Reflections on the Field: Aspirations of Learning Science and the Practical Logic of Instructional Enterprises

Over 100 years of learning and cognition research have had only modest cumulative impact on teaching, while many other practical domains such as agriculture have shown a steady growth in widely accepted, research-informed practices. Several reasons have been advanced for the painfully slow adoption of science-based instructional procedures. One important but not widely recognized obstacle is proposed here, namely, that the aims of fundamental learning and teaching research do not mesh well with the practical logic of schools. Basic learning research tends to focus on efficiency, i.e., how much can be learned from a given amount of effort or time but teaching efficiency is not a strong concern for schools. This is because they generally focus on global year-end results while the efforts required at the tactical lesson level are only loosely monitored. School administrators tend to reckon costs in terms of the number of engaged teachers and not in the difficulty of each teacher’s job. For these reasons, schools can be expected to have only nominal interests in science-informed, close management of tactical pedagogic units. Psychological work on labor saving possibilities, such as research-based instructive products, is more likely to be readily welcomed than improvements in lesson efficiency, especially in middle and high schools. Instructional enterprises in which the cost and the benefits of instruction are borne by the same agency, such as industrial training, are the most likely consumers of efficiency-related basic cognitive research.

Conferences

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

ConferencesCongrés

     

Notes: Russian Studies of Vision in Relation to Physical Activity and Sports

Abstract

The central purpose of this study was to determine the origin of sports extant in English-speaking countries. The method of research utilized was principally historical-bibliographical and was concerned with the collection, criticism, and synthesis of source material in an effort to establish past actuality. Specific documentary evidence concerning the date, place, and significant circumstances associated with the origins of 95 sports was synthesized. In most instances, establishing the date and place of origin was possible. Often, however, determining the personnel and circumstances connected with the origins was not possible. Charts show the dates of the origins chronologically, the origins attributed to various countries, and the activities from which the 95 sports evolved.     

Innovative Partnerships in the Knowledge Industry

The authors are concerned that, on one hand, the public universities in the United Kingdom and in other developed countries are becoming increasingly overcrowded (massified) and, on the other hand, underfunded. At the same time, numerous students who have had, in many cases, to pay large sums of money for their education, as in Canada, cannot find jobs when they graduate. Yet, increasingly, large corporations are creating in‐house training programmes and, in some cases, corporate universities. The conclusion is that academe is not providing the trained personnel that industry wishes (and needs) to hire. Why are universities apparently unable to fill the gap? A solution would be more targeted governmental steering of higher education. However, the majority of job creators in technological societies are small‐ and medium‐size enterprises. They cannot create their own training programmes, much less their own corporate universities. They must rely on higher education institutions both to provide them with skilled personnel with initial qualifications and then to provide further training. Higher education must seize this potential market.     

Knowledge recontextualisation in academic development: an empirical exploration of an emerging academic region

As an emerging field within higher education, academic development remains fragmented, both as a field of theory and practice. In the vibrant, on-going debate about the theoretical foundations and directions of academic development as a nascent field, some relatively wide-ranging claims which have been made seem to be lacking in supporting empirical evidence. With regards to this limitation, this paper contends that more systematic empirical explorations of the knowledge-base of academic development are vital to gain a better understanding of the field. Informed by Bernstein’s social realist frameworks on the structure of academic knowledge, the paper presents an analysis of knowledge recontextualisation processes in two English and two Flemish academic development units, based on semi-structured interviews with 30 academic developers. From the analysis, contrasting patterns of knowledge recontextualisation emerged between the four sites and between the national contexts in particular, pointing towards an increasing epistemological fragmentation.     

Cochlear implanted pupils in Scottish schools: 4-year school attainment data (2000-2004)

The Achievements of Deaf Pupils in Scotland (ADPS) project has been tracking the educational attainment of deaf pupils in Scotland's schools since 2000. At the time of writing, the database contains records for 1,752 deaf pupils (2000-2005). Here 4-year aggregate educational attainment data are reported for a subset of 152 school-aged deaf pupils with cochlear implants notified to the ADPS database between June 2000 and June 2004. The data describe primary and secondary school results in reading, writing, and math for this subgroup, as well as placement and communication characteristics. The educational attainment of the group of deaf pupils with cochlear implants is clearly marked when the deaf pupil population is disaggregated for hearing loss, achieving comparatively higher average attainment in both 5-14 Curriculum National Tests (Mathematics in particular) and Standard Grades. Therefore the gap in performance relative to the national population data is reduced for those deaf pupils, although it still widens at higher levels of achievement for the National Tests. Although most pupils with cochlear implants are placed in the mainstream, there is no pattern of migration toward mainstream schools. Some deaf pupils with cochlear implants moved out of mainstream to other types of placement, and this has implications for health-economic cost-utility assessments of cochlear implantation that favor mainstream education by drawing upon the relative cost of different placement types. These findings suggest that the ADPS program of research can contribute school outcome data as valuable real-life outcome measures in wider assessments of the benefit of cochlear implants to deaf children and deaf young people.     

TIJAH: Embracing IR Methods in XML Databases

This paper discusses our participation in INEX (the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval) using the TIJAH XML-IR system. TIJAHs system design follows a standard layered database architecture, carefully separating the conceptual, logical and physical levels. At the conceptual level, we classify the INEX XPath-based query expressions into three different query patterns. For each pattern, we present its mapping into a query execution strategy. The logical layer exploits score region algebra (SRA) as the basis for query processing. We discuss the region operators used to select and manipulate XML document components. The logical algebra expressions are mapped into efficient relational algebra expressions over a physical representation of the XML document collection using the pre-post numbering scheme. The paper concludes with an analysis of experiments performed with the INEX test collection.