Adapting to Curriculum Change: A Theoretical Framework Informing the Design and Implementation of a Curriculum Intervention

Adapting to curriculum change necessitates the evaluation of teaching and learning pedagogies. A new curriculum invites reflection on how knowledge is constructed and operationalised to extend higher order thinking in adolescent learners. This paper reviews contemporary empirical and theoretical literature identifying productive pedagogical practices associated with critical reading competencies in order to design and implement a curriculum intervention in a senior secondary Literature course.     

Using learning analytics in the Amazonas: understanding students’ behaviour in introductory programming

Tools for automatic grading programming assignments, also known as Online Judges, have been widely used to support computer science (CS) courses. Nevertheless, few studies have used these tools to acquire and analyse interaction data to better understand the students’ performance and behaviours, often due to data availability or inadequate granularity. To address this problem, we propose an Online Judge called CodeBench, which allows for fine-grained data collection of student interactions, at the level of, eg, keystrokes, number of submissions, and grades. We deployed CodeBench for 3 years (2016–18) and collected data from 2058 students from 16 introductory computer science (CS1) courses, on which we have carried out fine-grained learning analytics, towards early detection of effective/ineffective behaviours regarding learning CS concepts. Results extract clear behavioural classes of CS1 students, significantly differentiated both semantically and statistically, enabling us to better explain how student behaviours during programming have influenced learning outcomes. Finally, we also identify behaviours that can guide novice students to improve their learning performance, which can be used for interventions. We believe this work is a step forward towards enhancing Online Judges and helping teachers and students improve their CS1 teaching/learning practices.     

Powerful pedagogical strategies in initial teacher education

The development of beginning teachers’ practice during a school placement is a multiplicity of mediated interaction between university and school based systems. Both systems have the common aim of training effective teachers. However day‐to‐day internal institution matters can cause tension between the learning goals set out for the beginning teacher by the university and the schools’ drive to ensure maximum student performance in ‘high stake’ national tests. The aim of the intervention was to set up structures which might enable beginning teachers to develop the capacity to think about and reflect explicitly on their practice, through purposive activity in an authentic classroom environment. The context of the activity was a secondary science course which aimed to encourage new teachers to empathize with secondary school pupils (aged 11–16) and understand their conceptual difficulties in learning about science within the constraints of a ‘curriculum delivery’ lead culture. The dialogue engaged in as part of the intervention helped beginning teachers to think critically about practice during school placements.     

Connections and critique: Feminist pedagogy and science teacher education

In this article, we authors and feminist science and teacher educators share assignments we developed and used in our undergraduate and graduate teacher education classes. We designed these varied assignments to help students feel comfortable with science, to begin to understand and critique the many ways science has been narrowly and powerfully shaped and has marginalized significant groups of individuals, and to begin to deconstruct scientific knowledge and construct alternative views of science and science education that are gender and culture sensitive. We also challenged them to use what they were learning to develop pedagogical strategies that would be inviting to their own students. The focus of the article is our students' reactions to these assignments and how these reactions—both inviting and resisting—informed us about their notions of science, of teaching, of themselves as learners, and of the social context in which they would teach. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 897–918, 1998.     

A Blurring of the Boundaries

Our certainty about the definition of museums is disappearing and with it goes our assurance about where we are and what we are becoming. Observing visitors' use of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum could cause us to change our understanding about how people use and act in museums. Further boundaries are blurring as the native communities worldwide ask museum personnel to change their methods of collections care and alter rules of accessioned objects' use. Without acknowledging it, museum personnel are becoming more comfortable with reproductions and purposebuilt material. Technology is making us a “paperless” society. Our need for and understanding of “authenticity” is changing, and we no longer rely purely on our objects to define our work. Are we destroying museums, changing with the times, or creating some new and potentially more vibrant and useful institutions? Can a new realignment and new definition of our institutions help us to create a more civil society? Do we wish to continue on this road?     

Risks and Opportunities for Natural History Collections: Moving Toward a Unified Policy

The current status of natural history collections is complex and seemingly contradictory. While opportunities for collections to serve society are greater than ever, many institutions find that their ability to care for collections is diminishing. Competition for resources, especially in academic institutions, is one reason. But there is also sometimes a lack of clear mission for collections within organizations themselves. The Association of Systematics Collections (ASC) provides programs and resources to help institutions meet the challenge of maintaining natural history collections. If collections are truly endangered, we can help ensure that they are not lost to science and society.