Educational knowledge generation from administrative data

Most universities use Information Systems (IS) to perform their daily administrative activities (student enrollment, data files, accountancy, etc.), and an integrated Learning Management System (LMS) to support teaching and learning. However, although a lot of effort has been put into deploying these computerized systems, the data that they provide are not fully exploited from an educational perspective. In this paper we describe a case in which these data have been used to identify relevant relations between the general use of the LMS, the existence of teaching innovation programs and the quality of education. The method used can be easily generalized and employed in other different contexts, to derive meaningful information on the impact that some variables may have over others.     

Bringing text display digital radio to consumers with hearing loss

Radio is migrating to digital transmission, expanding its offerings to include captioning for individuals with hearing loss. Text display radio requires a large amount of word throughput with minimal screen display area, making good user interface design crucial to its success. In two experiments, we presented hearing, hard-of-hearing, and deaf consumers with National Public Radio stories converted to text and examined their preferences for and reactions to midsized and small radio text displays. We focused on physical display attributes such as text color, font style, line length, and scrolling type as well as emergency alert messages and emergency prompts for drivers, announcer identification schemes, and synchronization of audio and text. Results suggest that midsized, Global Positioning System (GPS)-style displays were well liked, synchronization of audio and text was important to comprehension and retrieval of story details, identification of announcers was served best with a combination of name change in parenthesis and color change, and a mixture of color and flashing symbols was preferred for emergency alerting.     

Recognizing the learning-living gap

Many residence hall staff have attempted to align the academic subculture of the faculty with the opposing extracurricular subculture of students by moving closer to the academic sector. Studies at Harvard University and at Hampshire College are summarized to indicate the failure of traditional house systems or residence hall programming to successfully bridge the gap between the academic and living subcultures. It is suggested that student personnel staff should focus on their unique contribution in higher education: the facilitation of students' personal development and interpersonal communication skills.     

Identifying key issues for university practitioners of garden-based learning in Spain

ABSTRACT

The presence of learning gardens in Spain is growing, and the current scenario is highly diverse in relation to issues such as participatory models or purposes, among others. In the context of the 1^st National Meeting on organic learning gardens, we convened eight expert practitioners in a focus group. Their discourse was analyzed through content analysis, after which four categories were selected for co-occurrence analyses. The most important questions for university garden-based practitioners in the country are presented, related to actors involved, functions that gardens fulfill, strengths of these educational resources, and requirements for their consolidation.     

Science diaries: a brief writing intervention to improve motivation to learn science

This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and understanding of science concepts and activities would increase their motivation in science classes. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental condition that wrote self-assessments of their competence and interest in science lessons or a control condition that wrote summaries of those same lessons. Writing activities were 10?min long and were given approximately once a week for eighteen weeks. Student motivation was assessed via self-report surveys for achievement goals and interest in science before and after the intervention. Students in the experimental condition showed higher endorsement of mastery goals and reported greater situational interest in science topics after the intervention compared to students who summarised the lessons. Increases in situational interest predicted higher individual interest in the domain. Results indicate an instructional practice requiring just 3?hours out of a semester of instruction was sufficient to achieve these effects on motivation in science classes.     

Political and educational springboard or straitjacket? Theorising post/human subjects in an age of vulnerability

Contemporary discourses of social justice in education, disability, mental health, social policy and feminist studies are refracted increasingly through concerns about psychological and structural vulnerabilities created by the crises of late capitalism. Focusing on developments in British social policy generally and educational research specifically, this paper uses the authors' contrasting perspectives on two discernible discourses of vulnerability emerging in these contexts. One elevates the recognition of collective vulnerability as a springboard for new conceptualisations of resistance that disrupt materialist narratives of the human subject as a coherent, unified and rational agent of history. A second discourse offers a materialist understanding that locates vulnerability as both driver and product of a ‘therapeutic culture’, arguing that a psycho-emotional focus for vulnerability offers a diminished and ineffective subjectivity that belies rhetorics of resistance. These contrasting perspectives generate and emerge simultaneously from new understandings of the human subject. The paper evaluates the implications of using vulnerability to frame expectations of human subjects for everyday educational practices and relationships. It concludes by suggesting empirical questions that need exploring.     

Research-based teacher education? Exploring the meaning potentials of Swedish teacher education

In this article, we explore the meaning potentials of teacher education in terms of the significance of a research-based approach and the different pedagogic identities that such an approach implies. The study’s aim is to examine the important factors for education to be considered research-based and to identify and analyse the research base of teacher education in Sweden. The results from the analysis of a large number of course documents and from a survey administered to teachers and students in four teacher education programmes indicate that the emerging potential meaning is that teacher education is generally a strongly framed professional education with a relatively weak and adapted research base. The analysis of the classification and framing of disciplinary content and pedagogy in the Swedish teacher education curriculum points at different pedagogic identities emerging from the different meaning potentials that are made available to the students. We argue that a thorough understanding of research-based teacher education needs to be grounded in both course content and its research base as well as other possible pedagogical aspects of research-based education; the education as a whole must be included in the concept of research-based education.     

Balancing varied assessment functions to attain systemic validity: Three is the magic number

Accountability-oriented reforms demand immediate and continual gains on achievement test, for all students, and without diminishing other outcomes or undermining instruction. This paper describes a framework for aligning classroom assessment and external testing with the aim of negotiating these seemingly contradictory goals. The framework varies the sensitivity to instruction and the representations of knowledge across approaches to assessment. Cycles of design- based studies successively refine relationships between a curriculum and the frame that each assessment provides. Doing so, we argue, leverages the unique formative and summative balance across assessments in order to scaffold learning and demonstrate the “consequential” validity of our strategy without compromising curricula, instruction, or the “evidential” validity that warrants their continued use.     

Reformation of VET and demands on teachers’ subject knowledge – Swedish vocational teachers’ recurrent participation in a national CPD initiative

This study investigates continuing professional development (CPD) of vocational teachers, with a focus on recurrent participation. Vocational teachers need to be competent as teachers and in relation to their vocational teaching subject. Reformation of Swedish vocational education in order to strengthen the working-life connection imposes demands on teachers to have up-to-date knowledge about the vocations related to their vocational subjects. To support the reform, vocational teachers have been offered to participate in a new national CPD initiative targeting their vocational competence. The study concerns participation in this initiative. Drawing on a socio-cultural perspective, vocational teachers’ CPD implies boundary-crossing between school and working-life. Theory concerning adults’ participation in education is considered relevant to understand conditions for such boundary-crossing, and learning, among vocational teachers. The article specifically investigates patterns in vocational teachers’ recurrent participation, which is expected to clarify the factors influencing further participation in professional development. The strongest predictor of recurrent participation, when adjusting for the influence of other factors, is the type of municipality that the teacher comes from, with low populated municipalities having the lowest likelihood of participation. Furthermore, recurrent participation is more likely by participating teachers from adult education or from privately owned schools, and by male teachers.     

A sociocultural perspective on mediated activity in third grade science

This ethnographic study of a third grade classroom examined elementary school science learning as a sociocultural accomplishment. The research focused on how a teacher helped his students acquire psychological tools for learning to think and engage in scientific practices as locally defined. Analyses of classroom discourse examined both how the teacher used mediational strategies to frame disciplinary knowledge in science as well as how students internalized and appropriated ways of knowing in science. The study documented and analyzed how students came to appropriate scientific knowledge as their own in an ongoing manner tied to their identities as student scientists. Implications for sociocultural theory in science education research are discussed. John Reveles is an assistant professor in the Elementary Education Department at California State University, Northridge. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2005. Before pursuing his Ph.D., he worked as a bilingual elementary school teacher for 3 years. His research focuses on the development of scientific literacy in elementary school settings; sociocultural influences on students' academic identity; equity of access issues in science education; qualitative and quantitative research methods. Within the Michael D. Eisner College of Education, he teaches elementary science curriculum methods courses, graduate science education seminars, and graduate research courses. Gregory Kelly is a professor of science education at Penn State University. He is a former Peace Corps Volunteer and physics teacher. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1994. His research focuses on classroom discourse, epistemology, and science learning. This work has been supported by grants from Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Education. He teaches courses concerning the uses of history, philosophy, sociology of science in science teaching and teaching and learning science in secondary schools. He is editor of the journal Science Education. Richard Durán is a Professor in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara. His research and publications have been in the areas of literacy and assessment of English Language Learners and Latino students. He has also conducted research on after school computer clubs, technology and learning as part of the international UC Links Network. With support from the Kellogg Foundation, he is implementing and investigating community and family-centered intervention programs serving the educational progress of Latino students in the middle and high school grades.