Bounded decision-making,teachers’ reflection and organisational learning: How research can inform teachers and teaching

Despite numerous efforts to align educational practice more closely with findings from educational research, there is little clarity about how educational practitioners can, in principle, use research. We propose a conceptualisation based on how research can contribute to practitioners’ thinking: specifically, our framework proposes that research can inform bounded decision-making, teachers’ reflection and organisational learning. Practitioners can also use research without being aware that they are doing so. We argue that this conceptualisation of research use has potential to inform researchers and practitioners.     

Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication

This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and professional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional communication.     

Experimental determination of the flame temperatures of complex mixtures of combustible gases and a method for calculating them

The flame temperatures of mixtures of hydrogen, or methane, or carbon monoxide containing various amounts of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with air, have been determined. The flame temperatures of a number of complex mixtures of combustible gases and industrial gases have also been determined. A method of calculating the maximum flame temperature of any mixed gas is described. Good agreement is found between the calculated and determined temperatures of the gases used in this investigation.     

Attachment‐Related Biases in Adolescents’ Memory

Attachment theorists propose that individuals’ internal working models influence their social information processing. This study explored links between attachment representations and social information processing by examining adolescents’ (n = 189; M_age = 16.5 years) attachment‐related memory biases. Participants completed laboratory tasks assessing memory for (a) emotionally salient childhood events, (b) adjectives describing their parents, and (c) generalized parent‐related characteristics not specific to their own parents. As expected, dismissing attachment (assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview) was linked across tasks to a deactivating strategy in which memory for emotional childhood events and attachment‐relevant stimuli was reduced. In contrast, evidence that preoccupied attachment was linked to a hyperactivating strategy in which memory was heightened emerged only in relation to emotional childhood events.     

Gender differences in teacher-student interactions in science classrooms

Thirty physical science and 30 chemistry classes, which contained a total of 1332 students, were observed using the Brophy-Good Teacher-Child Dyadic Interaction System. Classroom interactions were examined for gender differences that may contribute to the underrepresentation of women in physics and engineering courses and subsequent careers. The Brophy-Good coding process allows for examination of patterns of interactions for individuals and groups of pupils. An analysis of variance of the data yielded a significant main effect for teacher praise, call outs, procedural questions, and behavioral warnings based on the sex of the student and a significant teacher-sex main effect for direct questions. Significant two-way interactions were found for the behavioral warning variable for teacher sex and subject by student sex. Female teachers warned male students significantly more than female students. Male teachers warned both genders with similar frequency. Male students also received significantly more behavioral warnings in physical science classes than female students. In chemistry classes, both male and female students received approximately the same number of behavioral warnings.     

Singaporean and Australian Students' Understanding of Vision

A model for the development of an understanding of how people see has been proposed on the basis of a questionnaire and interview study of a cross-section of Australian school students. The model, based on the SOLO model of cognitive development (Collis & Biggs, 1991), involves the building of connections between the eye, light and the object seen in the Ikonic and Concrete Symbolic modes of cognitive functioning. In order to assess the viability of the model across cultures, the questionnaire was administered to 116 primary and secondary school students in Singapore. This paper reports some details of how the model was supported in its most important respects. The few discrepancies might be explained in terms of environmental, linguistic and/or teaching factors.     

A Case for Coach Garfinkel: Decision Making and What We Already Know

The purpose of this article is to deconstruct the decision-making processes of sports coaches through the writings of the sociologist Harold Garfinkel. Specifically, the authors draw upon Garfinkel’s (1967) writings on jurors’ decision making to challenge current cognitivist bound conceptualization to better interpret coaches’ sense-making–why and how they make their decisions. The significance of the work lies in further deciphering the meaningful structures of daily coaching lives; within whose limits coaching decisions unfold. Following a brief review of literature related to coaches’ decision making, the principal tenets of Garfinkel’s work are outlined. This gives way to an examination of Erving Goffman’s (1974) work of “frames of reference” in terms of how coaches’ decision making can be developed and improved before a reflective conclusion summarizes the main points made and their implications for future coach education.     

Toward a Science of Learning Games

Reinforcement learning involves a tight coupling of reward‐associated behavior and a type of learning that is very different from that promoted by education. However, the emerging understanding of its underlying processes may help derive principles for effective learning games that have, until now, been elusive. This article first reviews findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology to provide insight into the motivating role of uncertain reward in games, including educational games. Then, a short experiment is reported to illustrate the potential of reward‐based neurocomputational models of behavior in the understanding and development of effective learning games. In this study, a reward‐based model of behavior is shown to predict recall of newly learned information during a simple learning game.