Teaching of Energy Issues: A Debate Proposal for a Global Reorientation

The growing awareness of serious difficulties in the learning of energy issues has produced a great deal of research, most of which is focused on specific conceptual aspects. In our opinion, the difficulties pointed out in the literature are interrelated and connected to other aspects (conceptual as well as procedural and axiological), which are not sufficiently taken into account in previous research. This paper aims to carry out a global analysis in order to avoid the more limited approaches that deal only with individual aspects. From this global analysis we have outlined 24 propositions that are put forward for debate to lay the foundations for a profound reorientation of the teaching of energy topics in upper high school courses, in order to facilitate a better scientific understanding of these topics, avoid many students’ misconceptions and enhance awareness of the current situation of planetary emergency. This paper has been conceived as a contribution to the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, established by the UN General Assembly for the period 2005–2014.     

A framework for climate change engagement through video games

Abstract

Video games have the potential to educate and engage people—especially young people—in climate change and energy issues by facilitating the development of helpful thoughts, feelings, and actions. The objective of the present article is to propose a set of game attributes that could maximise the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural engagement of players, and lay the foundations for future work. We have used semi-structured interviews with experts to identify a set of game attributes and a group discussion with teenagers to validate them. By applying grounded theory in our analysis of the experts’ responses, we have developed a framework for climate change engagement through serious games. It consists of 15?key attributes that we have classified in three dimensions: cognitive, emotional, and behavioural. Literature review drawn on sources in social psychology, communication and education has contributed to further explain and justify the inclusion of each of the attributes.     

What do K-12 students feel when dealing with technology and engineering issues? Gardner's multiple intelligence theory implications in technology lessons for motivating engineering vocations at Spanish Secondary School

The interest on engineering and scientific studies can be raised up even from the early years of academic instructional process. This vocation may be linked to emotions and aptitudes towards technological education. Particularly, students get in touch with these technological issues (namely STEM) during the Compulsory Secondary Education in Spain (12–16 years old).This work presents a preliminary evaluation of how relevant is Gardner's multiple intelligence theory (MIT) in the teaching–learning process within the Technology Lessons. In this sense, MIT was considered as an explanation variable of the emotional response within the different educational parts (so-called syllabus units, SU) in the Technology spanish curriculum. Different intelligence style (IS) will orient the student to a vision of the engineering and technology. This work tries to identify which relationships can be established between IS and specific technology and engineering learning. This research involved up to 135 students were subsequently tested about their predominant (IS) and on the emotions that arouse in them when working with each SU. The results were statistically significant and only those with a Logic-arithmetic or Environmental IS were not affected by the SU.Best teaching and learning practicesare required for encouraging further engineering studies.     

From resource to document: scaffolding content and organising student learning in teachers’ documentation work on the teaching of series

We examine teachers’ use of resources as they prepare to teach the topic of numerical series of real numbers, in order to identify how their personal relationship with mathematical content—and its teaching—interacts with their use of a commonly used textbook. We describe this interplay between textbook and personal relationship, a term coined in the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD, Chevallard, 2003), in terms of documentation work (resources, aims, rules of action, operational invariants), a key construct from the documentational approach (DA, Gueudet & Trouche, in Educational Studies in Mathematics, 71, 199–218, 2009). We do so in the case of five post-secondary teachers who use the same textbook as a main resource for teaching the topic. Documentational analysis of interviews with the teachers led to the identification of their aims and rules of action (the what and how of their resource use as they organise their teaching of the topic) as well as the operational invariants (the why for this organisation of their teaching). We describe the teachers’ documentation work in two sets of aims/rules of action: scaffolding mathematical content (series as a stepping stone to learning about Taylor polynomials and Maclaurin series), and organising student learning about series through drill exercises, visualisation, examples, and applications. Our bridging (networking) of theoretical constructs originating in one theoretical framework (personal relationship, ATD) with the constructs of a different, yet compatible, framework (documentation work, DA) aims to enrich the latter (teachers’ documentation work) with the individual agency (teachers’ personal relationships with the topic) provided by the former.     

The influence of prior knowledge and viewing repertoire on learning from video

Video is increasingly used as an instructional tool. It is therefore becoming more important to improve learning of students from video. We investigated whether student learning effects are influenced through an instruction about other viewing behaviours, and whether these learning effects depend on their prior knowledge. In a controlled environment, 115 students watched a number of instructional videos about the technical equipment needed in a course on digital photography. Every second student was instructed about other possible viewing behaviours. A pre-post-retention test was carried out to calculate learning effects. The differences with respect to the learning effects of students who received an awareness instruction on an alternative viewing strategy were not significantly different. The differences as observed in our earlier experiment however could not be reproduced. Students with a broad viewing repertoire showed higher learning effects than students with a narrow repertoire. Furthermore, students with a strategic viewing approach also showed higher learning effects. Certain conditions have to be met: the technical and didactical quality of the video must be good, the integration in a learning task must be apparent, students must be aware of their viewing behaviour, and teachers must be aware of their students’ viewing behaviour in order to enrich the viewing repertoire of students when they have at least some basic knowledge e.g. after several lessons on the topics at hand. In future research, this study should be replicated using more complex video episodes than the instruction videos we used in our experiments that were only on the factual knowledge level of the taxonomy of Bloom. Moreover, replication of this study with a larger sample size could yield a significant improvement in learning effects. This is plausible because students need an amount of prior knowledge beyond a certain threshold value in order to be able to expand their knowledge network in their long term memory. Finally, additional media player functionality, facilitating effective student learning from video, can be described based on the results of this study.     

Organisational and training factors affecting academic teacher training outcomes

University teacher training has become an important topic in recent years due to the curricular and methodological reforms introduced by the Bologna process. Despite its acknowledged importance, evaluations have been limited to measures of participants’ satisfaction, and little is known about its impact on teaching practices. This study seeks to analyse the effects of the different delivery methods used during workshops that aim to enhance academic teachers’ pedagogical competence and teaching practices. Moreover, the study analyses to what extent individual characteristic and job requirement also have an effect on training outcomes. The study draws on data collected through a self-reported questionnaire administered to academic teachers two years after they participated in training workshops at a Spanish university (n?=?204). The results show that specific delivery methods have a significant effect on the outcome variables, especially those related to the design of learning activities and assessment tools.     

The change of teachers' conceptions: A strategy for inservice science teachers' education

This paper presents an evaluation of the design and implementation of a course for inservice science teachers, which was undertaken in Seville (1988, Spain) by requirement of the Ministry of Education and based on a didactic model named “Research at School”. The research was designed to evaluate and test the validity of this activity as a strategy to inform teacher educators, and also to encourage their professional development.     

PISA as a Political Tool in Spain: Assessment Instrument,Academic Discourse and Political Reform

This study examines to what extent there is a sort of “political appropiation” by political parties when they seek to set a discourse about the Spanish PISA outcomes. We have consistently found that programs for assessing the competencies of students, especially PISA, have become tools of rationalization and the legitimization of education policies in both the national and territorial contexts. Furthermore, each regional government focuses its discourse on what it feels to be its strong points, that is, a clear “self-justifying reading” of PISA outcomes.     

A pedagogical alliance for trust,wellbeing and the identification of errors for learning and formative assessment

Formative assessments and feedback are vital to enhancing learning outcomes but require that learners feel at ease identifying their errors, and receiving feedback from a trusted source – teachers. An experimental test of a new theoretical framework was conducted to cultivate a pedagogical alliance to enhance students’ (a) trust in the teacher, (b) well-being in the learning environment and (c) identification of confusion and errors for the purpose of learning, assessment and feedback. A sample of 101 undergraduate students was randomly assigned to either an intervention (n = 51) or control (n = 50) condition in Elementary Statistics. Results indicated that a pedagogical alliance could be created to enhance student trust in the instructor, leading students to report greater well-being and a higher number of potential areas of confusion in their understanding of new content material relative to a control group. These results have implications for formative feedback, assessments, and by extension learning outcomes.     

Conservation in Physics Teaching,History of Science and in Child Development

The current work is an exploratory study on the ideas thatstudents in their fourth semester of engineering have about ``conservation'. Wereview the Piagetian position on the importance of conservations in logical operational structures inchild development and we comment upon other current trends in cognitive psychology. We discussbriefly the development of conservations in science during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and we pointout the contrast between this and how most textbooks introduce this subject. We have also carried out afirst, tentative analysis of the answers given by a sample of these students to a brief questionnaire about``conservation' and ``non-conservation'.