Labour market information and social justice: a critical examination

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - Labour Market Information forms a central place in career practice and how individuals enact their careers. This paper makes use of...     

Visions of change: information technology, education and postmodernism

The questions that dominate the discourse of IT in education are mostly at the technical or craft levels. Visionary questions relating to the purpose of education and the proper place of technology are not much discussed. This paper seeks to undermine the idea that such questions should be avoided. The context of postmodernist change is described and two contrasting visions of education are discussed. Each vision is a hypothetical but recognisable representation of certain trends in educational thinking. Each vision has appeal but also severe shortcomings. The paper concludes that unless teachers, learners and communities can articulate their own visions of educational change, new technology could take them into a future that they would never willingly have chosen.     

The Research and Development in Organisations Approach and the Evaluation of a Mainstream Behaviour Support Initiative

This paper describes the evaluation of a local authority behaviour support initiative that involved the re-location of four behaviour support teachers from pupil referral units into three mainstream secondary schools to work with pupils at risk of exclusion. The evaluation was largely illuminative (Parlett, 1981) and focused on the effect of changing off-site behaviour support to in-school support. The research approach taken incorporated a Co-operative Inquiry strand (Heron, 1996) where researchers and behaviour support teachers worked together to design major aspects of the research process. This enabled research outcomes to inform educational practice, and gave a reflective, formative aspect to the study. The overall approach to the design of the study was informed by the Research and Development in Organisations (RADIO) model developed by Knight and Timmins (1995). The application of this approach in the context of the study is described along with a brief account of the findings. Finally, brief comment is made on the way in which the RADIO approach might contribute to educational psychologists' work at the local education authority and whole school levels.     

Scaffolding strategies in a rubric-based intervention to promote engineering students’ ability to address wicked problems

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been increasing interest within the engineering education research community to prepare engineering students to address wicked problems (WPs) such as climate change, resource scarcity and violent conflict. Previous research suggests that engineering students are able to address WPs if they are given adequate support, but there is a lack of research on what kinds of support are needed. This paper aims to reduce this gap by reporting on students’ performance in, and approaches to, addressing WPs when different scaffolding strategies were used in different parts of a rubric-based intervention. The intervention aimed to provide undergraduate engineering students with an understanding of the nature of WPs and with a structured way of addressing them. For each part of the intervention, we discuss affordances for learning provided by the different scaffolding strategies. The results suggest that strong cognitive scaffolding can support students’ understanding of the nature of WPs and students’ performance in written responses to WPs, but possibly also limits deep engagement with WPs and transfer of learning to other contexts.     

How do tutors use data to support their students?

ABSTRACT

Despite widespread enthusiasm, evidence of the effectiveness of learning analytics remains mixed. One possible explanation for this is that insufficient attention has been paid to the contexts in which it is introduced. We report here on a small-scale study into the prior use of data and communications technologies by tutors, who comprise a key user group in The Open University’s tuition model. Tutors interviewed reported using a complex set of data sources and information tools, and creating local/personal tools and methods for keeping track of students and their interactions with them.     

Evidence for the role of higher order reasoning processes in cue competition and other learning phenomena

When people judge the contingency between a target cue and an outcome, they also take into account the contingency between the outcome and other cues with which the target cue co-occurred. Several authors have argued that such cue competition effects are due to higher order reasoning processes. We review the evidence that supports this hypothesis and discuss whether higher order reasoning might also play a role in other learning phenomena.     

Teaching Basic Science and Clinical Medicine at a distance: An Evaluation of Satellite Communication

The evaluation plan arid preliminary results are reported for the ATS‐6 Satellite interactive telecommunication program for teaching at sites remote from an established medical school. The technical aspects of the system were seen as quite adequate and did not appear to substantially inhibit interaction. In the Fairbanks broadcasts analyzed, the average number of interactions ranged from 1.49 to 2.60 per minute. Ninety percent of the interaction flowed across the Satellite during Omak transmissions. Participants tended to initiate communication when they were on camera rather than when viewing their counterparts. Omak participants directed a higher percentage of the communication in student/resident programs (70%) than in faculty continuing education programs (59%). Interaction analysis indicated the categories of giving opinion, information, and suggestion were most frequent. Asking for opinion and suggestion occurred infrequently. The most frequent emotional expression was offering solidarity (e.g., reassurance), while there were exceedingly few expressions of disagreement, tension and antagonism. User acceptance of the system was determined to be very high. Participants with frequent exposure to the Satellite modality tended to have positive reaction. A significant difference in knowledge gain is reported in one of two basic science areas taught via Satellite as compared to regular instruction.