The teaching portfolio: institutional imperative or teacher’s personal journey?

This research draws on the experiences of a group of tertiary teachers who compiled a multi‐purpose portfolio as an assessment component of a postgraduate certificate in tertiary teaching at a New Zealand University. The research was initially undertaken in response to feedback from some of the participants that the experience of compiling a portfolio generated intense emotions. The data for this study were the retrospective reflections of the tertiary teachers on the experience of creating a portfolio as well as the portfolios themselves. The authors chose a narrative research methodology as an appropriate way to investigate a process that essentially involved the storying of the participants’ achievements and identities as tertiary teachers. The findings revealed that some participants felt uncomfortable about the blend of the formative (or developmental) and summative (or evaluative) functions of the multi‐purpose portfolio and that producing the portfolio evoked a range of complex emotions. These findings have led to the reformulation of the portfolio task.     

The DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN CAPACITY IN MALAWI: THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Faced with accelerating poverty, the Malawi government has re-awakened its commitment to the development of human capacity and the role of development in this context. This paper explores the relationship between development and science and technology. It goes on to review the country’s science and technology needs and how these justify taking developmental action. It concludes that strategies designed to increase access to education should not be limited to the primary sector, but should also include secondary curricula and university science and technology programmes. Drawing on the arguments in the article and personal experience, the authors suggest promoting the development of human capacity in Malawi by creating special “science schools” in the secondary sector and increasing the number of scholarships for university science students.     

Clickers in college classrooms: Fostering learning with questioning methods in large lecture classes

What can be done to promote student–instructor interaction in a large lecture class? One approach is to use a personal response system (or “clickers”) in which students press a button on a hand-held remote control device corresponding to their answer to a multiple choice question projected on a screen, then see the class distribution of answers on a screen, and discuss the thinking that leads to the correct answer. Students scored significantly higher on the course exams in a college-level educational psychology class when they used clickers to answer 2 to 4 questions per lecture (clicker group), as compared to an identical class with in-class questions presented without clickers (no-clicker group, d = 0.38) or with no in-class questions (control group, d = 0.40). The clicker treatment produced a gain of approximately 1/3 of a grade point over the no-clicker and control groups, which did not differ significantly from each other. Results are consistent with the generative theory of learning, which predicts students in the clicker group are more cognitively engaged during learning.