Online Course Design in Higher Education: A Review of National and Statewide Evaluation Instruments

This research identifies six online course evaluation instruments used nationally or in statewide systems. We examined the characteristics (i.e., number of standards and criteria) and coded the criteria that guide the design of online courses. We discussed the focus of the instruments and their unique features.     

Parental perceptions of the 2014 SEND legislation

The study researched parent’s experiences of The Children and Families Act 2014 in Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire. A sample of parents using KIDS Services in the area were surveyed by questionnaire, both before and after the legislation came into force. Nearly half of the parents were aware of a change in Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) legislation; and a third noticed a change in support for their child. Professionals are now more involved in SEND early identification, and most SEND needs were identified at or before the early year stage. The majority of parents thought that the support for their child was either always or sometimes well coordinated. Parents generally felt more involved in the process since the Act, and perceived improvements in educational support. Professional support for parents at diagnosis had increased over the studies, and educational, health and social care needs were generally being met. However, some parents thought that Information, communication and school support needed to improve, and that the voluntary sector was highly regarded. Implications in relation to practice were also made.     

Options for Change: A Flexible Vehicle for Curriculum Evolution and Reform

In this article we examine a flexible curricular approach known as the “Option.” The Option enables students to supplement traditional majors with a coherent set of courses and other educational experiences in a related, often interdisciplinary field. Options can act as curricular bridges between mainstream academic fields and problems of professional practice. They can also give students experience with emerging subject areas (e.g., biomedical engineering). Options serve as laboratories for experimenting with new subject areas before incorporating them fully into the curriculum as majors and minors. Hence, Options promote creativity and risk-taking by providing a proving ground for potential new academic programs.Roger G. Baldwin received his doctorate in higher education from the University of Michigan. He is currently Professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education at Michigan State University. His research interests include curriculum development and reform, faculty career development, and organizational change. Melissa J. Baumann received her doctorate in Materials Science and Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. She is currently Associate Professor of Engineering at Michigan State University. Her research interests include biomedical materials research, specifically ceramic scaffolds in bone tissue engineering and biomedical engineering education.     

The Ontogeny of Social Information Gathering

When facing the unknown, humans tend to consult others for guidance. This propensity to treat others as information sources has wide-ranging implications, being in part responsible for the breadth and depth of our world knowledge. As yet, little is known concerning when and how young children acquire this important skill. Social referencing and communicative abilities in infancy have been interpreted by many as reflecting precocious social information-seeking ability, but the evidence is far from compelling and equally compatible with an attachment regulation interpretation. While the evidence indicates that infants as young as 12 months are good consumers of social information, it falls well short of demonstrating that they are active seekers of that information. Moreover, genuine social information seeking requires an implicit conception of the knowledge-ignorance distinction, and existing research on children's theories of mind suggests that such a conception is most likely not available in infancy. For these reasons, we argue for a developmental account of social information-gathering ability, one that is consistent with the larger body of evidence concerning sociocognitive abilities in infants and young children.     

Transient and Robust Knowledge: Contextual Support and the Dynamics of Children's Reasoning About Density

ABSTRACT— Contextual support for performance and understanding plays an important role in learning and teaching. This study investigated the temporal course of the effects of support—how it affects complexity and correctness of judgments about density in kindergarten ( n = 35) and second-grade ( n = 29) children. In the experimental group, a teacher provided support through modeling more complex reasoning about why objects sink or float. Children's complexity judgments increased sharply with support compared to no support, although their predictions about whether objects would sink or float were mostly correct from the start. Following the support event, children showed a sudden jump in complexity of explanations, which was transient for most children, who showed either rapid decrease or some oscillation and then decrease. A few sustained the high-level explanation after the jump, showing robust knowledge. That is, patterns of performance across trials were primarily nonlinear, following mostly cubic or quadratic change. In addition, second-graders had a more complex understanding of density than did kindergarteners. Findings indicate that children's concepts are dynamic rather than static, as evidenced by the strong but transient effects of support for most students. To move from transient to robust knowledge requires the building of knowledge and skill over time.     

Transformations in learning and teaching through Initial Teacher Education

In England, little research has been carried out into how pre‐service secondary English teachers transform what they know as they learn to teach. They are seldom asked to reflect explicitly on the connections between the pedagogy of their undergraduate studies and their pedagogical experiences as student teachers. The initial teacher education committee of the National Association for the Teaching of English decided to explore these connections by asking student teachers on English Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses in five different university departments of education to respond to a series of questions at the start and end of the academic year 2004–2005. The questions fall into four broad areas: student teachers' experiences as learners at undergraduate level and developing ideas about teaching; the nature of the subject English; tensions encountered during the PGCE course; new learning about teaching. The purpose of this article is to discuss some patterns emerging from the research. The most prominent of these is student teachers' realisation that good teaching comes from teachers seeing themselves as learners. We argue that ‘reflexivity’ ( Moore, 2004 ) is a valuable way to help student teachers begin to understand this transformation from learner into learning teacher.     

Savings in classical conditioning in the rabbit as a function of extended extinction

In the present experiments, savings phenomena following a limited amount of initial acquisition and extended extinction were examined. Experiments 1 and 2 compared rates of reacquisition following brief acquisition and various amounts of extinction in conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane and heart rate response, respectively. Experiment 3 compared rates of acquisition to a novel stimulus (e.g., light) following brief acquisition and various amounts of extinction to another stimulus (e.g., tone). In addition, in Experiment 3 recovery of responding to the extinguished stimulus during acquisition to the novel, cross-modal stimulus was examined. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 demonstrated that with a limited number of acquisition trials (1) there was a graded reduction in the rate of reacquisition as a function of the number of extinction trials in both conditioning preparations, (2) there was a graded reduction in the rate of cross-modal acquisition as a function of the number of extinction trials, but (3), in Experiment 3, recovery of responding to the extinguished stimulus during cross-modal training of the novel stimulus appeared uniformly robust even in the face of extended extinction.     

HPE teachers’ negotiation of environmental health spaces: discursive positions,embodiment and materialism

A National Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (HPE) has recently been developed in Australia. This new curriculum reflects, among other educational priorities, both environmental sensitivities and a commitment to the enhancement of young people’s health and wellbeing. HPE is one of the key sites in the curriculum where a focused consideration of the relationship between the environment and health is possible. However, to date no research has considered the ways that HPE teachers might recognise and negotiate these spaces. The research described in this paper addresses this gap through an analysis of semi-structured interviews with generalist primary and specialist secondary HPE teachers, drawing on a ‘narrative ethnography’ approach derived from cultural geography. This analysis highlights the consequences of the absence of a knowledge tradition that explicitly links the fields of the environment and health in HPE. Participants who were able to conceptualise environmental health almost exclusively drew on dominant neoliberal and risk discourses. At the same time, teachers’ embodied histories and affective encounters with non-human nature helped them to rupture or challenge dominant assumptions about environmental health. We argue that corporeal knowledge developed through embodied experiences has the potential to assist teachers in formulating environmental health in ways that highlight how interactions with the environment might enhance health and wellbeing.     

Learning words from knowledgeable versus ignorant speakers: links between preschoolers' theory of mind and semantic development

Two studies addressed whether children consider speakers' knowledge states when establishing initial word-referent links. In Study 1, forty-eight 3- and 4-year-olds were taught two novel words by a speaker who expressed either knowledge or ignorance about the words' referents. Children showed better word learning when the speaker was knowledgeable. In Study 2, forty-eight 3- and 4-year-olds were taught two novel words by a speaker who expressed uncertainty about their referents. Whether the uncertainty truly reflected ignorance, however, differed across conditions. In one condition, the speaker said he made the object himself and thus, he was knowledgeable. In the other condition, the speaker stated that the object was made by a friend and thus, expressed ignorance about it. Four-year-olds learned better in the speaker-made than in the friend-made condition; 3-year-olds, however, showed relatively poor learning in both conditions. These findings suggest that theory-of-mind developments impact word learning.