Questionnaires as interventions: can taking a survey increase teachers’ openness to student feedback surveys?

Administrators often struggle in getting teachers to trust their school’s evaluation practices – a necessity if teachers are to learn from the feedback they receive. We attempted to bolster teachers’ support for receiving evaluative feedback from a particularly controversial source: student-perception surveys. For our intervention, we took one of two approaches to asking 309 teachers how they felt about students evaluating their teaching practice. Control participants responded only to core questions regarding their attitudes towards student-perception surveys. Meanwhile, treatment participants were first asked whether teachers should evaluate administrators in performance reviews and were then asked the core items about student-perception surveys. Congruent with cognitive dissonance theory, this juxtaposition of questions bolstered treatment teachers’ support for using student surveys in teacher evaluations relative to the control group. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to increasing teacher openness to alternative evaluation approaches, and consider whether surveys show promise as a vehicle for delivering interventions.     

One Hundred Children: baseline assessment of literacy in the early years of education

One Hundred Children is an Australian study of literacy learning in the early years of education. The larger study (Hill, Comber, Louden, Reid and Rivalland, 1998) includes detailed case studies of children’s literacy learning in their homes, pre-schools, day-care centres and schools. This paper reports on the assessment framework developed during the study and provides a brief overview of children’s performance on items in that framework. The study demonstrates that most children made rapid and substantial progress in literacy learning and identifies the literacy domains in which children learned most during their first year at school. A number of advantages of the use of baseline measures for assessing young children’s progress in literacy are also highlighted.     

Learning Multi‐unit Number Concepts and Understanding Decimal Place Value

Research indicates that many errors in secondary school mathematics can be attributed to lack of understanding of decimal place value. Recently it has been suggested that this arises from an underlying weakness in integer place value concepts and perception of multidigit numbers in unitary terms rather than base ten, multi‐unit structures. Development of place value and multidigit number concepts was examined in individual interviews with 262 primary school pupils, aged between 7 and 12 years, using subjects’ concrete representations of written numerals and associated verbal explanations. Almost all the children had some understanding of integer place value; most older children had multi‐unit concepts of three‐ or four‐digit numbers; but two‐digit numbers, especially values of 20 or less, were frequently perceived in terms of units by all age groups. This was particularly common for the value ten where 55% of subjects displayed unitary concepts. Implications for understanding and teaching decimal place value are discussed.     

Manipulative Use and Elementary School Students’ Mathematics Learning

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) 1998/1999, we examine the relationship between elementary students’ (K–5) manipulative use and mathematics learning. Using a cross-sectional correlational analysis, we found no relationship between manipulative use and student mathematics achievement. However, using a longitudinal analysis, we documented a positive relationship between manipulative use and student mathematics learning during their elementary school years (K–5). From a teaching and learning perspective, these findings provide important evidence of the influence of long-term manipulative use on students’ overall learning. From policy and methodological perspectives, these findings provide evidence for the importance of modeling student learning (as opposed to achievement) when studying the effectiveness of instructional strategies.     

Using a multicultural approach to teach chemistry and the nature of science to undergraduate non-majors

This research documents the creation, implementation, and evaluation of a novel chemistry curriculum. The curriculum allowed students to create theories situated in a variety of cultures while they investigated chemical phenomena central to all civilizations; it was a way of synthesizing chemistry, the history and nature of science, inquiry, and multicultural education. Achieving both chemistry content and nature of science objectives were the main goals of the curriculum. A small sample of undergraduate students participated in the curriculum instead of attending a large lecture course. The novel curriculum covered the same chemistry topics as the large lecture course. Program efficacy was evaluated using a combination of grades, survey data, and interviews with the participating undergraduates. The results suggest that this curriculum was a successful start at engaging students and teaching them chemistry as well as nature of science concepts.     

The benefits of multi-year research experiences: differences in novice and experienced students' reported gains from undergraduate research

This mixed-methods study explores differences in novice and experienced undergraduate students' perceptions of their cognitive, personal, and professional gains from engaging in scientific research. The study was conducted in four different undergraduate research (UR) programs at two research-extensive universities; three of these programs had a focus on the biosciences. Seventy-three entry-level and experienced student researchers participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews and completed the quantitative Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA) instrument. Interviews and surveys assessed students' developmental outcomes from engaging in UR. Experienced students reported distinct personal, professional, and cognitive outcomes relative to their novice peers, including a more sophisticated understanding of the process of scientific research. Students also described the trajectories by which they developed not only the intellectual skills necessary to advance in science, but also the behaviors and temperament necessary to be a scientist. The findings suggest that students benefit from multi-year UR experiences. Implications for UR program design, advising practices, and funding structures are discussed.     

Professional Academic Societies: Stewards of the Future

ABSTRACT

Academic disciplines are vulnerable in the 21st century to the forces Barnett called supercomplexity, and we argue that academic societies such as the National Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education are especially well positioned to prepare 21st century scholars to respond to contemporary changes in the disciplines and in institutions of higher education. Academic societies can respond by helping to train scholars to be stewards of their disciplines, and the means by which disciplines will do so is to focus on the character of the scholar through the development and reinforcement of specific virtues. Following the arguments of Plato, Ernest Boyer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, we argue that the development of stewards can help kinesiology respond to contemporary issues.     

Development of moral reasoning in situational and cultural contexts

ABSTRACT

This article examines relationships between children and youths’ judgments and their justifications of truth telling and verbal deception, in situational and cultural contexts. Han Chinese, Euro-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians, seven- to 17-years of age were presented competitive scenarios in which protagonists told either lies to protect, or truths to harm, various levels of collectivity. Participants evaluated protagonists’ statements, using a 7-point scale, and justified their judgments. Cultural variations in moral evaluations emerged among the three groups of participants. Older Chinese participants reflected significant collective cultural values in their judgements; by contrast, Euro-Canadians identified more individualistically; and Chinese-Canadians demonstrated notable variability between these perspectives in their judgments. The article enhances understanding of situational and cultural sources in the development of moral reasoning within a sociocultural framework.