Bridging scientific reasoning and conceptual change through adaptive web‐based learning

This study reports an adaptive digital learning project, Scientific Concept Construction and Reconstruction (SCCR), and examines its effects on 108 8th grade students' scientific reasoning and conceptual change through mixed methods. A one‐group pre‐, post‐, and retention quasi‐experimental design was used in the study. All students received tests for Atomic Achievement, Scientific Reasoning, and Atomic Dependent Reasoning before, 1 week after, and 8 weeks after learning. A total of 18 students, six from each class, were each interviewed for 1 hour before, immediately after, and 2 months after learning. A flow map was used to provide a sequential representation of the flow of students' scientific narrative elicited from the interviews, and to further analyze the level of scientific reasoning and conceptual change. Results show students' concepts of atoms, scientific reasoning, and conceptual change made progress, which is consistent with the interviewing results regarding the level of scientific reasoning and quantity of conceptual change. This study demonstrated that students' conceptual change and scientific reasoning could be improved through the SCCR learning project. Moreover, regression results indicated students' scientific reasoning contributed more to their conceptual change than to the concepts students held immediately after learning. It implies that scientific reasoning was pivotal for conceptual change and prompted students to make associations among new mental sets and existing hierarchical structure‐based memory. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 91–119, 2010     

Effects of training peer tutors in content knowledge versus tutoring skills on giving feedback to help tutees’ complex tasks

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of training tutors in content knowledge of a particular domain versus training them in tutoring skills of pedagogical knowledge when tutoring on a complex tutee task. Forty-seven tutor–tutee pairs of fourth-year secondary school students were created and assigned to one of the two treatments. Twenty-two tutors received training in content knowledge and the other twenty-five tutors in tutoring skills. Tutors formulated written feedback immediately after the training. Tutees first interpreted the tutor feedback and then used it to revise their research questions. The results showed that tutors trained in tutoring skills formulated more effective feedback than tutors trained in content knowledge. In addition, tutees helped by tutoring-skills tutors found the feedback more motivating than those helped by content-knowledge tutors. However, no differences were found in tutee performance on revision. The findings are discussed in terms of the set-up of this study and implications for improving the effectiveness of peer tutoring.     

The intellectual development of the technology acceptance model: A co-citation analysis

The goal of this paper is to present a visual mapping of intellectual structure in two-dimensions and to identify the subfields of the technology acceptance model through co-citation analysis. All the citation documents are included in the ISI Web of Knowledge database between 1989 and 2006. By using a sequence of statistical analyses including factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and cluster analysis, we identified three main trends: task-related systems, e-commerce systems, and hedonic systems. The findings yielded managerial implications for both academic and practical issues.     

心物交感互动：好诗的基本条件——以林亨泰、郑愁予的两首组诗为例

好诗的条件会是什么？一直是历史中争辩不休而未得正解的问题,诗人的见解不免成为主观的诗观的表达,评论者的意见往往又是术语的堆砌,读者接受学的反应,也从未有人真正提出统计数据加以分析。论文试图从诗歌发生学的角度去厘清好诗的基本条件,第一层次在于诗人是否能以自己的心与外物交感互动,成就一首好诗,第二层次在于这首诗是否能够唤醒读者的心与外物（包含这首诗）的交感互动,藉以确立一首好诗的基本特质。并以林亨泰的《风景》组诗、郑愁予的《小城连作》组诗为例证,加以鉴识。     

Science and Mathematics Literacy: PISA for Better School Education

In this study, we explored how a teacher used a new mobile application that enables students to collect data inside and outside the classroom, and then use the data to create scientific explanations by using claim-evidence-reasoning framework. Previous technologies designed to support scientific explanations focused on how these programs improve students’ scientific explanations, but these programs ignored how scientific explanation applications can support teacher practices. Thus, to increase our knowledge about using mobile devices in education, this study aims to portray the synergy with an emphasis on a teacher’s practices when using mobile devices in 2 different units (water quality and plants). Synergy can be thought of as various scaffolds (scaffolds in the mobile application and the teacher support) working together to enable students to support creating explanations when using the mobile application. The findings of this study showed that the decrease in the teacher’s support for claims did not affect the quality of the students’ claims. On the other hand, the quality of students’ reasoning was linked with the teacher’s practices. This suggests that when supporting students’ explanations, focusing on components that students find challenging would benefit students’ construction of explanations. To achieve synergy in this process, the collaboration between teacher’s practices, professional development days, and scaffolds designed to support the teacher played a crucial role in aiding students in creating explanations.     

Learning to Program in KPL Through Guided Collaboration

A quasi-experiment was conducted at an elementary school to investigate if guided collaboration would facilitate programming learning of 6 graders. Sixty-six students of two intact classes learned to program in KPL （kid＇s programming language） for 18 weeks during the experiment. One class was randomly assigned to the control group （i.e., free-collaboration） and the other to the experimental group （i.e., guided-collaboration）. Students in both groups formed heterogeneous teams of 3 persons. The guided-collaboration teams in experimental group were provided with a worksheet for every programming task. The worksheet contained a set of task-specific guiding questions to guide students through the problem-solving process in a systematic and disciplined manner. An analysis of test scores showed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the achievement tests, suggesting that the guiding questions were useful in enhancing students＇ comprehension of programming concepts and developing their programming skills. A comparison of the amount of time spent at each problem-solving step showed that the experimental group spent significantly more time than the control group at the analysis/design/coding step as well as the reflection step. Conversely, the control group spent considerably more time at the debugging step. With the help of the guiding questions, students in the experimental group were also more able to conduct meaningful discussions.     

The role of organizational learning in transformational leadership and organizational innovation

Leadership is an important factor affecting organizational innovation. Many studies show that transformational leadership has positive and significant influence on organizational innovation. Based on a literature review and previous work, this study aims to investigate the influence of transformational leadership on organizational innovation and to examine whether organizational learning is a mediator between their relationships. Structural equation modeling was used to test the model. The research sample consisted of 330 teachers in charge of administration in postsecondary schools. The findings of this study provide evidence that transformational leadership and organizational learning have significant positive relationship influence on organizational innovation. The research also demonstrates that there is significant effect on the role of mediation in organizational learning on the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational innovation. The study suggests that if school principals use the strategies of transformational leadership and organizational learning at the same time, organizational learning was highly effectiveness to achieve organizational innovation in the postsecondary schools.