress has been reported in the literature as one factor which impedes student teacher learning during the practicum (Zeichner, 1980). We argue that ICT has the potential to maximise student teachers' learning outcomes in the practicum by giving them more control over the learning process, reducing their stress, and enabling them to manage their practicum experience more effectively.     

Shifting epistemologies during instructional conversations about “good” argumentative writing in a high school English language arts classroom

A widespread instructional practice in the teaching of argumentative writing is the use of writing samples or models during instructional conversations about what counts as “good argumentative writing.” In this article, we focus on a set of lessons in a high school English language arts classroom in order to gain insight into how a teacher’s use of writing samples contributed not only to what counts as “good argumentative writing” in that classroom, but how her instructional conversations with a group of 11th grade students revealed a shift in her “argumentative epistemologies” for teaching literature-related argumentative writing. We examine simultaneously the impact of instructional conversations on the evolution of the socially constructed definitions of good argumentative writing and the teacher’s shifting argumentative epistemologies by tracing the teacher’s socially constructed definitions of good argumentative writing in the instructional conversations around argumentative writing samples as they evolve and change over time. The findings suggest that the interactional construction of “good argumentative writing” in instructional conversations was influenced by the broader instructional context (e.g., a testing regimen), by the teacher’s argumentative epistemologies for what counts as good writing, and by the conversational interaction of teachers and students in classroom lessons.

     

The effects of verbal scaffolding instruction on young children's private speech and problem-solving capabilities

This investigation examined the efficacy of a verbal scaffolding instructional program designed to teach young children how to use private speech while working on school tasks and problems. Two different contexts for solving problems were used; common school tasks and analogical reasoning problems. Thirty-four 5-year olds who attended public school kindergartens were assigned to either the comparison group or the treatment group. Comparison group subjects were presented with a series of 8 lessons which focused on a cognitive strategy to be used in the solutions of geometric analogy problems. Treatment group subjects were presented with a series of 8 lessons which employed cognitive self-instruction in a verbal scaffolding format. After initial instruction using self-verbalizations, treatment group subjects were shown how to apply the cognitive self-instruction to routine school tasks and geometric analogy problems. The data analysis revealed that there was an effect on the treatment group's use of 3 of the 4 levels of private speech. When the two groups were compared, the treatment group used significantly less task irrelevant private speech and significantly more task relevant private speech. There were no significant differences between the two groups on the post-assessment of geometric analogy reasoning. Additionally, when the two groups were compared there were positive effects of the instructional program on the treatment group's classroom behavior (near transfer) and locus of control scores (far transfer). The results of this study provide support for the use of cognitive self-instruction to improve young children's problem-solving private speech in the context of a public school classroom.Portions of this paper were presented at the 2nd Annual European Congress of Psychology, Budapest Hungary, July 1991 by the first author.This paper was presented at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta, GA.     

The GLOBE Visualization Project: Using WWW in the Classroom

Though commercial interest in the World Wide Web is growing, the potential uses of the medium as a learning tool are numerous. The GLOBE Visualization Project is one such educational application. We have designed and implemented a WWW-based, user-friendly, language-independent, graphical user interface providing access to visualizations created for GLOBE, a multinational program of education and science. The target users of the system are K–12 students and their teachers from over 1100 schools in 39 countries; other clients include the GLOBE scientific investigators and members of the public internationally. Navigation is intuitive, and employs the metaphors of a Control Panel which changes the image appearing in a Viewscreen. The interface can be learned empirically by persons of all ages regardless of technical expertise or native language; context-sensitive help is provided for users who prefer documentation. The GLOBE Visualization server is on the World Wide Web at URL http://globe.gsfc.nasa.gov/globe/.