A love towards a thing eternal: Spinoza and the classroom

There is a growing concern about the struggles of early career teachers and an understandable questioning of the preparation being offered by teacher education courses. Are our preservice teachers being given workable strategies and techniques to allow them to survive the early years? Is it strategies and techniques that are primarily at issue here? Could it be that there is something more fundamental, to do with an underlying philosophical understanding about human nature, the desire to learn and the need to relate? I want to suggest that instruction about strategies and techniques is too often built on an insecure and incompatible foundation of assumptions about the nature of the world of sentient beings and their relationships. Ontology matters. Philosopher Spinoza divided the world of thought into ideas that were adequate – contributing to our well-being, potency and happiness – and those that were inadequate – leading us to feel weak, at the mercy of outside forces, and sad. I want to argue, with Spinoza, that inadequate ontologies lead to a sense of impotence and frustration, and that adequate ideas – a stronger ontology – can underpin and sustain a more durable pedagogy. I explore this idea by looking at some classroom events through a Spinozean lens.     

Design and implementation of multi-campus,modular master classes in biochemical engineering

The Master of Science in engineering technology: biochemical engineering is organised in KU Leuven at four geographically dispersed campuses. To sustain the Master's programmes at all campuses, it is clear that a unique education profile at each campus is crucial. In addition, a rationalisation is required by increased cooperation, increased exchange of lecturers, and increased student mobility. To achieve this, a multicampus education system for the M.Sc. in engineering technology: biochemical engineering was developed by offering modules that are also available for students of other campuses. Such a module is primarily based on the research expertise present at the campus. In the development, special attention has been given to the optimal organisation of the modules, evaluation, required modifications of the current curricula, and the practical consequences for students following the module at another campus. Even in the first year of implementation, around 30% of the students followed a multicampus module, which indicates the potential success of the multicampus concept described here.     

Reconstruction of a Collaborative Mathematical Learning Process

The study focused on the interaction between two secondary school students while they were working on computerized mathematical investigation tasks related to probability theory. The aim was to establish how such interaction helped the students to learn from one another, and how it may have hindered their learning process. The assumption was that interaction is beneficial for students if they can perform certain key activities, namely showing, explaining, justifying, and reconstructing their work. Both students attained mathematical level raising. However, the student who explained frequently and criticized himself attained more mathematical level raising than the student who did not explain her work frequently or criticize herself.     

Pigeons’ memory for time: Assessment of the role of subjective shortening in the duration-comparison procedure

Pigeons were trained in a duration-comparison procedure to peck one key if the comparison duration (c) was 1 sec shorter than a standard duration (s), and another key if c was 1 sec longer than s. During training, the s-c delay was 1 sec, and the total duration of an s-c pair was not predictive of the correct choice. In Experiment 1, during equal-duration pair test trials, pigeons increasingly responded long (i.e., c τ s) as the s-c delay was lengthened. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that s affected long responding on equal-duration test trials, even at the 8-sec s-c delay. In Experiment 3, long responding increased as the s-c delay was lengthened, even when stimulus conditions during the s-c delay differed from those during the intertrial interval (ITI). Additional analyses indicated that it was unlikely that the increase in long responding was due to the pigeons’ adding the s-c delay to c and comparing the total against the duration of s. The increase in long responding with an increase in s-c delay is more consistent with subjective shortening of s than with confusion between the s-c delay and the ITI.     

Correction to: The State of Current Reading Intervention Research for English Learners in Grades K–2: a Best-Evidence Synthesis

Educational Psychology Review -     

Various ways to determine rational number size: an exploration across primary and secondary education

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Understanding rational numbers is a complex task for primary and secondary school students. Previous research has shown that a possible reason is...     

The mathematics teacher identity of two early career mathematics teachers and the influence of their working communities on its development

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education - To better understand the critical early years of teaching and teacher identity development, this study explored the mathematics teacher identity of two...     

Advise with Permission?: The Effects of Advice Solicitation on Advice Outcomes

Two studies examine reactions to permitted (offered and permission granted), volunteered (given without offer or assent), and imposed advice (offered and given even though declined). In Study 1, participants’ ratings of advice quality and implementation intention were higher for volunteered and permitted than imposed advice. Only for a task that was highly personal did recipients have a significantly higher intention to use permitted than volunteered advice. Study 2 replicated results from Study 1 with a nonstudent sample. In addition, Study 2 found stronger differences between volunteered and permitted advice, with permitted advice rated more positively. Study 2 also examined the effect of using you pronouns, which have been linked to confrontation and criticism, when giving advice, but found no consistent effects on advice outcomes.     

Reputation and reality: ranking major disciplines in Australian universities

League tables that rank universities may use reputational measures, performance measures, or both. Each type of measure has strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we rank disciplines in Australian universities both by reputation, using an international survey of senior academics, and with actual performance measures. We then compare the two types of measures to see how closely they match. The criterion we use for both sets of measures is ‘international academic standing’. We find a high correlation between the survey results and the various measures of research performance. We also find a correlation between the quality of student intake and the survey rankings, but the satisfaction levels of recent graduates do not correlate well with the rankings by academics. We then construct an overall measure of performance, which gives very similar rankings to the survey results, especially for the top-ranked institutions.