The influence of an intensive in-service workshop on pedagogical content knowledge growth among novice chemical demonstrators

This study examined the influence of an intensive chemical demonstration workshop on fostering pedagogical content knowledge growth among science teachers identified as novice chemical demonstrators. The two-week summer workshop was designed around four training elements considered important to effective teacher in-servicing: theory, modeling, practice, and feedback. Clinical interviews served to probe various aspects of novice demonstrators' pedagogical content knowledge prior to and after the workshop. The interview protocols were analyzed using the methods of taxonomic, componential, and theme analysis. Differences in pre- and postworkshop clinical interview responses suggested growth in novices' representational and adaptational repertoires for demonstrating fundamental topics in chemistry. This growth was reflected in the increased number of chemical demonstrations and demonstration variations on each of the target chemical concepts that the novice demonstrators discussed after the in-service intervention. Their interview responses also suggested an increased awareness of the complexity of several chemical demonstrations, how these complexities could interfere with learning, and how simplified variations of the chemical demonstrations could promote science concept understanding. The research findings suggest that science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in chemistry can be enhanced through intensive, short-term in-service programs.     

Supporting High School Student Accomplishment of Biology Content Using Interactive Computer-Based Curricular Case Studies

Research in Science Education - Research into the efficacy of modules featuring dynamic visualizations, case studies, and interactive learning environments is reported here. This quasi-experimental...     

Expanding the Foundation: Climate Change and Opportunities for Educational Research

Human-caused climate change is a dominant global challenge. Unlike other disciplines and fields, there has as yet been only limited attention to climate change in educational research generally, and in educational foundations in particular. Education is key to assisting humanity in mitigating and adapting to climate change, and educational researchers working within diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions and a broad array of research contexts need to engage in this most pressing of challenges. We argue that the field needs a new commitment to a form of educational justice appropriately scaled to the size of the challenge we face. We address this gap by reviewing current thinking on the human dimensions of climate change and summarizing what research has been conducted in the area of climate change education as a means of identifying a range of possibilities for educational research and praxis.     

The real world on a short leash: The (mis) application of constructivism to the design of educational technology

Constructivism, or more precisely, a constructivist metatheory, presently prevails throughout professional education circles. Most educators easily accept constructivism's central premise that learners approach tasks with prior knowledge and expectations based on their knowledge of the world around them. Naturally, then, constructivist educational technologists have been guided by the implicit (and increasingly explicit) desire to create authentic environments for learning: environments that correspond to the real world. In this paper, I argue that technologists have tended to paper over the critical epistemological dimension of constructivism by preauthenticating learning environments: creating environments that are predetermined to reflect the real world even though constructivist theory contrindicates precisely this. I suggest that a rhetorical perspective on constructivism offers a way out of this bind and I propose some guidelines to assist developers of educational technologies in accommodating the essentially dialogic nature of teaching and learning.Many of the issues raised in this article are developed in his recent (1998) book entitledReality by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education.     

Explaining the effects of communities of pastoral care for students

This article explains how communities of pastoral care work. It presents an empirically forged theory in action. We examined theoretical and empirical work across the targeted area of personalization for students. We also completed what Hallinger (2012) refers to as “exhaustive review” of the field of school improvement writ large. We treated the literature as qualitative data, inductively developing macro-level constructs, mid-level elements, and micro-level practices. We find that pastoral care for students has important effects on student learning. We conclude that the impact is mediated through two critical variables, institutional affiliation and student engagement.     

Simulation-based performance assessment: an innovative approach to exploring understanding of physical science concepts

This paper illustrates the use of simulation-based performance assessment (PA) methodology in a recent study of eighth-grade students’ understanding of physical science concepts. A set of four simulation-based PA tasks were iteratively developed to assess student understanding of an array of physical science concepts, including net force, acceleration, velocity, and inertia. Illustrative examples drawn from the administration of these simulation-based PA tasks to a sample of eighth-grade students (n?=?74) highlight the potential of simulation-based tasks for revealing conceptual understanding of science concepts and for informing curriculum development within the context of design-based implementation research. The paper also describes a variety of challenges encountered over the course of the development, administration, and analysis of the PA data that may be informative for researchers and educators as they consider implementing simulation-based PAs.