Student empowerment in an english language enrichment programme: an action research project in Hong Kong

This paper describes how students are empowered in an action research project. The author argues that, given the opportunity, students are willing and have the ability to exercise their power to control their learning. In addition, the author contends that the more power students have in deciding what and how to learn, the harder they will work, the stronger their learning motivation will be, and the more they will gain in their learning. The experience gained in this project pointed to three important components of student empowerment efforts, i.e. empowerment through involvement, empowerment through partnership and empowerment through action research.     

Changers and the Changed: Moral Aspects of Coming Out in Physical Education

In this paper we draw from interviews with four lesbian sportswomen and physical educators whose personal journeys inform us about the difficulties and rewards of challenging homophobia and heterosexism. Our co-participants discussed their life stories in terms of the interrelationships among sport, moral, and lesbian identities and their coming out process. Analyses of these narrations revealed three major themes associated with coming out in sport and physical education settings: integrity, compassion, and community. Each of these themes is discussed in terms of our co-participants' experiences and interpretations of moving from fear and isolation to a sense of community and empowerment.     

Health literacy and social capital: what role for adult literacy partnerships and pedagogy?

This paper makes the case for adult literacy (including numeracy) practitioners to play a greater role in health literacy initiatives in Australia. The paper draws on data from a national research project that investigated adult literacy partnerships and pedagogy viewed from a social capital perspective. The primary purpose of the project was to produce guidelines on how to deliver integrated adult literacy and numeracy programmes using a social capital approach. Prior experience of partnerships was explored through a review of the literature and an environmental scan of adult literacy providers using an email survey and follow-up interviews. An in-depth case study of a health literacy partnership was trialled using action research. Partnerships between adult literacy and health organisations in Australia were found to be largely ad hoc and rarely documented. To enable sustainable health literacy programmes, partnerships are needed across the three interlinked organisational levels – micro, meso and macro, and in particular the latter, which is currently almost completely absent. The conceptual frameworks outlined for health literacy partnerships and social capital pedagogy in this paper are new and potentially of value to policy makers, researchers and practitioners in the fields of health and literacy.     

The influence of reputation information on the assessment of undergraduate student work

The present study employed an experimental design to examine the influence of knowledge of a student’s previous performance and the general quality of their writing style on the assessment of undergraduate student work. Fifteen sport and exercise physiology academics were asked to mark and give feedback on two final year undergraduate student essays. The first student essay that participants marked was a control essay. The second essay was the target essay. Participants read one of three student reputation profiles (positive, negative or neutral) prior to marking this essay. Kruskal–Wallis tests for difference indicated that the marks awarded to each essay did not significantly differ between the three student reputation conditions. Thematic analysis of the target essay also revealed no apparent differences in the way in which feedback was presented across the three student reputation profiles. It was therefore concluded that non-anonymous marking did not induce marker bias in this instance.     

Practical Work in Earth Sciences Education: An experience with students in the context of a National Science Programme in Portugal

The programme Ciencia Viva of the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology aims to create a greater understanding of science and science education amongst scientists, teachers, school children and the general public, each of whom is encouraged to cooperate and interact through regular contacts. The purpose is to improve practical, experimental and other forms of investigative work. To accomplish such work in schools, an overview of the state of science education worldwide is presented in terms of old and new traditions of the teaching of the physical and historical sciences the latter including the teaching of fieldwork. Traditional practices are compared with those established recently in various parts of the world in which more carefully considered understanding of the nature of science and science education has been established. In illustration of good practice, an outline is offered of the nature and rationale of two sets of curricular materials. These were designed by a team comprising staff members of the University of Aveiro and secondary school teachers and were trialled in schools. These activities are concerned with the internal rock cycle and the internal energy of the Earth in relation to plate tectonic theory. They are also related to the processes of weathering, erosion, transportation and deposition of sedimentary rocks and structures (like wave and current ripple marks) which were formed as part of the external rock cycle driven by the Sun's energy. The account concludes with an outline of the sub programme 'Geology in Summer', a fieldwork programme which introduces a holistic understanding of the workings of the outer part of the Earth to the general public. Students' perspectives and teachers' views about these experiences are generally very positive and are presented at the end. The whole programme was evaluated by an international team of scientists and science educators.     

Developmental Changes in Executive Functioning

Although early studies of executive functioning in children supported Miyake et al.'s (2000) three‐factor model, more recent findings supported a variety of undifferentiated or two‐factor structures. Using a cohort‐sequential design, this study examined whether there were age‐related differences in the structure of executive functioning among 6‐ to 15‐year‐olds (N = 688). Children were tested annually on tasks designed to measure updating and working memory, inhibition, and switch efficiency. There was substantial task‐based variation in developmental patterns on the various tasks. Confirmatory factor analyses and tests for longitudinal factorial invariance showed that data from the 5‐ to 13‐year‐olds conformed to a two‐factor structure. For the 15‐year‐olds, a well‐separated three‐factor structure was found.     

Transtheoretical-based bullying prevention effectiveness trials in middle schools and high schools

Background Bullying threatens the physical and mental well-being of students across a broad range of schools. Tailored interventions based on the Transtheoretical model and delivered over the Internet were designed to reduce participation in each of three roles related to bullying (bully, victim and passive bystander).

Methods Effectiveness trials were completed in 12 middle schools and 13 high schools in the USA. A diverse sample of 1237 middle (6th–8th grade, with 45.1% in the 7th grade; ages 11–14) and 1215 high school (9th–11th grade, with 41.6% in the 9th grade; ages 14–17) students were available for analyses.

Results Analyses showed significant treatment effects for both intervention groups when compared to control for both the middle and high school programs.

Conclusions Given the relative ease of dissemination, these programs could be applied as stand-alone practices or as part of more intensive interventions.     

Problem posing based on investigation activities by university students

This paper reports a classroom-based study involving investigation activities in a university numerical analysis course. The study aims to analyse students' mathematical processes and to understand how these activities provide opportunities for problem posing. The investigations were intended to stimulate students in asking questions, to trigger their thinking processes, to promote their ability to investigate and to support them in learning numerical analysis' concepts and procedures. The results show that the investigations provided opportunities for students to experience mathematical processes, including posing questions, formulating and testing conjectures and, to some extent, proving results. They also provide some understanding about the role of problem posing in these processes. Posing questions occurred mainly in an implicit way, in the interpretation of tasks and in identifying regularities, analysing graphs and testing cases. The conjectures were often based on pattern identification or data manipulation, and the students tended to accept them without testing or proving. The students also proposed alternative formulations for the initial questions and posed new problems from their explorations and attempts to refine previous conjectures.