Immersion,Reflection, Failure: Teaching Graduate Students to Teach Writing Online

ABSTRACT

A common challenge facing those who prepare graduate students to teach writing online is the need to help those students connect online writing instruction (OWI) theory with their classroom practice. The authors present how graduate students are prepared to teach writing online at three universities and then synthesize those approaches to highlight three principles that can guide effective OWI preparation for graduate students in any program: immersion, reflection, and failure.     

Conditioned flavor preferences as a function of deprivation level: Preferences or aversions?

Rats tend to prefer flavors previously consumed under low deprivation to flavors previously consumed under high deprivation (Capaldi & Myers, 1982). We attempted to distinguish among possible associative explanations by determining whether this conditioning phenomenon was based upon conditioned preferences, conditioned aversions, or both. We compared preference for flavors presented exclusively under either high or low deprivation with preference for a neutral flavor. In Experiments 1A and 1B the neutral flavor was one that had been randomly paired with both high and low deprivation, whereas in Experiments 2 and 3 the neutral flavors had not been associated with either high or low deprivation. Our results strongly suggest that this conditioning phenomenon is based upon an actual increase in preference for the flavor consumed under low deprivation rather than on any form of aversion conditioning.     

A model of student approaches to learning encompassing ways to influence and change approaches

The tems surface and deep are widely used to describe student approaches to studying and learning. Different writers have attributed different shades of meaning to the terms, as the categories have resulted from the work of a number of groups or individual researchers. There are greater divergences of opinion on the question of how students can be influenced to adopt either a surface or a deep approach. This paper attempts to synthesise some of the divergent positions into a simple model of student approaches to learning which concentrates on the ways that students may be influenced to adopt either surface or deep approaches. The model recognises the existence of predispositions to either deep or surface approaches, and the use of strategies for particular tasks. A number of contextual variables seem to influence students with a deep predisposition to adopt surface strategies. The transition between surface and deep predispositions is seen as difficult to influence, but three types of intervention are discussed.     

University class size: Is smaller better?

This study investigates the relationship between class size and achievement at the college level. Recent meta-analyses have found a strong relationship between class size and student achievement, but few of the studies examined class size larger than 40 or university-age populations. This analysis examines a university's testing-center data-archives representing 305 sections from 24 different courses. Section sizes ranged from 13 to 1,006. A total of 16,230 test scores were analyzed. The results of this investigation reveal that at the college level, class size may be less important an influence on student achievement than some educators have thought.