Interdisciplinary Exploration Supports Sternberg’s Expansion of Giftedness

Robert Sternberg’s (2017) Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) framework provides a helpful way to align gifted education with the complexities of 21st-century socioeconomic and cultural environments. The recommendation that we shift away from pseudoquantitative precision in conceptions of giftedness aligns with similar recommendations in other fields including political science, economics, and mathematics. The emphases on ethics and wisdom are reinforced by analyses of the need for more ethical awareness in societies. These analyses arise from research and theory in other fields, including ethical philosophy, political science, economics, history, sociology, and journalism. These transdisciplinary similarities are interpreted to be conceptual triangulation supporting the importance of Sternberg’s model as a catalyst for the development of more holistic conceptions of giftedness and talent.     

Understanding by Design: A Framework for Effecting Curricular Development and Assessment

Successful learning outcomes require the integration of content and meaningful assessment with effective pedagogy. However, development of coherent and cohesive curriculum is seemingly overwhelming even to experienced teachers. Obviously this creates a barrier to successful student learning. Understanding by Design (UbD) overcomes this impasse by providing concise and practical guidance for experienced and inexperienced teachers. In programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, teams composed of University of Wyoming graduate students and science teachers from grades 6 to 9 designed motivating, inquiry-based lesson plans intended to get students to think and act like scientists. In this process, teams utilized principles outlined in UbD with great success. UbD describes a practical and useful “backward” design process in which anticipated results are first identified; acceptable evidence for learning outcomes is established and, only then, are specific learning experiences and instruction planned. Additionally, UbD provides procedures to avoid content overload by focusing on “enduring principles.” WHERE, the UbD sieve for activities, was used effectively to develop tasks that are engaging, that are consistent with state educational standards, and that promote self-directed, life-long learning.     

Ethics in Assessing and Developing Academic Quality

Assessing quality in higher education makes important ethical assumptions, some of them questionable. A more satisfactory ethical view is required if assessing quality in higher education is to be sound. However, political intrusion in system‐wide assessment brings an influence which, preoccupied with market forces and technological development, goes beyond appropriate technical excellence to technicist excess. This generates a climate inimical to ethical quality and conflicts with academic work. Academic development units have a special role in regard to academic quality, but tend to be conceived of in a technicist way. A resultant managerialist‐technicist approach to their task is incompatible with ethical and epistemological virtues necessary to sound academic work and its development.     

On the Future of Awful Thoughts in Teacher Education

This article explores the idea that the future of a profession resides in the questions it might ask of itself and how such questions affect its thinking. We consider how current conditions in teacher education-its crisis-driven orientation, its manic pace, its focus on control and stable knowledge-foreclose the capacity to think creatively from the having of awful thoughts. Drawing an example from literature we ask, what can it mean, to the lives we already live, to encounter human relations at the most difficult moments and in their most generous and ethical attempts? From this question, we raise themes that might allow us to rethink teacher education: affiliation, commitment, trauma, destruction and community.     

Beginning Conversations: Future Teachers' Perspectives on Gender

This paper begins with the observation that, for a variety of social, political, and economic reasons, many universities are beginning to rethink the nature of their relations with local communities and asks about the place of Faculties of Education in such processes of reconsideration. It describes recent initiatives at York University as examples of what might be possible.     

Designing the Internet of Things for learning environmentally responsible behaviour

We present two designs in the area of the Internet of Things, utilizing the ontology-driven Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications (SOFIA) Interoperability Platform (IOP). The IOP connects domestic objects in the physical world to the information world, allowing for coaching the behaviour of, or raising awareness in, domestic energy consumption. The concept and architecture of the SOFIA IOP is introduced, in which the domestic objects are knowledge processors connected to a semantic information broker. This broker, using a blackboard design pattern, ontologies, and semantic web technologies, enables interoperability among both digital and physical entities. The two designs based on the SOFIA IOP are presented as examples for coaching with and learning from the Internet of Things. Although both designs are in the area of domestic energy consumption, they can be seen as good starting points towards broader areas of ubiquitous learning enabled by the Internet of Things.     

Teaching an Innocence Case Review Course to Undergraduate Students

After two years of experience in overseeing groups of undergraduate and graduate criminal justice students in an Innocence Case Review course at the University of Central Missouri (UCM), the authors reviewed the structure of the course and the attitudes of the participating students. An examination of Innocence Case Review current procedures in undergraduate institutions and law schools provides background for course design. This article summarizes the findings of the students’ experiences, reactions, and attitudes of their yearlong case screening efforts, and to the criminal justice system in general. The first part of this article examines the literature on innocence case review classes at both undergraduate institutions and law schools exploring different learning styles and strategies inherent in this type of class. It also explores the skills necessary for case review, and the skills students can take to other classes and professions. The second part reviews the structure of our courses as initially created and implemented for the last two academic years at UCM and the modifications the instructors felt necessary for the future. The third part examines the survey conducted by the UCM’s Innocence Case Review class, including student suggestions for class improvements and advice to students selected for the new academic year. The benefits and abilities gained by the students through this course become apparent. The fourth part discusses and evaluates the current class structure and reforms suggested by the UCM students, the professors’ experience, and as indicated by other universities. The conclusion reviews findings gathered from the current course as well as examining other universities’ courses, and the value students experience from participating in this experiential or engaged learning.     

From Design and Implementation to Impact of Quality Assurance: An Overview of Some Studies into what Impacts Improvement

Abstract

Access to university has improved following the massification of the Australian higher education sector which started in 1989, with the expansion being funded by a widening of the funding base. In the ten years from 1989, Australian universities enrolled an additional 231,000 students, including an extra 189,000 in undergraduate bachelor degrees. Specific equity policies have further attempted to increase opportunities for students previously excluded from higher education. This paper looks at changes in the composition of the student body, and in the patterns of university funding. Using aggregated national student data sets, some of the changes which have arisen from massification are identified, with particular consideration of designated equity groups.     

Communication apprehension in the dating partner context

This research project focused upon an inconsistency in the structure of a context specific instrument measuring communication apprehension in dating relationships. A parsimonious, single‐factor, solution for Dating Partner Communication Apprehension (DPCA) emerged from the analysis. Principle component analysis produced a 13‐item solution that maintains high reliability and validity. As hypothesized, validity checks indicated that the DPCA unidimensional model was moderately and significantly correlated with dyadic communication apprehension, interpersonal solidarity, interpersonal communication satisfaction, and a series of relational perceptions in the dating context. A variety of potential applications and explorations of communication apprehension within dating relationships are discussed.