Crafting educational intervention research that's both credible and creditable

Pressley and Harris' concerns about the current quality of educational intervention research are applauded. They are also extended to distinguish between research credibility (scientific believability) and research creditability (educational commendability). A best possible design philosophy is introduced to enable intervention researchers to craft research that is both credible and creditable.     

The economics of student time

A major feature of almost all of the recent national calls for educational reform has been the recommendation to increase the amount of instructional time through lengthening the school day and school year, assignment of more homework, and expanding the proportion of the school day devoted to instruction. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the allocation of student time from the perspective of economic theory. Under a reasonable set of assumptions, the economic model that is employed predicts a rather small increase in educational achievement relative to rather substantial increases in instructional time. These predictions are found to comport well with the available empirical evidence. The policy consequences of the analysis are also examined.     

E-learning by design

Teachers in higher education throughout the world are making use of course-management systems (CMS) to support their courses. None of these teachers grew up with using a CMS; they must themselves learn how to use them effectively at the same time that they are using them with their students. While institutions commonly provide some sort of introductory workshop for CMS use, these workshops have limitations in terms of their transfer value into practice. In this paper we discuss an example of embedded justin-time support within the CMS itself to help teachers learn how to use a CMS efficiently but also so that both they and their students can take on new roles in the learning process. A new form of computer-based support for teaching and learning has emerged since the late 1990s. It is a system of integrated tools that makes use of both database and web functionalities in order to make a web environment available to support a course or learning event. One name for such a system is a course-management system (CMS). Course-management systems are new tools for teachers and thus teachers must learn how to use them in a technical sense as well as in a meaningful sense. By meaningful, we mean not only to increase the efficiency of participating in a course but also to enrich and extend learning processes.     

On pictures in prose

For some time now, researchers and educators have questioned the value of pictures for prose-learning. However, there is abundant empirical evidence to document the positive value of pictures. Consistent learning gains are associated with the use of pictures when experiments adhere to these five ground rules: (1) prose passages are presented orally; (2) the subjects are children; (3) the passages are fictional narratives; (4) the pictures overlap the story content; and (5) learning is demonstrated by factual recall. Both centers are supported in part by funds from the National Institute of Education. The opinions herein do not necessarily reflect the postion or policy of the National Institute of Education and no official endorsement by the National Institute of Education should be inferred. The authors are grateful to Michael Pressley and Sharon Stevens for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper.     

Views of South African Chemistry Students in University Bridging Programs on the Reliability of Experimental Data

This paper reports an investigation of the status of procedural knowledge in chemistry amongst students entering into bridging programs at two South African universities. The students answered a questionnaire which investigated their perceived reasons for repeating readings and their ideas about handling data. Students also answered a question on laboratory apparatus which was used to assess their laboratory experience. The overall responses were analysed, as well as their relationship to laboratory experience and home language. The findings show that students overall tend to repeat in order to get a recurring reading. Very few students were able to use a line of best fit for a set of graphical data. There is some relationship between their responses and previous laboratory experiences, but little fundamental difference between the responses of the two main language groups. Some implications for tertiary education in chemistry are discussed.