Influences of Writing Tasks on Students' Answers to Recall and Higher-Level Test Questions

This paper reports on two inter-related studies that examined the use of non-traditional writing strategies within secondary school science classrooms. The first study involved Year 10 students who incorporated one letter writing experience into the learning sequence when studying genetics. The second study was with Year 9 students who used both a non-traditional laboratory writing heuristic and letter writing as part of the learning sequence when studying a topic on light. The same teacher was involved in both case studies. A higher-level analogy question was added to the teacher-prepared tests for each study to examine if students who participated in writing-to-learn activities were able to perform significantly better as a group than a group of students who completed traditional teacher directed laboratory activities and note-taking. Results indicate that for the first study there was not a significant difference using t-test analysis, while for the second study involving two writing treatments there was a statistically significant difference using t-test analysis. There was no statistically significant difference in responses between treatment and control groups when answering low level recall questions for either case study. Student interviews indicated awareness by students of the metacognitive value gained by using the non-traditional writing types.     

Complex Systems Approaches to Educational Research: Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

To explore the movement toward increased complex systems (CS) research in education, this special issue of the Journal of Experimental Education was developed to identify some under-examined places where CS approaches have advanced research. The articles provide empirical examples of research leveraging methods and analyses from complexity science. In this introduction article to the special issue, we discuss the authors’ contributions to defining and explicating concepts and methods that fall under the umbrella of CS perspectives and how these methods were used to investigate complex processes in their topics of study. The articles capture the goal of the special issue to demonstrate how the research questions framed by CS assumptions can change our expectations about the very nature of the processes under study in education. We then take a more global perspective and acknowledge the commonalities amongst the papers, including (a) the reliance on intensive data to answer research questions, and (b) the use of dynamic approaches that yield findings about the stability and change of these systems and phenomena.     

Escape-from-fear performance as affected by handling method and an additional CS-shock treatment

Experiment 1 demonstrated that hurdle-jumping, escape-from-fear (EFF) performance was affected deleteriously when the handling of the rats was by the tail rather than the body and was facilitated by the administration, just prior to EFF training, of one additional CS-shock pairing along with the opportunity to jump the hurdle. Additional experiments elucidated the basis for the effect of these two variables. Experiment 2 indicated that tail handling degraded performance by decreasing reinforcement. In Experiment 3, the facilitatory effect of the extra CS-shock treatment was found to result from the occurrence of a response at the termination of the pairing and not from the CS-shock pairing per se.     

Statement-Pie: a strategy to improve the paragraph writing skills of adolescents with learning disabilities

This study investigated the effects of teaching a metacognitive text structure strategy upon the paragraph writing skills of eighth-grade students with learning disabilities. The technique, called Statement-Pie (Hanau, 1974), teaches students to understand the relationship of supporting details to a main idea. Four students were taught to use an outline as a paragraph planning guide, which they then used to convert information into written expository paragraphs. All subjects reached instructional outcome criterion on the writing of comparison/contrast and sequence paragraphs. One week after reaching mastery in the special education classroom, students generalized their paragraph writing skills to other teachers and to different classrooms. The results of this investigation indicate that when provided with direct, intensive instruction in a text structure strategy, adolescents with learning disabilities can improve their skills in paragraph writing.     

Middle Schools: the heart of schools in crisis

This paper is about middle schools and the effects of recent policies on the curricula organisation of six of them. We begin by establishing some general links between middle school origins, brief history and development, and wider economic and political forces for change. Drawing on four years of research with a group of schools in one local authority, we describe some of the directions of change which followed the Great Debate. We highlight recent changes as these schools came under increasing bureaucratic control, with the emphasis on the organisation of pupil selection and changes from mixed ability grouping, to setting, and back to mixed ability groups. We conclude with some theoretical discussion related to the work of Habermas.     

Computer-managed instruction in Naval technical training

Based on the success reported by the behaviorally oriented programmed instruction movement in the 1960s, the Navy in the late 1960s and early 1970s began to individualize and self-pace a number of their high student throughput apprentice training courses. To facilitate self-pacing the Navy set up a centralized computer-managed instruction (CMI) system to manage self-paced courses. This paper describes the evolution of that CMI system, reviews a number of studies done on the system over 10 years (many of which were published as internal technical reports with restricted distribution), describes the demise of the system, and discusses future directions of self-paced and individualized instruction.