Informal Education: A New Lens on Socially Engaged Design Practices

The disciplinary intersection between community work and design is under‐explored. Despite similarities in both the context and values of the work, there has not been a significant critical comparison of their respective approaches in either theory or practice. This article suggests that informal education offers an alternative lens to consider both disciplines and inform future practice. More specifically, it considers the relevance of informal education principles in design education and design practice that has an explicit social focus. This discussion is drawn from doctoral practitioner action research in Scotland during 2016–18. The fieldwork focused on the different outlooks and approaches to work in community settings from both design and community work perspectives.     

Exploring Changes in Pre-service Elementary Teachers' Mathematical Beliefs

Research literature (e.g., Thompson, 1992)suggests that teachers' beliefs about thenature of mathematics provide a strongindicator of their future teaching practices. Moreover, current reform efforts (e.g., NCTM,2000) ask teachers to lead mathematicalexplorations that allow their own students toconstruct mathematics. Understandingprospective teachers' mathematical beliefs andthe circumstances under which these beliefsmight be changed is therefore critical toteacher educators. In this paper we describethe culture of a mathematics content course forprospective elementary teachers that isdesigned to provide participants with authenticmathematical experiences and to fosterautonomous mathematical behaviors. Using bothsurvey and interview data, we exploredparticipants' beliefs about the nature ofmathematical behavior both at the commencementand at the completion of the course. We arguethat the participants' beliefs became moresupportive of autonomous behaviors during thecourse. We report that students attributedchanges in beliefs to specific classroom socialnorms and sociomathematical norms that includedfacets of work on ``big' problems withunderlying structures, a broadening in theacceptable methods of solving problems, a focuson explanation and argument, and theopportunity to generate mathematics as aclassroom community.     

How mature-age students succeed in higher education: implications for institutional support

This article draws on stories of success in higher education by mature-age students of diverse backgrounds to highlight some key implications for institutional support. We begin by reviewing the post-World War II background of mature-age study in Australian higher education to provide a context for presenting some major findings from a small, in-depth research project. We examine these findings to focus on the role of institutional support in the success of mature-age students, particularly given recent sectoral factors affecting their access and support. The study findings show students’ primary supports were families and friends. Participants all belonged to equity categories as designated by the Australian government, but many did not use institutional supports. Some lacked the confidence to approach staff; others were unaware support services existed or lacked the time to access them. The participants’ stories demonstrate the complex disadvantages experienced by mature-age students. They highlight universities’ need to ensure support services are ‘student-centred’ in order to ensure improved educational and equity outcomes for their mature-age student populations.     

Enrolment,content and assessment: a review of examinable senior secondary (16–19 year olds) physical education courses: an international perspective

Senior secondary physical education courses for certification continue to attract increasing student enrolments amidst international concerns for the state and status of physical education in schools. Curricula analysis of senior secondary physical education has typically focussed on courses in local contexts. This review aims to contribute to the current discussion around physical education curricula through a document analysis of 15 senior secondary physical education courses for certification. Results from the analysis of curricula documents reveal similarities in subject aims, objectives and rationales, subject specific content and assessment. Senior secondary physical education is firmly based in both the biophysical and sociocultural fields of study and draws on a broad range of disciplines from which to study human movement. The stated rationales of the courses reviewed suggested that an understanding of the complex interrelationships between content areas underpins senior secondary physical education; however content was mostly prescribed in stand-alone units. This review identified more similarities than differences in content and assessment practices in senior secondary physical education, a point of distinction between the courses reviewed was those that assess physical performance and those that do not. Internal assessment provided for a variety of tasks to determine student learning, however, external assessment was dominated by a written examination.     

Predicting Spelling Behaviour in 7 to 11 Year-olds

There is an increasing number of studies which demonstrate that readers in more transparent orthographies than English, such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German have little difficulty in decoding written words, while English children have many more problems. Increasingly, lack of orthographic transparency in English is seen as having a powerful negative effect on the development of reading skills in English-speaking children. There is evidence that English-speaking children who fail to acquire reading skills may fall into two distinct categories: those who would succeed in languages, other than English, that have greater orthographic consistency; and, those who would still have problems even with perfect orthographic transparency. The first, larger, group are let down by the interaction of poor teaching methods and an incomprehensible system of orthography. At Hull University’s Institute for Learning, word factors associated with poor spelling and reading have been identified. We have found three factors which account for the relative ease with which pupils can spell words: frequency of the word in the English language, length of the word, and the presence of “tricky” letters or letter combinations. Data is presented illustrating our predictive model of spelling which enables word difficulty to be calculated from the characteristics of English words. The implications the model has for teaching and learning English is elaborated, with particular reference to the most common 150 words in the English language.