ICT action school development at Helen Parkhurst Dalton School

The paper presents the progress of the action plan for the improvement of the ICT usage at the Helen Parkhurst Dalton School for secondary education in the Netherlands. At the start of the described action period in 2007, the ICT-usage in education was assessed through a review performed by a group of European inspectors. This assessment formed the basis for a continuous development in the school for promoting and improving the usage of ICT to improve the effectiveness of education. We did this by addressing the observed weaknesses with special measures, and continuing the action plans which were already put in place. We kept loyal to our starting point that technology use has to be determined through a strong vision of education and not that technology determines our philosophy as is sometimes the case. It was determined that the curriculum that should drive the learning, not the technology. In 2009 we carried out an intermediate self-evaluation. We established a new vision for school development for the near future. In this vision there was much room for a growing role of ICT usage. Concrete plans for the future were made. In this paper, the third in a row, we will try to assess the full impact of this implementation for teachers, learners and the quality of the teaching and learning process by comparing the assessment of 2007 with a self evaluation on the same indicators in 2011.     

Paying attention to attention: New economies for learning

Challenging formal education's traditional monopoly over the mass-scale acculturation of youth, the technological infrastructure of the new economy brings in its wake a new " attentional economy" in which any "connected" adult or child owns and controls a full economic share of her or his own attention. For youth who have never known the text-bound world from which their elders have come, new technologies afford them far greater power and greatly expanded rights that enable them to decide for themselves what they can see, think, and do, as their teachers grapple with ways to attract, rather than compel, students' voluntary attention. This paper reviews various formulations of "attentional economy," and it urges the study of popular forms of technologically enabled play. These technologies effectively mobilize, direct, and sustain the engaged attention of youth, whose learning in and through play far exceeds the kind of glazed-eyed button-mashing complained of by those who have made little effort to understand the educative prospects of computer gaming.     

Teachers’ monitoring of students’ text comprehension: can students’ keywords and summaries improve teachers’ judgment accuracy?

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy. Teachers also judged their students’ learning for each text, while seeing - if present - the keywords or summaries each student had written for each text, and also selected texts for restudy. Overall, monitoring accuracy was low (.10 for students, ?.02 for teachers) and did not differ between cue-prompt conditions. Regulation, indexed by the correlation between JOLs and restudy selections, was significant (?.38 for students, ?.60 for teachers), but was also not affected by cue-prompt condition. In Experiment 2, teachers judged students’ comprehension of six texts without knowing the students’ names, so that only the keywords and summaries, not prior impressions, could inform judgments. Again, monitoring accuracy was generally low (.06), but higher for keywords (.23) than for summaries (?.10). These results suggest that monitoring intra-individual differences in students’ learning is challenging for teachers. Analyses of the diagnosticity and utilization of keywords suggest that these may contain insufficient cues for improving teacher judgments at this level of specificity.     

Gender differences in mental simulation during sentence and word processing

Text comprehension requires readers to mentally simulate the described situation by reactivating previously acquired sensory and motor information from (episodic) memory. Drawing upon research demonstrating gender differences, favouring girls, in tasks involving episodic memory retrieval, the present study explores whether gender differences exist in mental simulation in children (Grades 4 to 6). In Experiment 1, 99 children performed a sentence–picture verification task measuring mental simulation at sentence level. In Experiment 2, 97 children completed a lexical decision task in which imageability of words was manipulated to measure mental simulation at word level. Only for girls we found faster reaction times for matching versus mismatching sentence–picture pairs (Experiment 1) and high‐imageability versus low‐imageability words (Experiment 2). The results suggest that girls construct more coherent and vivid mental simulations than boys and rely more heavily on these representations. The results emphasize the importance of including gender into reading comprehension research. [Correction added on 13 June 2016, after first online publication: The affiliation of author “Björn B. de Koning” was previously wrong and has been corrected in this current version.]     

Toward Integration: From Quantitative Biology to Mathbio-Biomath?

In response to the call of BIO2010 for integrating quantitative skills into undergraduate biology education, 30 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Program Directors at the 2006 HHMI Program Directors Meeting established a consortium to investigate, implement, develop, and disseminate best practices resulting from the integration of math and biology. With the assistance of an HHMI-funded mini-grant, led by Karl Joplin of East Tennessee State University, and support in institutional HHMI grants at Emory and University of Delaware, these institutions held a series of summer institutes and workshops to document progress toward and address the challenges of implementing a more quantitative approach to undergraduate biology education. This report summarizes the results of the four summer institutes (2007–2010). The group developed four draft white papers, a wiki site, and a listserv. One major outcome of these meetings is this issue of CBE—Life Sciences Education, which resulted from proposals at our 2008 meeting and a January 2009 planning session. Many of the papers in this issue emerged from or were influenced by these meetings.     

Worldwide impacts of atmospheric vapor pressure deficit on the interannual variability of terrestrial carbon sinksOA

Interannual variability of the terrestrial ecosystem carbon sink is substantially regulated by various environmental variables and highly dominates the interannual variation of atmospheric carbon dioxide(CO₂) concentrations.Thus,it is necessary to determine dominating factors affecting the interannual variability of the carbon sink to improve our capability of predicting future terrestrial carbon sinks.Using global datasets derived from machine-learning methods and process-based ecosy...     

转型期城市社区功能变迁与社区制度创新

社区作为地域性社会生活共同体，集中体现了社会转型的基本特点，当代中国正处于从传统社会向现代社会转型的过程中，城市社区的结构与功能都发生着越来越深刻的变化，这一变化客观上要求改变原有的社会管理体制，创立新的社区组织形式及社区运行机制。     

Mathematics education in the neoliberal and corporate curriculum: the case of Brazilian agricultural high schools

The pedagogical principle learning by research guides the current curriculum in agricultural high schools in Brazil. A problematization of the principle shows how (1) it feeds into current neoliberal and corporate agendas in the education sector, and (2) it associates mathematical formalism and abstraction as necessary conditions for the production and use of biotechnology. Data consists of official national and institutional policy documents, as well as interviews conducted with nine former students, along with their school notebooks and tests. The theoretical and methodological framework draws on the work of Michel Foucault. It is argued that neoliberal market values are embedded in the mathematics education, through the articulation of abstract and formal reasoning with techno-scientific knowledge, for the purpose of competitive production. The learning by research principle shapes students’ subjectivities to desire becoming techno-scientificized individuals. The ethical question of the subordination of the value of mathematics education to a neoliberal, predominantly marketized logic is raised as a challenge to the role of mathematics in contemporary cultures.