Teaching and Learning About Inquiry: Insights and Challenges in Professional Development

The purpose of this study was to determine if teachers who participated in a professional development program continued to learn about inquiry and inquiry teaching as they implemented inquiry in their classrooms. A qualitative design utilizing inductive analysis was used to investigate teachers’ understanding and classroom implementation of inquiry. Findings are presented as assertions, drawing support from four focal teachers. For each assertion, confirming and disconfirming data are presented. Based on these data, we assert that a) there was little or no change in teachers’ individual understanding of inquiry, and b) professional development enhanced teachers’ ability to design inquiry-based activities – however, classroom implementation did not reflect a high level of inquiry.     

Internet,Multimedia and Virtual Laboratories in a 'Third World' Environment

Electronic education faces similar difficulties in low-budget institutions throughout the world (many of them in common with developed nations), including mainly rejection or disinterest from staff and students, insufficient funds, outdated hardware, incompatible software and poor Internet access. Over the past five years, with low budgets and considerable limitations in the equipment available, the Universidad Estatal a Distancia in Costa Rica has produced multimedia courses and materials for use on the Internet, as well as designing virtual laboratories that can be run on cheap computers. The authors recount their experiences in the hope that these will prove useful to others. They explain how simultaneous production of traditional materials (mainly printed textbooks) and online courses, together with simple automatic evaluation and 'outsourcing', reduce costs significantly. They conclude that HTML and JAVA are currently the choice computer languages to reach the greatest number of users without need of a specific computing platform, powerful computers or expensive software.     

The use of relative and absolute bearings by Clark’s nutcrackers,Nucifraga columbiana

Two groups of Clark’s nutcrackers were trained to find buried seeds whose location was defined by a constant angle from two landmarks whose interlandmark distance and position in the room varied across trials. The first group had a landmark array that was always placed in the same orientation with respect to the walls, allowing the animals to use both relative and absolute bearings. The second group had a landmark array that rotated across trials so that only relative bearings could be used to locate the seeds. The birds in each group learned the task and transferred to new interlandmark distances both within and beyond the range of training distances. Results from these experiments indicate that nutcrackers can learn a geometric relationship that relies exclusively on relative bearings even though the use of absolute bearing yields more efficient search.     

A Comparison of the Expressive Language Opportunities Provided by Shared Book Reading and Facilitated Play for Young Children with Mild to Moderate Intellectual Disabilities

ABSTRACT In this study, which aimed to compare the expressive language opportunities provided by shared book reading and facilitated play, the language of 22 young children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities and delayed language was examined. The children were videotaped while interacting with a facilitator during a session that included both book reading and play. Two different protocols were used to analyse the children's language in both conditions. The first protocol was used to document the number of intelligible, unintelligible and inaudible utterances and the second protocol was used to examine the intelligible utterances in relation to their complexity and function. The findings indicated that shared book reading elicited more language, more intelligible language and more complex language than the facilitated play condition. Results also suggested that shared book reading allowed for more conversational interaction between the children and the facilitators. The indications are that shared book reading may provide better opportunities than facilitated play for collecting a representative language sample from young children with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities.     

A Family Strengths Approach to Early Language and Literacy Development

Language and literacy skills are an essential element of young children’s development and allow them to interact meaningfully with other people and to develop knowledge in all subject areas. Despite the importance of language and literacy development, however, more than one-third of children in the United States enter school with significant differences in language, early literacy skills, and motivation to learn that place them at considerable risk for developing long-term reading difficulties. The quantity and quality of language interactions children have with their parents and exposure to print in their home environment prior to entering school have an important impact on these individual differences. This paper provides teachers with guidelines and tools for helping families identify and create language and literacy opportunities in their home environment that reflect their unique strengths and routines.     

Spanish validation of the Basic Psychological Needs at Work Scale: A measure to predict teachers’ well-being in the workplace

The present study aimed to validate a Spanish-version of the Basic Psychological Needs at Work Scale (BPNWS-Sp) and to examine the associations between needs satisfaction and engagement and burnout in secondary education teachers. Using a sample of 584 secondary education teachers, the results supported the three-factor model, composite reliability, measurement invariance, and nomological validity of the BPNWS-Sp. This study contributes to validating the first instrument in Spanish to measure the satisfaction of the three BPNs separately in secondary education teachers. The measurement of teachers’ BPNs could effectively provide guidance for school policies to improve teaching and learning.     

信息化教学模式的实践探索

陕西工业职业技术学院信息化建设在硬件与软件两个层面上为专业教学提供了方便，其计算机技术专业基于学分制的课程体系和人才培养模式突出学生个体计算机应用技能的培养，在教学计划中设置了文化基础、专业基础、专业选修、专业任选“四个平台”，根据不同的岗位需求设置了“多个出口”，突出了信息化教学的灵活性和学生个性的发挥。     

Factors affecting perceived learning of engineering students in problem based learning supported by business simulation

Although literature about problem based learning (PBL) is not scarce, there is little research on experiences about learning methodologies that combine PBL and the use of simulation tools. This lack of studies is even more notable in the case of engineering courses. The motivation for this study is to show how such a combination of PBL and simulation has been designed in a group work course for engineers and to analyze how the underlying factors of this methodology are related to perceived learning. This exploratory study focuses on how perceived enjoyment, interaction, collaborative learning, perceived satisfaction, and time dedicated to the course affect the learning perceived by the students in an engineer's degree course. The outcomes of this pilot study show that only three of these factors (satisfaction, time dedication, and collaborative learning) affect the students' perceived learning. Despite the high ratings obtained for interaction and perceived enjoyment, no significant relation between these factors and perceived learning was found. The reasons behind these findings are discussed.