Learning to talk the educational psychology talk through a problem-based course

A sociocultural view of learning proposes that learning involves becoming enculturated into a community of practice. A step along the way is learning to use the specialized language of such a community, as language is a crucial tool that regulates participation, mediates cognition and plays a central role in the development of thought. Problem-based learning (PBL), with its emphasis on collaborative discourse, provides opportunities for students to develop the conceptual language of a discipline, which in turn affects cognition. In a problem-based undergraduate Educational Psychology course, many psychological theories, concepts and principles are introduced to pre-service teachers. During the course, as students learn through problem solving, they engage with new knowledge. This evolving knowledge requires new discourse structures that will allow students to express their new ideas and that will ultimately structure students' ways of knowing. The content of group and individual artifacts is analyzed to examine how PBL influences students' language and knowledge development over the course of the semester in an Educational Psychology class (n = 34). The goal of this paper is to present these analyses and to discuss how the change affects students' language and knowledge.     

Designing technology to support reflection

Technology can play a powerful role in supporting student reflection. Sociocognitive theories provide a conceptual framework that we use to consider systems that afford reflective thinking. Reflective thinking involves actively monitoring, evaluating, and modifying one's thinking and comparing it to both expert models and peers. This requires a combination of both individual and collaborative reflection. These theoretical frameworks suggest four ways that technology can provide powerful scaffolding for reflection: (a) process displays, (b) process prompts, (c) process models, and (d) a forum for reflective social discourse. Each approach is presented with specific examples illustrating its design features. We argue that a systems approach that combines these different scaffolding techniques may be even more powerful. Modern technologies can provide students with rich resources for reflection and help students develop adaptive learning expertise through reflective practice. We conclude with a discussion of design issues that should be considered in the future.The preparation of this article was supported by a Vanderbilt University Research Council grant and a Spencer Fellowship to the first author. The ideas expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the granting agencies. We thank John Bransford, Allan Collins, Ben Loh and Susan Williams for their insightful suggestions on drafts of this article. We also thank Eliot Soloway, Shari Jackson Metcalf and the highly interactive computing group at the University of Michigan for their permission to use the graphics of the Model-It program. Finally, we thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions.     

School Resource Officers, ‘Zero Tolerance’ and the Enforcement of Compliance in the American Education System

Schools are an important part of any community, and are increasingly considered responsible for the social education of young people as much as their academic instruction. In doing so, many schools have adopted a ‘zero tolerance’ response to student conduct that involves harsh penalties for minor infractions. At the heart of this zero tolerance approach is the use of School Resource Officers (SROs) as a means of enforcing student discipline. Involvement of these sworn police officers in the day-today behaviour management processes of a school has serious implications for students that are targeted by these measures. Students at schools with a SRO presence are five times more likely to be arrested for disorderly conduct, with over 10,000 prosecutions of young people under the so-called ‘disturbing schools’ laws every academic year. SROs and their use as a behavioural deterrent can be seen to influence a juvenile’s likelihood of recidivism and heavily impacts upon their involvement in the school-to-prison pipeline. Direct causal connections exist between the criminalisation of misbehaviour in school and adult incarceration; in this sense, the presence of SROs in American schools must be re-evaluated in order to determine whether they constitute an acceptable application of social control.     

French-Arab students and verbal intellectual performance: Do they really suffer from a negative intellectual stereotype?

Stigmatized group membership leads to deleterious consequences for individuals. More specifically, according to stereotype threat literature, the awareness of negative intellectual stereotypes can impair stereotyped group members’ performance. Based on this framework, two studies were designed to explain the lower grades obtained by French-Arab students, compared to French students. An Implicit Association Test (Study 1) revealed that native French students automatically expressed a negative stereotype regarding French-Arab students’ intellectual abilities. The second study (Study 2) examined whether this negative stereotype could alter French-Arab students’ intellectual performance in a threatening context. As expected, French-Arab students underperformed when the verbal task was presented as a measure of intellectual ability, compared to French students. When the task was presented as non-diagnostic, their performance equaled that of French students. The discussion herein addressed implications of these results in terms of discrimination against the French-Arab population.     

Characterising the development of the understanding of human body systems in high-school biology students – a longitudinal study

ABSTRACT

Science education today has become increasingly focused on research into complex natural, social and technological systems. In this study, we examined the development of high-school biology students’ systems understanding of the human body, in a three-year longitudinal study. The development of the students’ system understanding was evaluated using the Components Mechanisms Phenomena (CMP) framework for conceptual representation. We coded and analysed the repertory grid personal constructs of 67 high-school biology students at 4 points throughout the study. Our data analysis builds on the assumption that systems understanding entails a perception of all the system categories, including structures within the system (its Components), specific processes and interactions at the macro and micro levels (Mechanisms), and the Phenomena that present the macro scale of processes and patterns within a system. Our findings suggest that as the learning process progressed, the systems understanding of our students became more advanced, moving forward within each of the major CMP categories. Moreover, there was an increase in the mechanism complexity presented by the students, manifested by more students describing mechanisms at the molecular level. Thus, the ‘mechanism’ category and the micro level are critical components that enable students to understand system-level phenomena such as homeostasis.     

A Randomized Study of a Literacy-Integrated Science Intervention for Low-Socio-economic Status Middle School Students: Findings from first-year implementation

This paper presents the findings from a randomized control trial study of reading/literacy-integrated science inquiry intervention after 1 year of implementation and the treatment effect on 5th-grade low-socio-economic African-American and Hispanic students’ achievement in science and English reading. A total of 94 treatment students and 194 comparison students from four randomized intermediate schools participated in the current project. The intervention consisted of ongoing professional development and specific instructional science lessons with inquiry-based learning, direct and explicit vocabulary instruction, and integration of reading and writing. Results suggested that (a) there was a significantly positive treatment effect as reflected in students' higher performance in district-wide curriculum-based tests of science and reading and standardized tests of science, reading, and English reading fluency; (b) males and females did not differ significantly from participating in science inquiry instruction; (c) African-American students had lower chance of sufficiently mastering the science concepts and achieving above the state standards when compared with Hispanic students across gender and condition, and (d) below-poverty African-American females are the most vulnerable group in science learning. Our study confirmed that even a modest amount of literacy integration in inquiry-based science instruction can promote students' science and reading achievement. Therefore, we call for more experimental research that focus on the quality of literacy-integrated science instruction from which middle grade students, particularly low-socio-economic status students, can benefit.     

Fish Swim,Rocks Sit,and Lungs Breathe: Expert-Novice Understanding of Complex Systems

Understanding complex systems is fundamental to understanding science. The complexity of such systems makes them very difficult to understand because they are composed of multiple interrelated levels that interact in dynamic ways. The goal of this study was to understand how experts and novices differed in their understanding of two complex systems, the human respiratory system and an aquarium ecosystem. In particular, we examined how a representation of complex systems, Structure-Behavior-Function theory (SBF), might account for these differences. SBF is particularly relevant in understanding biological systems because an important domain principle is the relation between form, function, and mechanism. Our results demonstrated that there were minimal differences between the expert and novice groups on structures, but that the locus of the difference was on understanding causal behaviors and functions, the least salient elements of the systems. Mental model analysis provided largely convergent results. We also found differences between the two different kinds of experts in each domain. These results suggest that SBF does capture expert-novice differences and may have implications for instruction.     

STARS AND STRIPES

Stars and Stripes is a unique newspaper with a distinctive mission, ownership and journalistic staff unlike any in the USA. Despite its parentage in the US Department of Defense, directives give the newspaper editorial independence. Still, military commanders and Pentagon overseers have challenged and interfered with those rights since the newspaper's First World War beginnings in Europe. This study examines the published accounts of that struggle, finding that despite the newspaper's journalistic successes, the military has periodically engaged in control and interference, particularly because of the newspaper's logistical dependence upon the Department of Defense. Stars and Stripes' achievements have largely been dependent upon having the support of various military commanders in charge of US overseas military forces, having military editors or publishers who were resolute against military intrusion, or having the involvement of Congressional oversight committees and other news media willing to expose military news management at the newspaper.