Harnessing technology to improve formative assessment of student conceptions in STEM: forging a national network

Concept inventories, consisting of multiple-choice questions designed around common student misconceptions, are designed to reveal student thinking. However, students often have complex, heterogeneous ideas about scientific concepts. Constructed-response assessments, in which students must create their own answer, may better reveal students' thinking, but are time- and resource-intensive to evaluate. This report describes the initial meeting of a National Science Foundation-funded cross-institutional collaboration of interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education researchers interested in exploring the use of automated text analysis to evaluate constructed-response assessments. Participants at the meeting shared existing work on lexical analysis and concept inventories, participated in technology demonstrations and workshops, and discussed research goals. We are seeking interested collaborators to join our research community.     

Clarifying Metacognition, Self-Regulation, and Self-Regulated Learning: What’s the Purpose?

In this commentary on the special issue, I join the authors in searching for a conceptual framework that would clarify the concepts of metacognition, self-regulation, and self-regulated learning. Building on the insights of the different articles, I suggest that metacognition, self-regulation, and self-regulated learning should be considered as subtypes of the general, abstract, phenomenon of self-regulated action. I continue by questioning the benefit of seeking boundaries between these three concepts. Instead, I propose to search for dimensions along which types of self-regulated action vary. I, then, introduce the notion of a “multidimensional conceptual space of self-regulated action” as a conceptual tool that allows for diversity of conceptions of self-regulated action while maintaining conceptual clarity. I conclude by highlighting the central role of purpose of engagement in self-regulated action and by noting its potential for guiding the search for meaningful dimensions on which to typify self-regulation.     

A further contribution to the modelling of multi-waveform generators

A method has been presented in recent papers for deriving precisely stabilized waveform generators by relating them to second-order conservative oscillators. The present paper suggests a method for considerably generalizing the previous class ofgenerator models. This should enable the development of a larger variety of waveform generators with ease and flexibility. The new method is analyzed and is shown to possess implications to theoretical biology and other fields.     

Experimental university classes and “the best that has been thought”

In the latest in a series of articles on experimental courses at Kent State University, the authors study how students perceive such classes in terms of a liberal arts cultural education versus a values oriented education. The results determine that subject matter interest was the prime motivation for students to enroll in experimental classes. The results also suggest an openness and variety of student interest that seems unaware of a liberal arts core of the best that has been thought.     

Toronto multiagency child abuse research project: The abused and the abuser

Information from 422 cases of child mistreatment in Toronto was gathered from the files of a child welfare agency and a children's hospital. These data were compared to patterns reported in previous studies and clinical writings on child mistreatment to investigate similarities and differences in families whose children have been abused in Canada, England, and the United States. Findings from the present study were similar to others in many respects. The differences were primarily in the area of lower incidences of such problems as perinatal difficulties in the children and intellectual limitations and social isolation in the parents; however, there was a higher incidence of single-parent families. The results suggest that clinicians should bear in mind that child mistreatment cannot be ruled out on the grounds that no serious problems have been noted for the child or the family.     

The Effect of Achievement Goals: Does Level of Perceived Academic Competence Make a Difference?

Researchers using a goal orientation framework have hypothesized that learning goals are associated with adaptive patterns of behavior, regardless of the level of perceived ability. In contrast, perceived ability is hypothesized to moderate the relation between performance goals and patterns of adaptive or maladaptive behavior. We examined this hypothesis in two samples of seventh grade middle school students, focusing on the math domain in one sample and on the English domain in the other. Using two different statistical methods, median split and multiple regression, we found only little support for the role of perceived competence as a moderator between performance goals and patterns of behavior. Contrary to what has been suggested, we found some evidence that perceived competence moderated the relation between learning goals and behavior. Implications of these findings for recent efforts to use goal theory to reform classrooms and schools are discussed.     

Child-Directed Speech Produced by Mothers with Symptoms of Depression Fails to Promote Associative Learning in 4-Month-Old Infants

Child-directed (CD) speech segments produced by 20 mothers who varied in self-reported symptoms of depression, recorded during a structured play interaction with their 2- to 6-month-old infants, were used as conditioned stimuli with face reinforcers in a conditioned attention paradigm. After pairings of speech segments and faces, speech segments were assessed for their ability to increase time spent looking at a novel checker-board pattern (summation test) using 225 4-month-old infants of nondepressed mothers. Significant positive summation, an index of associative learning, was obtained in groups of infants tested with speech produced by mothers with comparatively fewer self-reported symptoms of depression (Beck Depression Inventory or BDI < or = 15). However, significant positive summation was not achieved using speech samples produced by mothers with comparatively more symptoms of depression (BDI > 15). These results indicate that the CD speech produced by mothers with symptoms of depression does not promote associative learning in infants.