Software for managing complex learning: Examples from an educational psychology course

Inquiry-based instruction including problem-, project-, and case-based methods often incorporate complex sets of learning activities. The numerous activities run the risk of becoming disconnected in the minds of learners and teachers. STAR.Legacy is a software shell that can help designers organize learning activities into an inquiry cycle that is easy to understand and pedagogically sound. To ensure that classroom teachers can adapt the inquiry activities according to their local resources and needs, STAR.Legacy was built upon four types of design principles: learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. We describe how a STAR.Legacy constructed for an educational psychology course helped preservice teachers design and learn about effective inquiry-based instruction. This work was supported by grant #R305F60090 from the Department of Education. The authors thank the educational psychology students for their contributions to this paper and Amy Ryce for her editorial talents.     

An Internet-Based Course: Leadership Issues

It comes as no surprise that persons in leadership roles face many decisions related to providing distance learning experiences, especially ones centered on the Internet. In this paper we will try to focus upon leadership issues that arose during the creation and offering of an Internet-based course for high school chemistry teachers. One of us served as the department chair, another as the professor of record and course designer, and the third as a researcher who developed a systematic case study of the course.     

Beginning Elementary School Teachers and the Effective Teaching of Science

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

An Initiator-Catalyst Approach to College Counseling Outreach

The authors discuss the evolution of approaches to college counseling outreach, and suggest that an initiator-catalyst approach makes the most sense in contemporary college counseling and mental health settings. A brief history of outreach models and approaches is presented along with an outline of and example of the initiator-catalyst approach. Topics related to this approach are also discussed: mass communications/technology, assessment, faculty, student, and staff change agents; and campus politics.     

Pigeons’ memory for empty time intervals marked by visual or auditory stimuli

In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained to discriminate the duration (2 or 8 sec) of an empty interval separated by two 1325-Hz tone markers by responding to red and green comparison stimuli. During delay testing, a choose-short bias occurred at 1 sec, but a robust choose-long bias occurred at 9 sec. Responding in the absence of tone markers indicated that the pigeons were attending to the markers and not simply timing the total trial duration. The birds were then trained to match short (2-sec) or long (8-sec) empty intervals marked by light to blue/yellow comparisons. For both visual and auditory markers, delay testing produced a choose-short bias at 1 sec and a choose-long bias at 9 sec. In Experiment 2, the pigeons were shifted from a fixed to variable intertrial intervals (ITI) within sessions. On trials with tone markers, the duration of both the empty interval and the preceding ITI affected choice responding. On trials with light markers, only the duration of the empty interval influenced choice responding. Subsequent delay testing in the context of variable ITIs replicated the memory biases previously obtained. In Experiment 3, performance was assessed at various delay intervals on trials in which either the first or the second marker was omitted. The data from these omission tests indicated that the first marker initiated timing but that the second marker sometimes initiated the timing of a new interval. Explanations of these effects in terms of the internal clock model of timing are discussed, and a simple quantitative model of the delay interval data is tested.