Resisting,Rejecting, and Redefining Normative Pathways to the Professoriate: Faculty of Color in Higher Education

The Faculty of Color Cohort 2014 (FOCC2014) consists of 20 scholars in faculty positions across the country. Here we use the theory of transformational resistance and data from our private Facebook group webpage as a way to understand the resistance enacted by the FOCC2014 as first-year faculty members. Through critical discourse analysis, we investigate how the FOCC2014 Facebook webpage is used to encourage members to actively resist, reject, and redefine what it means to be a faculty member in higher education. Findings provide empirical evidence of the utility of social media as a space for engagement and community for faculty of color across multiple campuses where the racial/ethnic diversity of faculty is limited.     

EDLE: an integrated tool to foster entrepreneurial skills development in engineering education

Academic papers on entrepreneurship in engineers’ education have been growing in the last decades. However, studies on entrepreneurship in engineering have not sought to analyze how entrepreneurship education, in connection to active learning, design thinking, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, inserted in an integrated way, as a tool, might help the process of engineering students’ entrepreneurial skills development. Thus, this study has the goal to propose an integrated tool, linked to the principles of entrepreneurship education, active learning, design thinking, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, to foster engineering students’ entrepreneurial skills development. The tool, called Entrepreneurial Dynamic Learning, is operationalized and validated in a 2-year case study in a Brazilian public university. The study also produces practical implications, and five are highlighted: (1) at the level of governments and policy makers; (2) engineering scientific associations; (3) universities, coordinators, and professors of engineering undergraduate programs; (4) engineering education researchers; and (5) the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry.     

Regulating the writing process in the teacher training practicum guided by feedback at the University of Barcelona

This is a longitudinal study that focuses on blog-writing for the purpose of self-assessing competencies, and which was carried out within the practicum of a degree course in Primary Education Teaching at the University of Barcelona. Over the course of three academic years, students and a teacher have used a Platform 2.0 program, specially created for the study, to reflect on their learning processes and to self-assess with respect to the benchmark competences selected. The results show, first, a significant increase in students’ levels of awareness of their own competences, thanks to the optimisation of their communicative competency to explain same, and guided by the teacher’s feedback; and second, a growing level of satisfaction that can be observed in the assessment surveys on the process implemented.     

Tier 3 specialized writing instruction for students with dyslexia

Two instructional experiments used randomized, controlled designs to evaluate the effectiveness of writing instruction for students with carefully diagnosed dyslexia, which is both an oral reading and writing disorder, characterized by impaired word decoding, reading, and spelling. In Study 1 (4th to 6th grade sample and 7th to 9th grade sample), students were randomly assigned to orthographic or morphological spelling treatment but all students were taught strategies for planning, writing, and reviewing/revising narrative and expository texts. Both treatments resulted in improvement on three measures of spelling and one measure of composition. Morphological treatment resulted in better improvement in spelling pseudowords, whereas orthographic treatment resulted in better improvement in rate of reading pseudowords. In Study 2 (4th to 6th grade sample), students were randomly assigned to explicit language treatment (phonological working memory + phonological-orthographic spelling + science report writing training) or nonverbal problem solving treatment (virtual reality-based computer simulation, drawing maps, and building clay models). Both treatments used science content material and resulted in significant improvement in spelling and reading pseudowords (accuracy and rate). The surprising finding was that hands-on, engaging science problem solving led to more improvement in phonological working memory than did specialized phonological instruction. Only when spelling instruction emphasized orthography or morphology (Study 1) did real word spelling improve. Preparation of this chapter was supported by Grant Nos. HD25858 and P50 33812 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In Study 1 teaching assistants included Sylvia Abbott, Marci Anderson-Youngstrom, Belle Chennault, Kate Eschen, Noelia Garcia, Sandra Hiramatsu, Lynn Junell, Julia Kim, Stephanie King, Shin-Ju (Cindy) Lin, Rebecca Metzger, Heather Murphy, Jennifer Norton, Sue Palewicz, Rebecca Pirie, and Suzanna West. Also on the assessment team were Sylvia Abbott, Belle Chenault, Kate Eschen, and Rebecca Pirie. Certified teachers Diana Hoffer and Christina Johnson implemented the composition lessons written by the first author. In Study 2, teaching assistants included Nicole Alston-Abel, Leah Altemeier, Wade Altom, Marci Anderson-Youngstrom, Annie Boyd, Nicole Garcia, Laura Gould, Marta Holsinger, Yen-Ling Lee, Shin-Ju (Cindy) Lin, Laurie McCarthy, Heather Murphy, Hema O’Shea, Michelle Proux, Kristine Tardiff, and Kari Terjeson. Janine Jones supervised the assessment team. Margaret McShane and Doug Stock served as administrative assistants.     

Investigating the Impact of Using a CAD Simulation Tool on Students’ Learning of Design Thinking

Engineering design thinking is hard to teach and still harder to learn by novices primarily due to the undetermined nature of engineering problems that often results in multiple solutions. In this paper, we investigate the effect of teaching engineering design thinking to freshmen students by using a computer-aided Design (CAD) simulation software. We present a framework for characterizing different levels of engineering design thinking displayed by students who interacted with the CAD simulation software in the context of a collaborative assignment. This framework describes the presence of four levels of engineering design thinking—beginning designer, adept beginning designer, informed designer, adept informed designer. We present the characteristics associated with each of these four levels as they pertain to four engineering design strategies that students pursued in this study—understanding the design challenge, building knowledge, weighing options and making tradeoffs, and reflecting on the process. Students demonstrated significant improvements in two strategies—understanding the design challenge and building knowledge. We discuss the affordances of the CAD simulation tool along with the learning environment that potentially helped students move towards Adept informed designers while pursuing these design strategies.     

E‐Textbooks and Students’ Learning Experiences

The contribution of the e‐textbooks can be enormous considering their additional supporting features, but adoption has not crystallized yet. This study examines the relevant experiences of college students in terms of how the use of e‐textbooks may enhance their learning. A survey study was conducted to measure the perceptions of each student on how helpful an e‐textbook is for facilitating learning (i.e., E‐book Helpfulness), how well it promotes his/her involvement in learning (i.e., Student Involvement), and how much improvement it makes on learning outcome (i.e., Learning Outcome). Results indicate that e‐textbooks are perceived as enhancers of student learning experiences in two complementing routes: (1) E‐textbook Helpfulness enhances students’ learning outcomes directly and (2) Student Involvement plays an important mediating role between E‐textbook Helpfulness and Learning Outcome if students use e‐textbooks in class. These findings suggest that the successful adoption of e‐textbooks requires schools to provide necessary resources (e.g., computer labs) and instructors to actively engage students in using e‐textbooks.     

The immediate-shock deficit and postshock analgesia: Implications for the relationship between the analgesic CR and UR

Rats received a 3-sec, 1-mA footshock either immediately or 3 min after placement in a chamber. Postshock pain sensitivity was assessed with the formalin test. The animals that received the 3-min delay between placement and shock showed an analgesic response compared with noshock controls. The immediate-shock animals did not. Thus the immediate-shock deficit, previously reported for freezing and defecation, also occurs for analgesia. This suggests that shock levels sufficient to condition analgesia are not necessarily sufficient to produce analgesia as an unconditional response. As with freezing, there is a dissociation between conditional and unconditional responses in the fear-conditioning system. Increasing immediate-shock levels to 6 sec, 2 mA produced a transient unconditional analgesia. For analgesia, a conditional response is more readily produced than an unconditional response.     

Public education and student movements: the Chilean rebellion under a neoliberal experiment

Abstract

Chile is recognized in the educational policy field as one of the first laboratories of neoliberal initiatives. These policies, initiated under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, did not change with the new democratic governments after 1990. This characteristic led international organizations to promote the Chilean policies in different contexts in Latin America and beyond. In 2006, a high school student movement occupied public and private schools, demystifying the outcomes of these policies. A new wave of demonstrations took place in 2011, with a college student leadership that paralyzed a significant amount of universities and schools throughout the country. After both waves of mobilizations, the political system opened the process of policy-making that considered the demands of social movements. In this article, we explore the dynamics between educational policies and social student movements in Chile, and the possibilities of change in favor of public education.