A Curriculum Innovation Framework for Science, Technology and Mathematics Education

There is growing concern about falling levels of student engagement with school science, as evidenced by studies of student attitudes, and decreasing participation at the post compulsory level. One major response to this, the Australian School Innovation in Science, Technology and Mathematics (ASISTM) initiative, involves partnerships between schools and community and industry organisations in developing curriculum projects at the local level. This project fulfils many of the conditions advocated to engage students in learning in the sciences. ASISTM is underpinned by the notion of innovation. This paper describes the findings of case study research in which 16 ASISTM projects were selected as innovation exemplars. A definition of innovation and an innovation framework were developed, through which the case studies were analysed to make sense of the significance of the ideas and practices, participating actors, and outcomes of the projects. Through this analysis we argue that innovation is a powerful idea for framing curriculum development in the sciences at the local level that is generative for students and teachers, and that these ASISTM projects provide valuable models for engaging students, and for teacher professional learning.     

H. Craig Heller. Interviewed by Laura L. Mays Hoopes

Note from the Editor     

Missing the Boat with Technology Usage in Early Childhood Settings: A 21st Century View of Developmentally Appropriate Practice

Technology use permeates virtually all aspects of twenty-first century society, though its integration in early childhood settings and recognition as a developmentally appropriate practice remains problematic. A position is taken that education professionals may be ‘missing the boat’ by not embracing technology usage as a developmentally appropriate practice. Concerns are presented that both preservice education and inservice professional development require substantial improvement if early childhood education professionals are to both recognize the role of technology in developmentally appropriate practice and develop skills in using it in classroom settings.     

Bioinformatics and the Undergraduate Curriculum Essay

Recent advances involving high-throughput techniques for data generation and analysis have made familiarity with basic bioinformatics concepts and programs a necessity in the biological sciences. Undergraduate students increasingly need training in methods related to finding and retrieving information stored in vast databases. The rapid rise of bioinformatics as a new discipline has challenged many colleges and universities to keep current with their curricula, often in the face of static or dwindling resources. On the plus side, many bioinformatics modules and related databases and software programs are free and accessible online, and interdisciplinary partnerships between existing faculty members and their support staff have proved advantageous in such efforts. We present examples of strategies and methods that have been successfully used to incorporate bioinformatics content into undergraduate curricula.     

Aversive parenting in China: associations with child physical and relational aggression

This study assessed the combined and differential contributions of Chinese mothers and fathers (in terms of spouse-reported physically coercive and psychologically controlling parenting) to the development of peer-reported physical and relational aggression in their preschool-age children (mean age of 5 years). Results of the two-group (boys and girls) latent sum and difference structural equation model showed that combined parenting effects were slightly more prevalent than differential effects in predicting aggression. Furthermore, physical coercion was predictive of aggression in boys whereas psychological control was primarily associated with aggression in girls. Findings extend our understanding of relational aggression and the meaning of aversive parenting, particularly within the Chinese cultural context.     

MapReduce indexing strategies: Studying scalability and efficiency

In Information Retrieval (IR), the efficient indexing of terabyte-scale and larger corpora is still a difficult problem. MapReduce has been proposed as a framework for distributing data-intensive operations across multiple processing machines. In this work, we provide a detailed analysis of four MapReduce indexing strategies of varying complexity. Moreover, we evaluate these indexing strategies by implementing them in an existing IR framework, and performing experiments using the Hadoop MapReduce implementation, in combination with several large standard TREC test corpora. In particular, we examine the efficiency of the indexing strategies, and for the most efficient strategy, we examine how it scales with respect to corpus size, and processing power. Our results attest to both the importance of minimising data transfer between machines for IO intensive tasks like indexing, and the suitability of the per-posting list MapReduce indexing strategy, in particular for indexing at a terabyte-scale. Hence, we conclude that MapReduce is a suitable framework for the deployment of large-scale indexing.     

“Evaluation gone Awry”: The teacher experience of the summative evaluation of a school reform initiative

Written as four scenes that span a five-year period, this article examines the summative evaluation of an organized school reform programme in the United States from the teacher perspective. The study provides fine-grained details of how the evaluation of the particular reform effort went “awry” in the view of some teachers who directly participated. The inclusion of two teacher narratives particularly demonstrates how practitioners' intents and desires became overtaken by evaluators' stances and theoretical frames. The international value of the research is that it discusses problems of summative evaluators entering longitudinal reform endeavors too late in the change process, difficulties relating to non-participant observation, issues associated with not negotiating final evaluation reports, and failure of evaluation studies to enter into human subjects agreements with teachers. Lastly, the lack of congruence between formative planning and evaluation and summative evaluation constitutes an overarching theme.     

Rethinking Electronic Portfolios to Promote Sustainability among Teachers

Electronic portfolios (eportfolios) can increase reflection, develop content and pedagogy skills and facilitate communication between teachers and administrators. However, they have limitations. Despite resources that teacher institutions devote to eportfolios, research suggests that most implementations are of limited duration. In a climate where sustained professional development and lifelong learning are necessary to remain competitive, organizations should reevaluate how eportfolios are implemented to sustain use and maintain skills deemed important by teaching organizations. Using principles of change theory, this article identifies several eportfolio challenges and how they may be improved through principles of personal learning environments. Implementation procedures and limitations are also provided.     

Training load and schedule are important determinants of sleep behaviours in youth-soccer players

The current study examined how sleep may be influenced by the scheduling of training and match load within 10 youth-soccer players. Sleep was measured over a 14-day in-season period using a commercially available wireless sleep monitor. Each collected sleep variable; lights out, sleep latency, total sleep time wake after sleep onset and final awakening, was compared for the specific day within the training schedule (e.g. match day [MD], day after match [MD?+?1]) and to training/match load (high-speed distance (>5.5 m/s) [HSD] and rating of perceived exertion. The data were analysed using mixed models and effect sizes, to describe the magnitude of effects that training schedule and training load may have on sleep. A reduction of sleep duration was observed on the day after the match (MD?+?1) in relation to the training days preceding the match (MD-2: ?65 min, ES: 0.89?±?0.79; MD-1 ?61 min, ES: 0.82?±?0.64) and reduction on match day (+45 min; ES: 1.91?±?1.69). This may suggest youth-soccer players actively change their sleep scheduling behaviours in relation to the imposed soccer schedule. Increased high-speed running (for every 100 m) showed a small increase to total sleep time (+9 min; ES: 0.48?±?0.31). This may suggest that increases in training load may be associated with small increases in sleep quantity. Such observations may highlight that the type of day and the associated load within the training microcycle may have important consequences for sleep within youth-soccer players.