The Impact of Teacher Classroom Practices on Student Achievement during the Implementation of a Reform‐based Chemistry Curriculum

Evidence of a gap in student understanding has been well documented in chemistry: the typical student holds an abundance of misconceptions. The current expectation is that educational reform will foster greater student achievement via inquiry teaching within classrooms. Using assessments involving both conceptual and algorithmic knowledge of gas behaviour, gas laws, and phase changes in chemistry, this study aims to determine the relationship between inquiry teaching and student achievement. The topics were tested in the context of a unit from a reform‐based curriculum that features inquiry, hands‐on activities, and cooperative learning. This curriculum provides step‐by‐step guidance for each lesson in the teacher materials, in order to promote quality inquiry teaching. Two schools were involved in this study, with two high school chemistry teachers from each school. Each teacher participated in professional development and implemented this curriculum with sufficient training and guidance to develop reform methods. Student achievement was found to positively correlate with the use of inquiry teaching about the assessed concepts, regardless of teacher experience or school context.     

How Students without Special Needs Perceive Social Inclusion of Children with Physical Impairments in Mainstream Schools: A Scoping Review

ABSTRACT

Despite the importance of students without special needs’ perspectives in promoting successful social inclusion strategies in the classroom, their perspectives are not well represented in the literature. The purpose of this scoping review was to summarise the perspectives of students without special needs around the social inclusion of students with physical impairments in mainstream classrooms, describe factors impacting these perspectives and identify research gaps. Five databases were searched and 6229 articles were screened for eligibility. Ten articles met the inclusion criteria and were included in this review. The findings suggest that students without special needs avoid interacting with students with physical impairments, and are less accepting and less willing to befriend a student with a physical impairment. Combined, there were 13 individual, interpersonal and contextual factors influencing these perspectives, which should be considered to inform future inclusion practices.     

Being Chinese or Being Different: Chinese Undergraduates’ Use of Discourses of Chineseness

Myths about “the Chinese learner” developed from an outsider perspective abound in the Western world. The focus of this article, however, is how discourses of Chineseness were used by the Chinese international students themselves who, as undergraduate students in a New Zealand university, were the subjects of my doctoral research. It examines the students’ notions of Chineseness and how these served in explaining their own narratives, either through identifying with, or distancing themselves from, “Chinese” traits, indicating alternatively a shared experience of the challenges of the new academic culture, or marking themselves out as having a special ability to thrive within it. Whichever way they used them, the discourses seemed to serve a purpose of fortifying their sense of identity and membership. By the end of their study, they were able to reflect carefully on their experiences and discuss new third space identities in which both Chinese and New Zealand values were forging new realities for them.     

Building Systems from Scratch: an Exploratory Study of Students Learning About Climate Change

Science and computational practices such as modeling and abstraction are critical to understanding the complex systems that are integral to climate science. Given the demonstrated affordances of game design in supporting such practices, we implemented a free 4-day intensive workshop for middle school girls that focused on using the visual programming environment, Scratch, to design games to teach others about climate change. The experience was carefully constructed so that girls of widely differing levels of experience were able to engage in a cycle of game design. This qualitative study aimed to explore the representational choices the girls made as they took up aspects of climate change systems and modeled them in their games. Evidence points to the ways in which designing games about climate science fostered emergent systems thinking and engagement in modeling practices as learners chose what to represent in their games, grappled with the realism of their respective representations, and modeled interactions among systems components. Given the girls’ levels of programming skill, parts of systems were more tractable to create than others. The educational purpose of the games was important to the girls’ overall design experience, since it influenced their choice of topic, and challenged their emergent understanding of climate change as a systems problem.     

Learning Choices,Older Australians and Active Ageing

This paper reports on the findings of qualitative, semistructured interviews conducted with 40 older Australian participants who either did or did not engage in organized learning. Phenomenology was used to guide the interviews and analysis to explore the lived learning experiences and perspectives of these older people. Their experiences of learning can be described in two main categories of pleasure and leisure or purpose and relevance. Almost all the activities described in these categories have the potential to support health and wellbeing. Organizers of activities should take these reasons into account.     

The Effects of an Age‐appropriate Intervention on Young Children's Understanding of Inheritance

ABSTRACT The present study explored 4(N = 22) and 7‐year‐olds’ (N = 24) under‐Standing of biological inheritance in cows and horses. An intervention technique adapted from Springer (1995) in which children are taught the basic facts of intrauterine development and birth, in story form, was used in an attempt to improve children's conceptual understanding of inheritance. All children were pre‐tested about inheritance and subsequently half were trained using the intervention (the others were controls). All children were post‐tested within a week of pre‐test, and about 4 weeks later completed delayed post‐tests. Results showed that at pre‐test there were significant age differences in both judgements and explanations of inheritance with 7‐year‐olds exhibiting more sophisticated biological reasoning. Surprisingly, there were no significant improvements for either age in judgements or explanations of inheritance as a function of the intervention at post‐test or delayed post‐test. The findings are discussed with reference to theoretical issues surrounding children's theory of inheritance and the implications for training studies.     

Development of a Measure to Assess Youth Self-reported Experiences of Activity Settings (SEAS)

There is a need for psychometrically sound measures of youth experiences of community/home leisure activity settings. The 22-item Self-Reported Experiences of Activity Settings (SEAS) captures the following experiences of youth with a Grade 3 level of language comprehension or more: Personal Growth, Psychological Engagement, Social Belonging, Meaningful Interactions, and Choice & Control. Forty-five youth aged 14–23 years (10 with severe disabilities) completed the SEAS in 160 leisure activity settings. The SEAS has good to excellent internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha from 0.71 to 0.88) and moderate test–retest reliability (mean scale intra-class correlation coefficient = 0.68), as expected due to changes in activity settings over time. The SEAS was able to differentiate various types of activity settings and participation partners. The SEAS can be used to gain greater understanding of situation-specific experiences of youth participating in various types of recreation and leisure activity settings, including youth with different types of disabilities and those without disabilities.