Enhancing Alphabet Knowledge Instruction: Research Implications and Practical Strategies for Early Childhood Educators

Alphabet knowledge is consistently recognized as the strongest, most durable predictor of later literacy achievement. Recent research offers practical implications for increased effectiveness of teaching alphabet knowledge to young children. In this article, we outline Enhanced Alphabet Knowledge instruction (EAK), a method of practical instruction that early childhood teachers can use to organize, plan, and teach the essential skills of alphabet knowledge. EAK emphasizes identifying the letter name and sound, recognizing the letter in text, and producing the letter form, through flexible, distributed cycles of review based on factors that influence acquisition of alphabet knowledge.     

Peer‐mediated instruction: assisted performance in the primary classroom

Peer collaboration has been supported in research as an effective instructional strategy. However, education researchers lack a full understanding of the types of scaffolding that take place in peer groups. Little research is available that documents what happens during the small group interactions. This case study took place in one teacher’s multi‐age primary classroom in the southeastern region of the USA. It examined how elementary students provided scaffolding to one another during collaborative classroom activities. Specifically, this investigation explored the ways in which elementary students provide assistance to one another during academic tasks and examined the status of the children, in terms of more or less capabilities, during the collaborative events. Vygotsky asserts that for learning to occur, assistance must be provided by a more capable person. The research findings suggest that peers provide scaffolding for one another in various ways. In this investigation, these primary students utilized questioning, providing feedback, and instructing as the primary methods of scaffolding during the learning experiences. This study also supports assertions that when students are allowed to pose questions and provide feedback to one another during peer collaboration, they help to establish instruction in their zone of proximal development.     

Developing Summarization Skills through the Use of LSA-Based Feedback

This paper describes a series of classroom trials during which we developed Summary Street, an educational software system that uses Latent Semantic Analysis to support writing and revision activities. Summary Street provides various kinds of feedback, primarily about whether a student summary adequately covers important source content and fulfills other requirements, such as length. The feedback allows students to engage in extensive, independent practice in writing and revising without placing excessive demands on teachers for feedback. We first discuss the underlying educational rationale, then present some results of the trials conducted with the system. We describe the collaborative process among researchers and teachers which enabled the development of a viable and supportive educational tool and its integration into classroom instruction.     

What drives students to complete online courses? What drives faculty to teach online? Validating a measure of motivation orientation in university students and faculty

Although online student enrollment has shown double digit growth for almost a decade and academic leaders recognize that online education is necessary for enrollment growth, little is known about what motivates students to enroll in or faculty to teach face-to-face (F2F) versus online courses. The psychometric properties of a motivation scale were examined with students (n = 235) and faculty (n = 104) at a large, public, urban university in the southeastern USA. Analyses revealed that the scale was reliable as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for online and F2F courses were similarly constructed for students and faculty; additionally, results revealed that motivations for online and F2F education are distinct concepts. Findings also demonstrated that online extrinsic motivation predicted the number of online courses students completed, while F2F intrinsic motivation negatively predicted the number of online courses a faculty member had taught. These results address several limitations with existing motivation measures and enhance the ability to predict student and faculty outcomes in online education.     

Notes from the New Editors-in-Chief

The much-lamented gap between theory and practice in education cannot be filled by practical knowledge alone or by explanatory knowledge alone. Principled practical knowledge (PPK) is a type of knowledge that has characteristics of both practical know-how and scientific theory. Like basic scientific theory, PPK meets standards of explanatory coherence. However, its main function is not explanation or prediction but practical guidance. PPK grows out of efforts to solve practical problems, but it requires additional effort invested in producing knowledge that goes beyond what is required for the task at hand yet not so far beyond as to be unusable by practitioners. The Wright brothers’ construction of PPK to address problems of flight control is used as a model for building such knowledge in the learning sciences. Design-based research in the learning sciences may motivate research into basic theoretical questions, but it is unlikely to contribute directly to answering them. Extending design-based research to the creation of PPK can, however, increase the generalizability of knowledge produced through design work and provide a ladder leading to sometimes radical design improvement.     

Design and Reflection Help Students Develop Scientific Abilities: Learning in Introductory Physics Laboratories

Design activities, when embedded in an inquiry cycle and appropriately scaffolded and supplemented with reflection, can promote the development of the habits of mind (scientific abilities) that are an important part of scientific practice. Through the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), students construct physics knowledge by engaging in inquiry cycles that replicate the approach used by physicists to construct knowledge. A significant portion of student learning occurs in ISLE instructional labs where students design their own experiments. The labs provide an environment for cognitive apprenticeship enhanced by formative assessment. As a result, students develop interpretive knowing that helps them approach new problems as scientists. This article describes a classroom study in which the students in the ISLE design lab performed equally well on traditional exams as ISLE students who did not engage in design activities. However, the design group significantly outperformed the non-design group while working on novel experimental tasks (in physics and biology), demonstrating the application of scientific abilities to an inquiry task in a novel content domain. This research shows that a learning environment that integrates cognitive apprenticeship and formative assessment in a series of conceptual design tasks provides a rich context for helping students build scientific habits of mind.     

The Nature of Laboratory Learning Experiences in Secondary Science Online

Teaching science to secondary students in an online environment is a growing international trend. Despite this trend, reports of empirical studies of this phenomenon are noticeably missing. With a survey concerning the nature of laboratory activities, this study describes the perspective of 35-secondary teachers from 15-different U.S. states who are teaching science online. The type and frequency of reported laboratory activities are consistent with the tradition of face-to-face instruction, using hands-on and simulated experiments. While provided examples were student-centered and required the collection of data, they failed to illustrate key components of the nature of science. The features of student-teacher interactions, student engagement, and nonverbal communications were found to be lacking and likely constitute barriers to the enactment of inquiry. These results serve as a call for research and development focused on using existing communication tools to better align with the activity of science such that the nature of science is more clearly addressed, the work of students becomes more collaborative and authentic, and the formative elements of a scientific inquiry are more accessible to all participants.