Approaches to Study of Distance Education Students

The'Approaches to Studying'inventory of Ramsden and Entwistle (1981) was administered to groups of external and internal students at Capricornia Institute and the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. Factor analysis revealed a similar factor structure for external students to that of the total sample. This finding, together with analysis of variance data, is taken as evidence that it is valid to use the inventory and the associated theories on learning styles with distance education students. Analysis of variance data showed differences in learning styles for older students. The implications of this finding for the design of distance education courses are discussed.     

Possible role of confounded taste stimuli in conditioned taste aversions

In many publications, Sjödén, Archer, and their colleagues have studied conditioned taste aversions and found that in addition to taste, the bottle and/or spout containing a solution exerts strong control over the expression of an aversion. For example, Sjödén and Archer claim that this bottle stimulus will support a bottle-illness association even with long delays between the bottle and illness and after only a single conditioning trial. They have interpreted their results as indicating that contextual effects are important in taste-aversion learning. However, a confound in their procedure, stemming from the bottles they used, could explain their results in a simple way. Sjödén and Archer have emphasized that the bottle stimuli they used to distinguish between contexts consisted of one of two different sizes of drinking spouts, the larger of which made a clicking noise when licked. However, the larger spouts were always attached to plastic bottles and the smaller spouts were always attached to glass bottles. If discriminable tastes from the plastic bottles existed, then taste may have been inadvertently manipulated. Support for the likelihood of a plastic taste includes the seminal work on taste-aversion learning that stemmed from the serendipitous use of plastic bottles in the cage that rats were irradiated in and glass bottles in the home cages (see Garcia, McGowan, & Green, 1972). In these early demonstrations, rats learned to avoid the taste of water in the plastic bottles but not the taste of water in the glass bottles.     

Control of Practice and Level of Feedback in Computer-Based Instruction

This study investigated the effect of type of control and level of feedback during computer-based instruction. Subjects completed a computer lesson about the microscope that presented either mandatory or optional practice questions. Practice was accompanied by either elaboration feedback, correct-answer feedback, or no feedback. Results indicated that level of feedback had a significant effect on achievement and attitudes. Implications for including feedback in computer-based instruction are discussed.     

The limited value of planning in education: Getting back to the basics isn't all about curriculum

In these times of tight budgets and political intoleance for taxation, public schools, particularly urban public schools, will continually have to look for ways in which to spend less while dealing with ever-increasing societal problems. While the ability of schools to improve the overal “product” with less resources is highly suspect, this article addresses one way in which spending less might actually improve school perfomance. The best planners in the best schools should be the administration, techers, students, parents, and the comminitu at large, and not outside esxperts hired to improve a school's “comprehensive” or “strategic” plan. By forcing the segments of the public that have the largest stake in the educational outcomes of schools to work together to plan for the future, schools will improve the efficacy of their staffs, their students, and allow parents the self-satisfaction of playing an important role in their children's education. An improtant side effect of such a method may be an increasing awareness by the public of the difficulties that schools face, and perhaps a better understanding of the important need for higher expenditures. His research interests include professionalism, collective bargaining, and educational reform. His articles have appeared inPeople and Education, and a recent article has been aceepted for publication in theJournal of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector.     

Real education in non-real time: The use of electronic message systems for instruction

Education in different communication media takes place with functional differences that have consequences for the course of instructional interaction. In this paper, we examine instructional interaction among people using a computer-based electronic message system, contrasting it with conventional face-to-face discussion in a college level class. Interaction via the non-real time message system contained multiple “threads of discourse,” a higher proportion of student turns to teacher turns, and other deviations from the “initiation-response-evaluation” sequences usually found in face-to-face classroom interactions. Based on the results of our contrast, we describe ways to organize instruction using electronic message systems to take advantage of new properties and to avoid shortcomings of these new instructional media.     

Investigating the Relations Among Pre-Service Teachers’ Teaching/Learning Beliefs and Educational Technology Integration Competencies: a Structural Equation Modeling Study

Journal of Science Education and Technology - With the rapid developments in technology, training of pre-service teachers in terms of technology integration has become a crucial issue for all...     

Language proficiency and lateral position in the classroom

This paper not only makes a contribution to the mosaic of scientific knowledge of the brain and nervous system, but suggests implications of practical value. Observant, experienced teachers know empirically that some youngsters learn best, and perhaps only, when seated front-center, right before the teacher’s desk. Such children need to have the eye contact, or to be in quick arm’s reach, or to have distractions screened out. Drs. Bakker and Van Rijnsoever give evidence here that, for many children, taking in and remembering the message is dependent on their physical placement to catch most effectively the stream of sound. This is important to consider in the popular open classroom. Although many children can adapt readily to less-than-perfect physical learning conditions, for some we must “re-invent the wall,” not to climb, but to provide a place to call “home.” The theoretical re-inforcement presented in this paper proves that such boundaries can also provide source and direction for sound as part of some children’s currently needed sensory security and enhance the efficiency of their auditory intake. Editor     

Infant search and object permanence: a meta-analysis of the A-not-B error

Research on Piaget's stage 4 object concept has failed to reveal a clear or consistent pattern of results. Piaget found that 8-12-month-old infants would make perserverative errors; his explanation for this phenomenon was that the infant's concept of the object was contextually dependent on his or her actions. Some studies designed to test Piaget's explanation have replicated Piaget's basic finding, yet many have found no preference for the A location or the B location or an actual preference for the B location. More recently, researchers have attempted to uncover the causes for these results concerning the A-not-B error. Again, however, different studies have yielded different results, and qualitative reviews have failed to yield a consistent explanation for the results of the individual studies. This state of affairs suggests that the phenomenon may simply be too complex to be captured by individual studies varying 1 factor at a time and by reviews based on similar qualitative considerations. Therefore, the current investigation undertook a meta-analysis, a synthesis capturing the quantitative information across the now sizable number of studies. We entered several important factors into the meta-analysis, including the effects of age, the number of A trials, the length of delay between hiding and search, the number of locations, the distances between locations, and the distinctive visual properties of the hiding arrays. Of these, the analysis consistently indicated that age, delay, and number of hiding locations strongly influence infants' search. The pattern of specific findings also yielded new information about infant search. A general characterization of the results is that, at every age, both above-chance and below-chance performance was observed. That is, at each age at least 1 combination of delay and number of locations yielded above-chance A-not-B errors or significant perseverative search. At the same time, at each age at least 1 alternative combination of delay and number of locations yielded below-chance errors and significant above-chance correct performance, that is, significantly accurate search. These 2 findings, appropriately elaborated, allow us to evaluate all extant theories of stage 4 infant search. When this is done, all these extant accounts prove to be incorrect. That is, they are incommensurate with one aspect or another of the pooled findings in the meta-analysis. Therefore, we end by proposing a new account that is consistent with the entire data set.