Online professional development for environmental educators: strategies to foster critical thinking and social interactions

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer opportunities for professional development of environmental educators globally, yet we lack understanding of participants? cognitive and social learning processes and of how instructors can enhance these processes. Based on the Community of Inquiry framework, we used a survey and coded participant discussion board and Facebook posts to examine the cognitive, social, and teaching presence in the Environmental Education: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Addressing Wicked Problems MOOC, offered by Cornell University. Rather than train educators in a specific curriculum, the goal of the MOOC is to expand educators? critical and transdisciplinary thinking about the field of environmental education and to enhance social interactions to support learning, educators, and knowledge co-creation. Results indicate that cognitive presence is higher on the discussion board whereas social presence is higher on Facebook. Over half of cognitive posts focused on exploration, a lower level of learning, whereas just less than a fifth reflected higher level integration, suggesting room for enhancing cognitive learning. Our results suggest strategies to encourage higher levels of thinking and more meaningful social interactions to foster learning, educator support, and co-creation of knowledge, thereby improving online professional development.     

Peer victimization, poor academic achievement, and the link between childhood externalizing and internalizing problems

This study explored whether early elementary school aged children’s externalizing problems impede academic functioning and foster negative social experiences such as peer victimization, thereby making these children vulnerable for developing internalizing problems and possibly increasing their externalizing problems. It also explored whether early internalizing problems contributed to an increase in externalizing problems. The study examined 1,558 Canadian children from ages 6 to 8 years. Externalizing and internalizing problems, peer victimization, and school achievement were assessed annually. Externalizing problems lead to academic underachievement and experiences of peer victimization. Academic underachievement and peer victimization, in turn, predicted increases in internalizing problems and in externalizing problems. These pathways applied equally to boys and girls. No links from internalizing to externalizing problems were found.     

Meeting needs assessment challenges: Applying the performance pyramid in the U.S. Army

This article describes an application of the Performance Pyramid, a needs assessment framework that supports a holistic view of an organization allowing assessors to identify how organizational culture may affect performance. We illustrate use of the Performance Pyramid for a needs assessment with human systems integration practitioners in the U.S. Army. We describe how the Performance Pyramid guided our methods, data collection, and results interpretation and discuss advantages and disadvantages of the methodology.     

General Communications

Joseph C. Goulden's Monopoly (Pocket Books 77135, 95¢)

Bryce Rucker's The First Freedom (University of Southern Illinois Press, $2.85)

John Phelan's Communications Control (Sheed & Ward, $3.45)

David Manning White's edited collection Pop Culture in America (Quadrangle Books, $5.95/2.45)

Marshall Fishwick and Ray B. Browne's edited Icons of Popular Culture (Bowling Green University Popular Press, $1.00)

Don Fabun's Three Roads to Awareness (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Glencoe Press, $5.95/4.95)     

Book Publishing

The Oxford University Press and the Spread of Learning: An Illustrated History, by Nicolas Barker (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978 —$25.00)

The Oxford University Press: An Informal History, by Peter Sutcliffe (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978—$15.00)

Mary Hill and Wendell Cochran's Into Print: A Practical Guide to Writing, Illustrating, and Publishing (Los Altos, Calif.: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1977—$12.00/6.951)

Stanley Rice's Book Design: Systematic Aspects (274 pp., $17.50)

Stanley Rice's Book Design: Text Format Models (215 pp., $17.50)

John Y. Cole, ed. The Library of Congress in Perspective: A Volume Based on the Reports of the 1976 Librarian's Task Force and A visory Groups (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1978—$21.95)

Literary Market Place: 1978 Edition (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1978— $22.50, paper)     

Public perceptions of newspapers’ political positions: A perceptual map of Hong Kong newspapers

This study demonstrates for the first time that a newspaper's political orientation is a principal factor used by readers to locate its position in the marketplace. The findings have concrete implications for editors and publishers in Southeast Asia, where newspapers are often aligned with political organizations. The study uses data collected in Hong Kong to create a perceptual map of Hong Kong newspapers. In Hong Kong, there are 25 dailies serving a population of 6 million. Newspaper readership is high. The newspapers span the political spectrum from ultra‐left to ultra‐right. When data were collected for this study, some newspapers were controlled by the Kuomintang of Taiwan, others by the Chinese Communist Party of the People's Republic of China. This study selected eight newspapers whose political orientations had been clearly established by previous research. Some 990 respondents estimated the distance between 28 pairs of newspapers. These ‘perception data’ were pure similarity/dissimilarity measures. Factor analysis and multidimensional scaling both reveal a clear political dimension to the resultant perceptual maps. The study also includes an overview of the contemporary partisan press in Hong Kong.     

Gender Effects in Children’s Development and Education

This paper attempts to clarify several lines of research on gender in development and education, inter‐relating findings from studies on intuitive/informal knowledge with those from research on achievements and attitudes in science. It acknowledges the declining proportions of male teachers world‐wide and examination successes which indicate a reversal of educational disadvantage from female to male; as well as the recent evidence on the effects of the gender of teachers upon student success. An empirical contribution to the literature is offered, drawing from the gender‐related findings from research on children’s cosmologies in China and New Zealand with 346 boys and 340 girls (of whom 119 boys and 121 girls participated in the current study). The investigation focused on children’s concepts of the motion and shape of the Earth through observational astronomy and gave children opportunities to express their ideas in several modalities. The in‐depth interviews allowed children to share their meanings with gender differences becoming apparent (e.g. girls’ superior ability to visually represent their cosmologies and boys’ greater awareness of gravity). However, these differences were not universal across genders or cultures and marked similarities were apparent both in the content of children’s responses and in their reasoning processes. By comparing boy/girl cosmological concept categories and by tracking their developmental trends by age, statistical evidence revealed the extent of the similarities within and across these diverse cultures. The findings reinforce those from the authors’ knowledge restructuring and cultural mediation studies and provide support for the view that boys and girls have similar, holistic‐rather‐than‐fragmented, cosmologies which have features in common across cultures and ethnic groups.