Civics and Values Education Curriculum Policies in the United States: A Survey of the States

This article reports the results of a survey conducted in the fall of 1997. The purpose of this study was to survey the extant policies in civics and values education across the 50 United States. The survey addressed three areas concerning civics and values education: curriculum, textbook selection, and teacher licensure. The findings were: One, most states mandate or suggest civics education curriculum and policies while many fewer states have curriculum and policies addressing values education. Two, many states have teacher licensure requirements for civics instruction at the secondary level; however, no teacher licensure policies exist with respect to the instruction of values. Three, states are almost equally divided between the state‐adoption and local‐control methods of textbook adoption. The authors discuss six important trends and issues that emerge from this survey.     

Kinecting Physics: Conceptualization of Motion Through Visualization and Embodiment

The purpose of this work was to share our findings in using the Kinect technology to facilitate the understanding of basic kinematics with middle school science classrooms. This study marks the first three iterations of this design-based research that examines the pedagogical potential of using the Kinect technology. To this end, we explored the impact of using the Kinect in conjunction with an SDK Physical Virtual Graphing program on students’ understanding of displacement, velocity and acceleration compared to students who conducted more traditional inquiry of the same concepts. Results of this study show that, while there may be some affordances to be gained from integrating this technology, there is a need for a scaffolded approach that helps students to understand the “messiness” of the data collected. Further, meta-cognitive activities, such as reflective opportunities, should be integrated into the inquiry experiences in order to scaffold student learning and reinforce concepts being presented. While the Kinect did work to generate large-scale visualization and embodied interactions that served as a mechanism for student understanding, this study also suggests that a complementary approach that includes both the use of hands-on inquiry and the use of the Kinect sensor, with each activity informing the other, could be a powerful technique for supporting students’ learning of kinematics.     

Higher education and the achievement (and/or prevention) of equity and social justice

The article examines the theoretical and empirical literature on higher education’s role in relation to social equity and related notions of citizenship, social justice, social cohesion and meritocracy. It considers both the education and the research functions of higher education and how these impact upon different sections of society, on who benefits and who loses from them. Questions for future research on the wider impact of higher education are posed as well as some research questions on the narrower issue of widening participation.     

TransFormers in knowledge production: building science–practice collaborations

This article places action learning in the context of system innovation, as it studies the potential use of action learning for system change. In order to effect such system change, collaboration between actors from different institutional backgrounds is essential. To gain insight into if and how action learning can be applied for system change, we study three system change projects in Dutch agriculture. We focus specifically on the approaches developed by the project leaders for collaboration between the scientists and the entrepreneurs and analyse how the interaction between these two contributed to the learning process within the project. This article concludes with guiding concepts for action learning for system change in the field of sustainable development of agriculture and beyond.     

Eye movement patterns of captioned television viewers

Eye movement of six subjects was recorded as they watched video segments with and without captions. It was found that the addition of captions to a video resulted in major changes in eye movement patterns, with the viewing process becoming primarily a reading process. Further, although people viewing a specific video segment are likely to have similar eye movement patterns, there are also distinct individual differences present in these patterns. For example, someone accustomed to speechreading may spend more time looking at an actor's lips, while someone with poor English skills may spend more time reading the captions. Finally, there is some preliminary evidence to suggest that higher captioning speed results in more time spent reading captions on a video segment.