Student task involvement in activity oriented science

The focus of this investigation was on relationships between teaching behaviors and student engagement in 13 middle school science classes. The results indicated that seven managerial variables and four instructional variables were significantly related to student engagement rates. Also the types of tasks allocated by teachers in science lessons were significantly related to the types of tasks undertaken by students. A canonical correlation analysis indicated significant relationships between three allocated task dimensions and three student engagement dimensions. Although teachers allocated adequate time for students to engage in investigation planning, data collecting, and data processing, the results indicated that overt engagement was prevalent only when data were collected. Attending was the predominant type of student engagement when investigations were planned and data were processed. The percentage of student time on task was approximately 63%. Rates of student off task behavior tended to be consistently high across all types of allocated tasks.     

Benefits of assistive reading software for students with attention disorders

This study investigated how assistive reading software affected the reading performance of a group of 20 post-secondary students who had a primary diagnosis of attention disorder. These students used assistive reading software for most of a semester to read assignments for an English class and in testing sessions in which comparisons were made between normal, unassisted reading, and reading assisted by the soft ware. This software provides a synchronized visual and auditory presentation of text, and incorporates study skills tools for highlighting and note taking. Attention measures, reading speed, comprehension scores, and attitude questionnaire responses were obtained during these sessions. The principal findings were that the assistive software allowed the students to attend better to their reading, to reduce their distractibility, to read with less stress and fatigue, and to read for longer periods of time. It helped them to read faster and, thereby, to complete reading assignments in less time. It did not have a significant effect on comprehension, but it helped some students whose comprehension was very poor. The study results indicate that assistive reading software should be considered as a significant intervention to assist students who have attention disorders and as an accommodation to help them compensate for their disabilities.     

BEING A LEARNER: A VIRTUE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

ABSTRACT:  Lifelong learning is something which one does for oneself that no one else can do for one: it is a public and personal human activity, rather than private or individualistic. One of the features of the education system is the paucity of a language for learning as process and participative experience. Personalised learning requires a sense of the worthwhileness of 'being a learner'– a virtue in the 21st century. A sense of one's own worth as a person is essential to understanding one's identity as a learner. Research suggests the human capacity to learn can be understood as a form of consciousness which is characterised by particular values, attitudes and dispositions, with a lateral and a temporal connectivity. This 'consciousness' has several dimensions which are all related to becoming a person, with a learning identity. They also enable the learner to become aware of and appropriate what is of worth and map onto the sorts of core values that learning communities espouse. Awareness of self and of one's own worth as a person is a necessary condition for 'becoming a learner' and for identifying and engaging with 'what is of worth'. Furthermore, a sense of self as a learner is formed in relationship, and understood as one learns to tell one's own story, as a participant in the conversation of the learning community. Character is the way in which we refer to that quality of personhood in which there is rooted the capacity to change and learn over time.     

Psychological Resources as Stress Buffers: Their Relationship to University Students' Anxiety and Depression

The association of protective resources, personality variables, life events, and gender with anxiety and depression was examined with university students. Building on regression analyses, a structural equation model was generated with good fit, indicating that with respect to both anxiety and depression, negative life events and coping resources were mediated by a common distress factor. Personality variables were associated with anxiety, which in turn had a direct relationship to depression.     

Constraints to curriculum reform: Teachers and the myths of schooling

Curriculum reform efforts usually have ignored the culture in which curriculum is embedded. Principal components of the culture are the knowledge of teachers and the myths of this culture. Images, metaphors, and metonymies are forms of teacher knowledge that influence the manner in which teachers define their roles and implement the curriculum. Unless endeavors are made to facilitate teacher learning through the construction of new images, metaphors, and metonymies, it is unlikely that curricular reform will proceed in the intended manner. Similarly, the myths that define the customs and taboos of a culture need to be considered by instructional designers if their curricular resources are to be used as intended. The myths ofteacher as controller of students andobjectivism together might persuade teachers to adhere to the more traditional approach whereby knowledge is transferred to students in teacher-controlled activities.This article describes theScience Vision series, a hypermedia system developed in response to a clear need for additional resources to educate teachers concerning alternative myths and their use in relation to utilizing resources.     

THE QUESTION OF EDUCATION SCIENCE: EXPERIMENTISM VERSUS EXPERIMENTALISM

The ascendant view in the current debate about education science — experimentism — is a reassertion of the randomized experiment as the methodological gold standard. Advocates of this view have ignored, not answered, long-standing criticisms of the randomized experiment: its frequent impracticality, its lack of external validity, its confinement to a regularity conception of causality, and its externalization of politics. This article rehearses these criticisms and then adumbrates the alternative of experimentalism . In contrast to experimentism, experimentalism is expansive and variegated in its conception of scientific method, seeing methodology as itself an object of experimentation. Experimentalism also includes a central role for intentional causation and self-consciously incorporates progressive political values.     

Conveying clinical reasoning based on visual observation via eye-movement modelling examples

Complex perceptual tasks, like clinical reasoning based on visual observations of patients, require not only conceptual knowledge about diagnostic classes but also the skills to visually search for symptoms and interpret these observations. However, medical education so far has focused very little on how visual observation skills can be efficiently conveyed to novices. The current study applied a novel instructional method to teach these skills by showing the learners how an expert model visually searches and interprets symptoms (i.e., eye-movement modelling examples; EMMEs). Case videos of patients were verbally explained by a model (control condition) and presented to students. In the experimental conditions, the participants received a recording of the model’s eye movements superimposed on the case videos. The eye movements were displayed by either highlighting the features the model focused on with a circle (the circle condition) or by blurring the features the model did not focus on (the spotlight condition). Compared to the other two conditions, results show that a spotlight on the case videos better guides the students’ attention towards the relevant features. Moreover, when testing the students’ clinical reasoning skills with videos of new patient cases without any guidance, participants studying EMMEs with a spotlight showed improved their visual search and enhanced interpretation performance of the symptoms in contrast to participants in either the circle or the control condition. These findings show that a spotlight EMME can successfully convey clinical reasoning based on visual observations.     

Stephen Colbert's Civics Lesson: How Colbert Super PAC Taught Viewers About Campaign Finance

This study tests whether exposure to The Colbert Report influenced knowledge of super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups, and ascertains how having such knowledge influenced viewers' perceptions about the role of money in politics. Our analysis of a national random sample of adults interviewed after the 2012 presidential election found that viewing The Colbert Report both increased peoples' perception of how knowledgeable they were about super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups and increased actual knowledge of campaign finance regulation regarding these independent expenditure groups. Findings suggest that the political satirist was more successful in informing his viewers about super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups than were other types of news media. Viewing The Colbert Report also indirectly influenced how useful his audience perceived money to be in politics.