Viewpoint on distance education ‐ towards a focus and a future. ICDE World Conference, 11 August 1988. Oslo,Norway

Professor Charles Wedemeyer has appropriately been called the father of American distance education; he could also be termed an uncle of the British Open University, having acted as a consultant before the University opened to students.

As William Lighty Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison he broke the ground for much subsequent research in the field of distance education. His most familiar published work is his book Learning at the Back Door (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).

His long and distinguished career has included the Presidency of the International Council for Distance Education (ICDE), and the award of an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University in 1975.

He has attended many ICDE World conferences over the years, and in Oslo in the summer of 1988 gave a viewpoint on distance education for the future. Professor Wedemeyer has indicated that perhaps this paper will be the last he writes in this area; “This does not indicate a lack of interest... but at 77 years... I find it difficult to keep up with the volume of reading alone that must be maintained if I want to write among the best in our burgeoning field’.     

Electroencephalographic Coherence and Learning: Distinct Patterns of Change During Word Learning and Figure Learning Tasks

One likely mechanism in learning new skills is change in synchronous connections between distributed neural networks, which can be measured by coherence analysis of electroencephalographic patterns. This study examined coherence changes during the learning of two tasks, a word association task and a figure association task. Although learning curves were similar for both tasks, distinct patterns of coherence change were observed. Coherence tended to increase as learning progressed in the figure association task. In contrast, coherence tended to decrease in the word association task, especially within hemisphere. Word learning was coupled with negative intrahemispheric and positive interhemispheric performance–coherence relations in the gamma frequency. Unique to the figure learning task was an increase in the number of positive coherence–performance relations in both delta and theta frequencies across blocks. Results are discussed in light of ongoing efforts to identify the mechanisms that coordinate distributed brain activities during the process of learning. Further research is needed to define patterns of coherence change for different tasks, goals, and brain regions.     

Thinking Aloud Together: A Test of an Intervention to Foster Students' Collaborative Scientific Reasoning

This study addressed the question of how to increase students' competencies for regulating their co‐construction of knowledge when tackling complex collaborative learning tasks which are increasingly emphasized as a dimension of educational reform. An intervention stressing the metacognitive, regulatory, and strategic aspects of knowledge co‐construction, called Thinking Aloud Together, was embedded within a 12‐week science unit on building mental models of the nature of matter. Four classes of eighth graders received the intervention, and four served as control groups for quantitative analyses. In addition, the interactions of 24 students in eight focal groups were profiled qualitatively, and 12 of those students were interviewed twice. Students who received the intervention gained in metacognitive knowledge about collaborative reasoning and ability to articulate their collaborative reasoning processes in comparison to students in control classrooms, as hypothesized. However, the treatment and control students did not differ either in their abilities to apply their conceptual knowledge or in their on‐line collaborative reasoning behaviors in ways that were attributable to the intervention. Thus, there was a gap between students' metacognitive knowledge about collaborative cognition and their use of collaborative reasoning skills. Several reasons for this result are explored, as are patterns relating students' outcomes to their perspectives on learning science. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 1085–1109, 1999.     

Representing students' thinking about nutrient cycling in ecosystems: bidimensional coding of a complex topic

This study addresses the question of how to represent students' thinking about a complex topic in a way that is most useful to guide curriculum development, instructional decisions, and assessment of student learning. The development of a coding scheme that represents students' ideas along two dimensions, compatibility with expert propositions and elaboration of ideas, is described and applied to the analysis of interviews with four pairs of urban fifth- and sixth-grade students. Results indicate that decomposition is a linchpin concept for building an understanding of nutrient cycling, and that ideas which relate to children's natural framework theories provide a generative foundation for further learning. Finally, it is suggested that the elaboration dimension of the bidimensional coding scheme provides an indication of students' possession of valuable scientific habits of mind. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Historiographic Reconsideration of Colonial Education in Africa: Domestic Forces in the Early Expansion of English Schooling in Northern Igboland, 1890–1930

Mainstream historiography often turns to Europe's era of empire building to explain the expansion of Western formal education in Africa. Popular accounts suggest that in Africa (1) colonial involvement in education was late and short lived, spanning the early decades of the twentieth century, (2) missionaries were largely responsible for early educational expansion, and (3) education expansion resulted from interdenominational rivalries among missionaries. However, these popular narratives inadequately account for Africans’ own responses to colonial education. This study examines social and cultural shifts in northern Igboland in southeastern Nigeria between 1890 and 1930. It uses colonial archives and oral sources to demonstrate that beyond missionary rivalry, domestic contests converged with the fledgling colonial process to promote English education in northern Igboland. To accomplish this task, the article reviews methodological assumptions responsible for marginal attention to the agency of the colonized in the historiography of Western education in former colonies.     

National Curriculum Assessment in the U.K.

What are the objectives of national curriculum assessment in the United Kingdom? What criteria for assessment were established? What kinds of problems are associated with the assessment?