Children's drawings provide a new perspective on teacher–child relationship quality and school adjustment

A growing literature points to the importance of children's relationships with their teachers as a factor influencing attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of school adjustment. However, such data may be confounded when the same teacher rates school adjustment as well as relationship quality. The present study sought to address this problem by investigating direct (self-reported feelings about the teacher) and indirect (representations through drawings) procedures to assess children's perspectives on the relationship. Self-report questions were adapted from measures of school liking and maternal acceptance. Drawings applied Fury's system for describing relational negativity in child–family drawings. Results, based on a sample of 125 six-year-olds, showed significant associations between children's reports/drawings and teacher-rated relationship quality and school adjustment. Negativity in child–teacher drawings was a particularly salient correlate, suggesting that children's representations of relationships can provide a useful independent means of identifying relationship or adjustment difficulties at school.     

Predictors of Haitian-American Infant Development at Twelve Months

Perinatal and early childhood influences on the development of 66 Haitian-American children were examined as part of an ongoing home visiting program. Although all participants were impoverished, approximately two-thirds lived in an urban setting with some access to social and health services, while one-third lived in a rural farmworkers' community where housing and services were sharply substandard. Measures used to examine the development of infants in these 2 settings included birthweight, household crowding, parental contributions to the child-rearing environment (the HOME), and developmental progress at 12 months on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development. Results showed that the urban sample was advanced on the Mental Development Index of the Bayley Scales. Regression analyses showed birthweight and the HOME score measuring child-rearing environment to be significant predictors of mental development, while psychomotor development was related to birthweight and household crowding. The results indicate that even within this disadvantaged Haitian entrant population, environmental differences exist that influence infant development in subtle but significant ways.     

Becoming Better Primary Science Teachers: A Description of Our Journey

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Meta-assessment in a project-based systems engineering course

Project-based learning (PBL) facilitates significant learning, but it poses a major assessment challenge for assessing individual content knowledge. We developed and implemented an assessment approach and tool for a mandatory undergraduate systems engineering PBL-based course. We call this type of assessment student-oriented meta-assessment. Research participants included 131 undergraduate engineering students who carried out team projects requiring conceptual modelling of complex systems. Next, individual students assessed their peer team projects. Finally, the course staff assessed students individually, based on the content knowledge that was reflected in students’ comments to their peers, by using the new meta-assessment tool. The research findings validated the meta-assessment tool which can serve for assessing various PBL courses. Our contribution is twofold: a new approach for assessing project-based undergraduate engineering courses, and classification of meta-assessment methods into three types, where a student-oriented meta-assessment as one of the three meta-assessment methods is our newly introduced and validated method.     

Helping students understand their learning styles: Effects on study self‐efficacy,preference for group work,and group climate

Small tutorial groups in higher education are often composed without regard to students’ gender or broad knowledge background, for example, yet research indicates that composing groups on the basis of gender and prior qualifications may have significant effects on assessment outcomes. Previous studies have also investigated the effects of composing groups on the basis of learning style preference and found no effects. The effect of combining group composition with training in learning styles is unclear, however. In this study we report on the effects of workshop training in learning styles on balanced group members’ study self‐efficacy, preference for group work, group climate, and assessment performance. Although we found no effects, students reported greater self‐awareness of their own learning and acceptance of others’ styles. We conclude that in collaborative learning environments, training may need to go beyond facilitating growth in students’ self‐awareness to include a focus on how to apply this understanding to improving group function and helping others to learn.     

Waiting to Use a Symbol: The Effects of Delay on Children's Use of Models

To use a symbol to solve a problem, children must achieve representational insight; they must realize that the symbol stands for its referent. Moreover, they must keep this relation in mind as they attempt to use the symbol. The present studies investigated the achievement and maintenance of representational insight. 3-year-olds were asked to use a scale model of a room to find a toy hidden in the room. In Study 1a, children first watched as a small toy was hidden in the model. They then waited either 20 sec, 2 min, or 5 min before attempting to find a similar, larger toy that was hidden in the corresponding place in the room. All children experienced all delay intervals; three groups experienced the delays in different orders. There was a dramatic effect of delay order. The children who experienced the 20-sec delay on their first trial generally performed well throughout the 6 trials, but the children who experienced a 5-min delay first almost always failed to find the toy in the room, even on subsequent trials with shorter delays. Additional studies revealed that the negative effects of the initial long delay could be overcome by providing reminders of the model and its relevance (Studies 2 and 3) or by giving children prior experience in using the model (Study 4). The results indicate that keeping a symbol-referent relation in mind can be difficult for 3.0-year-old children. This research is discussed in terms of the importance of maintaining representational insight.     

How does STEM context-based learning work: what we know and what we still do not know

ABSTRACT

Context-based learning (CBL) has influenced teaching and learning science in many countries over the past decades. Twelve years ago, a special issue on CBL was published in this Journal, focusing on CBL curriculum development. Seven papers in this current special issue on CBL now address the question of how a context influences the learning process. The papers focus on the stimulation of learning STEM subjects within contexts, how the learning process occurs and is enhanced, and the application of contexts in different settings. The approaches, results, and implications of the papers are located in a larger view that considers the question of what must be the case if a student not only engages in the tasks of learning but also succeeds at them. Concerning willingness and effort by learners, the papers draw conclusions about which STEM-related interests of students endure and are ephemeral across a decade, design criteria for maximising students’ situational interest, and students’ engagement with content and context simultaneously. Focusing on the opportunity to teach and learn, the papers reveal how a professional development approach functions to support STEM teachers to develop CBL materials, and how specific scaffolding acts in teaching bring students to more complex reasoning. Regarding good teaching, insights are offered on how metacognitive prompts improve teaching. Centring on the social surround that supports teaching and learning, a comparison of two contexts for teaching the same content reveals which aspects of the contexts move student learning forward. From this mapping, paths toward future research are projected.     

Supporting school teachers’ rapid engagement with online education

Educational technology research and development - In response to Philipsen et al.'s (Educ Technol Res Dev 67:1145–1174, 2019) article titled “Improving teacher professional...     

How Much Have They Retained? Making Unseen Concepts Seen in a Freshman Electromagnetism Course at MIT

The introductory freshmen electromagnetism course at MIT has been taught since 2000 using a studio physics format entitled TEAL—Technology Enabled Active Learning. TEAL has created a collaborative, hands-on environment where students carry out desktop experiments, submit web-based assignments, and have access to a host of visualizations and simulations. These learning tools help them visualize unseen electromagnetic concepts and develop stronger intuition about related phenomena. A previous study has shown that students who took the course in the TEAL format (the experimental group) gained significantly better conceptual understanding than those who took it in the traditional lecture-recitation format (the control group). The present longitudinal study focuses on the extent to which these two research groups (experimental and control) retain conceptual understanding about a year to 18 months after finishing the course. It also examines students attitudes about whether the teaching format (TEAL or traditional) contributes to their learning in advanced courses. Our research has indicated that the long-term effect of the TEAL course on students’ retention of concepts was significantly stronger than that of the traditional course. This research is significant because it documents the long-term cognitive and affective impact of the TEAL studio physics format on learning outcomes of MIT students.

Educational Reform at MIT: Advancing and Evaluating Technology-Based Projects On- and Off-Campus

This issue is the first of two special issues that present a diverse collection of studies which describe and discuss innovative approaches to science and technology teaching and learning at MIT. This issue focuses on advancing and evaluating technology-based projects on-campus, while the second one will focus mainly on off-campus technology-based projects.