Class Level as a Possible Mediator of the Relationship between Grades and Student Ratings of Teaching

Although the research literature investigating the relationship between grade awarded to students and students’ evaluations of teaching performance is voluminous, very few studies have examined the grade‐rating relationship according to level of student. The present study examined correlations between mean instructor rating and mean class grade for all course evaluations (N = 625 classes) at Utah State University during an academic quarter. In lower‐division (courses 100–299) and upper‐division (courses 300–599) undergraduate classes, correlations between grades and ratings of faculty were of an expected direction and magnitude (0.29 and 0.28, respectively); however, the grade‐rating correlation for graduate classes (courses 600 +) was — 0.20. It is speculated that graduate students are both better students and more critical evaluators of instruction, but replication and extension with different samples are needed before this tentative explanation can be accepted with confidence.     

Teachers’ adoption of technology innovation into pedagogical practices

This paper summarized findings from an empirical study that evaluated the effectiveness of a technology incentive project, MEET, on facilitating the adoption of a web technology CCC Confer among college instructors. Results show that teachers’ technology adoption can be facilitated by providing certain incentives. A number of strategies were essential to the effectiveness of this incentive project: (1) Involving teachers in the decision-making process to make the technology integration project meaningful to them; (2) Helping teachers to develop a well-designed plan with realistic goals and a feasible implementation outline; (3) Building a collegial community from where teachers can learn from peers, obtain support from their social-networks, and work collaboratively; (4) Leading with strong leadership to ensure high morale, sufficient resources and support that are indispensible to the successful implementation of a technology project; and (5) Proving timely support to help teachers remove roadblocks. Restraining factors included insufficient critical appraisal, the absence of collaborative projects, and few face-to-face meetings. Specific implications for technology integration are discussed.     

Instruction matters: spelling of vowels by children in England and the US

Letter names are stressed in informal and formal literacy instruction with young children in the US, whereas letters sounds are stressed in England. We examined the impact of these differences on English children of about 5 and 6 years of age (in reception year and Year 1, respectively) and US 6 year olds (in kindergarten). Children in both countries spelled short vowels, as in bag, more accurately than long vowels, as in gate. The superiority for short vowels was larger for children from England, consistent with the instructional emphasis on letter sounds. Errors such as gat for words with long vowels such as gate were more common among US children, reflecting these children’s use of vowels’ names as a guide to spelling. The English children’s performance on a letter knowledge task was influenced by the fact that they are often taught letter sounds with reference to lowercase letters and letter names with reference to uppercase letters, and their spellings showed some effects of this practice. Although emphasis on letter sounds as opposed to letter names influences children’s patterns of performance and types of errors, it does not make the difficult English writing system markedly easier to master.     

Pedagogical love in the transactional curriculum

The original meaning of pedagogy is grounded in the relational and intentional responsibility of adult to child. The vulnerability of the child calls forth a loving attitude from the adult, as pedagogue, that is directed toward the physical security and the social, emotional, and educational well‐being of the child as student. The lived experiences of five teachers and their students presented in this paper demonstrate that pedagogical love as a favourable influence, or auspice of heart in teaching, is a mediating influence within the transactional curriculum. In the learning process, human beings, whether child or adult, develop an understanding of themselves and Other and in the process share a common heart. Pedagogical love cannot be perceived, nor received, in a curriculum environment in which feeling for the Other is absent or marginalized. Pedagogical love invites teachers and their students to actively participate in the understandings and knowledge that co‐emerge in the transactional curriculum.     

Software visualization as a pedagogical tool

The teaching of computer programming can benefit from looking ahead towards the needs of experienced programmers, who routinely use industrial strength programming environments. Two of the main attributes of such environments are (a) their ability to scale up to handle large examples and (b) the way they facilitate visualization of program execution. We describe our approach to software visualization, a collection of techniques which allows beginners to see the innards of program execution clearly and at the same time allows experts to view high level program abstractions which help them home in quickly on buggy code. This approach can be combined with recent developments in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and has the added benefit of allowing students to explore on their own using a discovery-based paradigm. Were-work some well known examples from the ITS community and show how our approach scales up to handle a more sophisticated problem involving a 7,500 line operating system.