The River of Learning: building relationships in a university,school and community Indigenous widening participation collaboration

In this article, findings of a qualitative study of an Indigenous widening participation program are presented. The program, River of Learning, has been in existence since 2010 and represents a powerful collaboration between a rural high school in New South Wales (NSW) Australia, a metropolitan university, Indigenous Elders and non-Indigenous community members. An analysis of the narrative data generated through individual and group interviews with stakeholders provided findings with respect to the program including how it has contributed to the building and strengthening of university and community relationships and how important the interaction with Indigenous Elders and school and university staff is in development of confidence to engage in higher education in the Indigenous students. These findings are discussed and the article concludes with reflections on the learnings generated through such university, school and community collaborations and what these may mean in ensuring greater Indigenous representation in higher education in Australia in the future.     

Affinity spaces,literacies and classrooms: tensions and opportunities

Building communicative competence in textual and multimodal literacies has become a linchpin of learning, of engagement with the world, and of participation in online and blended spaces. Young creators now compose online and with digital tools, often in what we call “user‐generated content affinity spaces” – interest‐based spaces that focus on creating and sharing self‐made content. Such spaces focus on processes of developing users' creations and sharing the products with an audience. These spaces have been inspirations for teachers to reinvigorate classroom practices and expose students to learning opportunities for creation and critique. But questions remain about models of participation in such spaces, especially those that idealise youth who are the most highly engaged while ignoring those whose participation is less visible. Here, we share three experiences of bringing user‐generated content affinity spaces into more formal learning environments and reflect on the tensions emerging from these efforts. We end by outlining steps to develop theory and interventions to navigate tensions and propel the field forward.     

Implementing “real science” through microcomputers and telecommunications in project-based elementary classrooms

This is a study of an ongoing collaborative project in which science education faculty and upper elementary school teachers investigate the potential of a project-based, technologyrich, environmentally oriented approach to science education in an urban school serving a racially diverse population. Major conclusions based on the experience of participants in this study include: (1) teachers describe their instructional roles in terms highly consistent with student-centered, project-based, experiential learning; (2) teachers believe that what makes science real for students is the feeling that they are working on a truly current problem that is also being investigated by others outside their classroom. This is achieved by KidsNet, a microcomputer- and telecommunications-mediated curriculum, in a way that would not be possible without this technology; (3) teachers describe the actual and possible role of computer technology in terms which, while insightful and generally positive, are not clearly related to its flexible use in project-based learning; and (4) while teachers recognize meaningful connections between off-line science activities and the use of computer and telecommunications technologies, their students often do not.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 16, 1993, Atlanta, Georgia.This work was partially supported by a Higher Education Grant from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education Improvement Program.     

Academic involvement at university

The call for students to become more involved in their academic study is not new. However few studies have investigated academic involvement as it is experienced by university students. This paper discusses the results of a study that was designed to explore student perceptions of the nature of academic involvement in learning. In addition students were asked to identify factors in their learning experience that encouraged or discouraged their academic involvement. The results reported here are drawn from interviews with 58 first and second year students attending Victoria University of Wellington.The results demonstrate that students experience involvement in qualitatively and quantitatively different ways that appear to be related to approach to learning. A major focus of the paper is on the interactive role personal and contextual factors play in the development of involvement. It is suggested that such factors combine to produce a particular learning climate that directly affects involvement in learning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this research for university policy, teaching practice and course design and makes some suggestions for further research.     

A Comparative Study of On-line Pretest Item—Calibration/Scaling Methods in Computerized Adaptive Testing

The purpose of this study was to compare and evaluate five on-line pretest item-calibration/scaling methods in computerized adaptive testing (CAT): marginal maximum likelihood estimate with one EM cycle (OEM), marginal maximum likelihood estimate with multiple EM cycles (MEM), Stocking's Method A, Stocking's Method B, and BILOG/Prior. The five methods were evaluated in terms of item-parameter recovery, using three different sample sizes (300, 1000 and 3000). The MEM method appeared to be the best choice among these, because it produced the smallest parameter-estimation errors for all sample size conditions. MEM and OEM are mathematically similar, although the OEM method produced larger errors. MEM also was preferable to OEM, unless the amount of time involved in iterative computation is a concern. Stocking's Method B also worked very well, but it required anchor items that either would increase test lengths or require larger sample sizes depending on test administration design. Until more appropriate ways of handling sparse data are devised, the BILOG/Prior method may not be a reasonable choice for small sample sizes. Stocking's Method A had the largest weighted total error, as well as a theoretical weakness (i.e., treating estimated ability as true ability); thus, there appeared to be little reason to use it.     

Responsiveness to General Education Instruction as the First Gate to Learning Disabilities Identification

Most definitions of learning disabilities (LD) include a qualification that adequate general education instruction was received and the child with LD did not benefit. Rarely is this tenet assessed in either practice or research before a diagnosis is made. We review three studies that investigated children's responsiveness to general education reading instruction as an indicator of need for more intensive interventions. Adequacy of instruction was quantified by children's level and rate of progress, compared to classmates, as measured by curriculum‐based measures of oral reading fluency. We found that the response‐to‐instruction model tested was valid in that (1) children who differ from their peers on level and slope of performance (dual discrepancy) have more severe academic and behavioral problems than children who have IQ‐achievement discrepancies or low achievement; (2) children who demonstrate persistent nonresponsiveness over three years differ from other at‐risk children on reading, reading‐related, and behavioral measures; and (3) at‐risk children who participated in specially designed general education interventions had better outcomes than at‐risk children who did not participate. We conducted additional analyses to assess low achievement definitional variations and found that they lack sensitivity and coverage compared to a dual discrepancy definition.     

Supervisory Style: Its Relation to the Supervisory Working Alliance and Supervisor Self‐Disclosure

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between supervisor perceptions of their supervisory style and elements of the supervision process, including the supervisory working alliance and supervisor self‐disclosure. Data from 137 counselor supervisors demonstrated a significant positive relationship between attractive, interpersonally sensitive, and task‐oriented supervisory styles and the (a) goals, tasks, and bond components of the supervisory working alliance and (b) frequency of supervisor self‐disclosure. Limitations and implications for counselor supervision theory, research, and practice are addressed.     

Dis-placing place-making: how African-American and immigrant youth realize their rights to the city

ABSTRACT

Notions of place-making assume that individuals and groups of people have legitimate ‘rights to the city.’ This paper unsettles these notions to incorporate the politically and legally tenuous relationships African-American and Immigrant youth have to their cities. We describe a community-based digital STEAM curriculum called Mobile City Science that invited youth to engage in place-making efforts using mobile and location-aware technologies. The design study relied on a contradiction that is fundamental to youth place-making in an era of white nationalism: for African-American and Immigrant youth to engage power structures in community development processes, they had to engage in a series of dis-placements that removed them from embodied experiences and in-location perceptions of their communities. Self-censoring, witnessing, historicizing, and re-veiwing were all examples of dis-placements youth enacted to speak truth to power with digital and mobile tools.     

VCE chemistry as a curriculum innovation

Conclusion The difficulty of sharing meaning of curriculum intentions between different groups is highlighted in this study. The acceptance of the novel features of the Chemistry Study Design is mixed. The longitudinal nature of the study helped to identify the difficulty teachers had in understanding the meaning of these novel features although the experiences of teaching units in the VCE chemistry course have enabled some teachers to shift in their construction of the meaning of the words and messages around them. Specializations: chemistry and science education, technology and industry links with sicence in schools. Specializations: science and technology curriculum, environmental education, educational disadvantage. Specializations: curriculum change, science career paths. Specializations: science education, computers in schools.