Content Familiarity: Differential Impact of Effective Teaching on Student Achievement Outcomes

Improving the quality of higher education for all students requires researchers to focus on factors that potentially influence learning. Of particular interest are student entry characteristics and effective teaching behaviors. Accordingly, structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships between student differences, prior experience with the subject material, past performances, teaching behaviors, and perceived learning and achievement. A theoretical model containing 8 variables was formulated and tested on students who were either experienced or inexperienced with the course material. The data were gathered at a large midwestern university fitting the Carnegie classification as a research institution. Overall, student achievement is affected by test anxiety and high school GPA. Prior experience with the course content revealed that content-unfamiliar students' perception of learning is more positively influenced by instructor organization than by instructor expressiveness, whereas for content-familiar students, expressiveness is much more influential than organization. Additionally, content-unfamiliar students are more sensitive to both teaching behaviors than content-familiar students. These findings have important implications for administrators, instructors, and researchers.     

Notes on the Chart ‘Aids to Communication’

There is nothing new about the use of audio and visual aids to communication. Speech and gesture and demonstration are the oldest forms; drawings very early ones, developing to hieroglyphics and ultimately to alphabets and written language. What is new is the multiplicity of media. The invention of papyrus was perhaps the earliest important fillip to mass communication—the drawings on walls were of fixed location, and clay tablets not exactly easy to transport. Then the invention of movable types with paper and printing presses made possible the vast movement of ideas leading to the ‘New Learning’ and the Renaissance in the West. Visual development was slower: drawings had to be laboriously engraved on wood or metal, in order to be reproduced by letter-press printing. This lasted until after the middle of the 19th Century. Then the tempo quickened; the inventions of photography, photo-etching, lithography, kinematography followed one another in fairly rapid succession and with the enormous improvements in the speed of printing presses, mass media in the form of newspapers, illustrated magazines, books, illustrated or otherwise, poured from the presses.     

Chapter 1 Introduction,The Field Study

This study was an investigation of the effectiveness of eight types of visual illustrations used to complement oral instruction. An attempt was made to evaluate the instructional value of black and white and colored visual Illustrations. Two hundred sixty-four eleventh-grade students were randomly assigned by class to one of nine treatment groups. Student learning was evaluated by means of five criterion tests designed to measure different educational objectives. Comparisons among the means of the nine treatment groups yielded significant differences. It was found that the realism continuum for still visuals is not a reliable predictor of learning efficiency; however, visual illustrations were found to significantly increase student learning on three criterion tests. Color in visual illustrations did not appear to be an important variable in increasing student learning in is study.     

Stages of collaboration and the realities of professional learning communities

Although professional learning communities are often promoted as unique learning opportunities, little is known about how they get started and how they are sustained. For this reason, group members are often unprepared, and then frustrated, by inevitable group tensions. With this in mind, Karl Weick's [(1979). The social psychology of organizing. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley] model of means convergence was used to analyze the social dynamics of a small group of Middle Years teachers over a 2-year period as they implemented Egan's [(1992). Imagination in teaching and learning: The middle school years. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press; (1997). The educated mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press] theory of Imagination and Learning to their practice. Along with the analysis of journal entries, focus-group discussions, and individual interviews, Weick's (1979) four developmental stages of collaboration provide a broader understanding of why conflict occurs in learning communities and its effect on collaborative learning.     

Is Visually Guided Reaching in Early Infancy a Myth?

The issue examined was whether infants require sight of their hand when first beginning to reach for, contact, and grasp objects. 7 infants were repeatedly tested between 6 and 25 weeks of age. Each session consisted of 8 trials of objects presented in the light and 8 trials of glowing or sounding objects in complete darkness. Infants first contacted the object in both conditions at comparable ages (mean age for light, 12.3 weeks, and for dark, 11.9 weeks). Infants first grasped the object in the light at 16.0 weeks and in the dark at 14.7 weeks, a nonsignificant difference. Once contact was observed, infants continued to touch and grasp the objects in both light and dark throughout all sessions. Because infants could not see their hand or arm in the dark, their early success in contacting the glowing and sounding objects indicates that proprioceptive cues, not sight of the limb, guided their early reaching. Reaching in the light developed in parallel with reaching in the dark, suggesting that visual guidance of the hand is not necessary to achieve object contact either at the onset of successful reaching or in the succeeding weeks.     

A Critical Analysis of Current Practices and Beliefs Underlying General Physical Education Programs in Higher Education

Abstract

This study was made to determine a current set of concepts which physical educators believe should characterize the purposes of the modern college program of general physical education. A review of current literature was conducted to identify and define those concepts which seemed to be characteristic of the purposes of the general college program of physical education. From this literature a structured interview guide was developed. Sections I and II of this guide contained questions concerning the current status of this program. Questions designed to elicit opinions with regard to selected aspects of the general college program of physical education also were included. Section III contained statements of concepts currently appearing in the literature of higher education. The data were obtained by the personal interview and the mailed questionnaire technique. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was employed to compare responses among three groups of respondents: a group of physical educators who were selected on the basis of their specific qualifications with regard to the general college program (Group I), a jury of physical educators who were considered expert in the overall field of physical education (Group II), and a group composed of deans of instruction (Group III). This test was designed to determine whethere were statistically significant differences of opinion among responses of the three groups. The data were reported and interpretations and analyses of the data were made. It was found that physical educators and academic deans of instruction were in close agreement in most instances with regard to beliefs concerning the general college program of physical education.