Teaching for a Sustainable World: the Environmental and Development Education Project for Teacher Education

The social, economic, political and ecological imperatives of sustainable development outlined in ’Our Common Future, Agenda 21’ and ’Caring for the Earth’ have established a renewed agenda for environmental education which links it very closely with development education. Teacher educators in Australia have responded to the need to link environmental and development education and to raise the level of attention usually devoted to them in teacher education programmes. The ’Environmental and Development Education Project for Teacher Education’ has been the result. The project has involved 20 educators, drawn from 11 universities, government departments and NGOs across Australia, in writing and trialing a set of 18 3‐hour workshop modules on environmental and development education for use in pre‐service teacher education courses. These modules, published in the project manual, ’Teaching for a Sustainable World’, illustrate how environmental education and development education are related and provide practical assistance for teacher educators who wish to include these important fields in their programmes. An intensive dissemination programme in 1993‐94 involves workshops for all Faculties of Education in Australia.     

‘I Think It's Really Great that Someone Is Listening to Us ...‘: young people and the environment

This paper presents a qualitative study of the environmental concerns and attitudes of young people. The study arose when it was recognised that a quantitative study on youth environmental knowledge and attitude in which we were engaged could be enriched through qualitative research. A pilot qualitative study was conducted using focus group interviews with young people aged 15‐17 years in Brisbane, Australia. The findings of this study are reported. Of particular interest are the young peoples’ expressions of cynicism, frustration, powerlessness and hope that have not been identified in quantitative studies about youth environmental knowledge and attitudes.     

The Illusion of Linearity: Expanding the evidence towards probabilistic reasoning

Previous research has shown that – due to the extensive attention spent to proportional reasoning in mathematics education – many students have a strong tendency to apply linear or proportional models anywhere, even in situations where they are not applicable. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the ‘illusion of linearity’. For example, in geometry it is known that many students believe that if the sides of a figure are doubled, the area is doubled too. In this article, the empirical evidence for this phenomenon is expanded to the domain of probabilistic reasoning. First, we elaborate on the notion of chance and provide some reasons for expecting the over generalization of linear models in the domain of probability too. Afterwards, a number of well-known and less-known probabilistic misconceptions are described and analysed, showing that they have one remarkable characteristic in common: they can be interpreted in terms oft he improper application of linear relations. Finally, we report on an empirical investigation aimed at identifying the ability of 10^th and12^th grade students to compare the probabilities of two binomial chance situations. It appears that before instruction in probability, students have a good capability of comparing two events qualitatively, but at the same time they incorrectly quantify this qualitative insight as if the variables in the problem were linked by a linear relationship. Remarkably, these errors persist after instruction in probability. The potential of this study for improving the teaching and learning of probability, as well as suggestions for further research, are discussed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

How do primary pre‐service teachers in a regional Australian university plan for teaching,learning and acting in environmentally responsible ways?

Integrated unit plans with an environmental focus can provide opportunities for school students to develop critical thinking skills, and to act in responsible ways – that is, to develop ‘action competence’. In this study, environmentally focused integrated unit plans, developed and implemented by final year pre‐service teachers at an Australian regional university, were analysed to determine the extent to which they contained concepts that promoted action competence. Results here suggest that more work could be done in the area of pre‐service education to prepare teachers for teaching, learning and acting responsibly in relation to complex environmental issues. In particular, there could be more emphasis on developing integrated unit plans that empower school students and promote critical thinking, democratic processes and action‐oriented knowledge.     

Students as Catalysts of Environmental Change: a framework for researching intergenerational influence through environmental education

Many environmental problems are desperately in need of attention. Educating both adults and young people is seen as part of the solution to such problems. Given this situation, and the already considerable investment in environmental education in schools, the notion of encouraging students to initiate environmental discussions with adults at home and in the community seems attractive and worthy of investigation. To this end, this paper critically reviews education and social science literature concerning intergenerational influence. An approach is outlined to guide future efforts in research and programme development aimed at encouraging students' to act as catalysts of environmental communication and learning beyond school boundaries.     

Chinese upper elementary school mathematics teachers�� attitudes towards the place and value of problematic word problems in mathematics education

Word problems play a crucial role in mathematics education. However, the authenticity of word problems is quite controversial. In terms of the necessity of realistic considerations to be taken into account in the solution process, word problems have been classified into two categories: standard word problems (S-items) and problematic word problems (P-items). S-items refer to those problems involving the straightforward application of one or more arithmetical operations with the given numbers, whereas P-items call for the use of real-world knowledge and real-life experience in the problem-solving process. This study aims to explore how Chinese upper elementary school mathematics teachers think of the place and value of P-items in the elementary mathematics curriculum.     

Who is granted authority in the mathematics classroom? An analysis of the observed and perceived distribution of authority

The article deals with the way in which authority was established and interpreted by teachers and students in two Flemish sixth-grade mathematics classrooms. Problem-solving lessons during a seven-month observation period were analysed regarding three aspects of teacher–student interactions that explicitly or implicitly reflect who bears mathematical authority: (1) to whom were students allowed to ask for help; (2) who was allowed to answer students’ mathematics-related questions; and (3) who was allowed to evaluate students’ responses. For each of these aspects, we were interested whether authority was ascribed only to the teacher or whether authority was distributed more broadly, with students being considered accountable for their own and other’s learning process. Interviews with teachers and students were conducted to investigate the meaning that participants gave to the practices in which they were involved.     

Transfer of conditioned suppression and conditioned acceleration from instrumental to consummatory baselines

Following training on a variable-interval food reinforcement schedule, rats were exposed to Pavlovian procedures which produced reliable conditioned suppression and conditioned acceleration of the leverpressing (instrumental) baseline. When free food was simultaneously made available in the test cage, all subjects spent the majority of each session “freeloading,” that is, eating food from a dish rather than leverpressing for it. When superimposed upon the freeloading baseline, the conditioned suppression and conditioned acceleration procedures affected the rate of pellet consumption identically in magnitude and direction to their previous effects on leverpressing. These results suggest a motivational mechanism for conditioned suppression and acceleration, rather than one which depends upon spurious punishment of specific response sequences.     

Perceptions of instructional quality: impact on acceptance and use of an online learning environment

ABSTRACT

Given the growing use of online learning environments in higher education, it is important to further unravel how students’ use is influenced by their perceptions towards these learning environments. This study includes the perceived quality of the instructional design based on the First Principles of Instruction of Merrill and students’ acceptance based on the constructs perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the technology acceptance model (TAM). The aim of this study is twofold: a first aim is to investigate the influence of the perceived instructional quality on students’ acceptance and the second aim is to investigate the impact of students’ acceptance and the perceived instructional quality on the quantity (i.e. course activity) and quality (i.e. course performance) of use. In this study, a Moodle-based online learning environment for learning French as a foreign language was studied. Participants were 161 university students. Structural equation modeling (SEM) indicates that the perceived instructional quality has a significant positive influence on students’ acceptance. Furthermore, students’ perceived instructional quality has a positive influence on the quality, but not on the quantity of use, whereas students’ acceptance of the online learning environment has no impact on the use of the learning environment.     

How immediate is language understanding? Investigating reading in real time

Oral and silent reading was studied for moving-window text displayed on a computer screen. Experiment 1 investigated whether local linguistic properties of text being read aloud affect speed in performing a dual task or the distance which a reader's voice lags behind the text seen. Regression analyses showed that choice reaction time during reading is not predicted by any linguistic properties of the immediate text considered, and that these properties instead predict a measure of eye-voice span. Experiment 2 investigated whether, in silent reading, reference is assigned to expressions in text while, or after, they are being viewed. In nearly all contexts, readers were observed to confirm that a given character in a story was being referred to only after the source expression in text had passed out of view. In general, the results tend to speak against an hypothesis about reading which holds that a reader completes processing of an expression in text while still looking at it.