Practical Production Work Within an Integrated English and Media Curriculum: Acquisition of Theory or Creative Exploration?

This is an account of an action research project carried out, in the summer of 1999, in a secondary school in Devon. My aim was to investigate ways of introducing media theory into the GCSE practical production module in Media Studies. I did this specifically with notions of audience in mind ‐an area, which I was aware, had been problematic in my teaching before then.     

WormClassroom.org: an inquiry-rich educational web portal for research resources of Caenorhabditis elegans

The utilization of biology research resources, coupled with a “learning by inquiry” approach, has great potential to aid students in gaining an understanding of fundamental biological principles. To help realize this potential, we have developed a Web portal for undergraduate biology education, WormClassroom.org, based on current research resources of a model research organism, Caenorhabditis elegans. This portal is intended to serve as a resource gateway for students to learn biological concepts using C. elegans research material. The driving forces behind the WormClassroom website were the strengths of C. elegans as a teaching organism, getting researchers and educators to work together to develop instructional materials, and the 3 P's (problem posing, problem solving, and peer persuasion) approach for inquiry learning. Iterative assessment is an important aspect of the WormClassroom site development because it not only ensures that content is up-to-date and accurate, but also verifies that it does, in fact, aid student learning. A primary assessment was performed to refine the WormClassroom website utilizing undergraduate biology students and nonstudent experts such as C. elegans researchers; results and comments were used for site improvement. We are actively encouraging continued resource contributions from the C. elegans research and education community for the further development of WormClassroom.     

Titles in research articles: Changes across time and discipline

Titles are a crucial feature of research papers and have become increasingly important with changes in publishing practices and the explosion of published research. As a result, novice writers seeking to get their work noticed in international journals might benefit from a clear understanding of the features of research titles and an awareness of the relationship between language and disciplinary context. In this study, we explore this relationship and the impact of changing contexts on titles across the last 60 years on the length, form and content of 36,000 titles from the 10 leading journals from six disciplines spread along a soft-hard science continuum. Our results show a considerable increase in the length of titles coupled with more interrogative and compound titles in almost all disciplines. There has also been a growing mention of methods in the titles of hard knowledge papers with more frequent inclusion of results in the softer domains. These diachronic changes can be attributed to different characteristics of the fields and of the changing dynamics of the publishing context. Our findings have important implications for early career academics seeking to publish in English and contribute to studies of diachronic analysis of academic discourse.     

Effect of taste context and ambient context changes on successive negative contrast

Rats shifted from 32% sucrose to 4% sucrose lick less than rats that experience oniy the 4% solution. Previous experiments have found this negative contrast effect to be reduced (“disinhibited”) by the addition of a novel tone in the postshift period. In Experiment 1 of this paper, the negative contrast effect was enhanced when a novel flavor was added to the sucrose solution in the postshift period. In Experiments 2–4, changes in the ambient context, even changes sufficient to produce disruptions in licking, did not alter the degree of negative contrast. Tiese results suggest that (1) rats compare rewards across substantially different contexts, (2) contrast may serve to enhance taste neophobia, and (3) a disinhibitory effect may be confined to the presentation of punctate, nontaste, novel stimuli within a familiar context.     

Pre-service teachers’ construction of professional identity through peer collaboration during professional experience: a case study in Australia

Much research in the area of pre-service teacher (PST) identity formation has focused on the mentoring relationship between PSTs and their supervising teachers. While this is important to identity formation, interaction with peers is another area that needs to be examined. Using Wenger’s matrix as a theoretical framework, this study aimed to explore how PSTs’ identities are formed during the process of paired placement during the professional experience. Two pairs of PSTs were followed during the four-week professional experience. Data were collected from interviews with the PSTs before, during and after the professional experience. It is clear from this case study that the identity formation of PSTs is enhanced during a paired placement on their first professional experience. This finding has implications for teacher educators who are seeking evidence of the effectiveness of paired placements on the identity formation of PSTs during professional experience.     

Connected and culturally embedded beliefs: Chinese and US teachers talk about how their students best learn mathematics

This study compares US and Chinese elementary mathematics teachers' beliefs about how students learn mathematics. Interviews with teachers in each country revealed that Chinese and US teachers have distinct ways of thinking about how mathematics should be taught and how students learn. Many Chinese teachers talked about developing students’ interest in mathematics and relating the content of mathematics lessons to real-life situations. The US teachers talked about students' learning styles and using hands-on approaches to learning mathematics. Furthermore, these beliefs may be widespread and persistent within each country because the set of ideas among teachers appear to be internally consistent. Implications for teacher change and the study of teachers' beliefs are discussed.     

Academic misconduct among teacher education students: A descriptive-correlational study

Results of a study to determine the extent to which teacher education students perceive their student peers to engage in various forms of academic misconduct are reported. A thirty-seven-item instrument was used to collect data from ninety-seven teacher education students at a southern comprehensive university. Items addressed the frequency of various cheating behaviors, the perceived maturity level of the persons most likely to cheat, and the degree to which respondents felt cheaters “neutralized” their cheating behaviors. Although cheating was not perceived as a major problem among teacher education students, a definite relationship between perceived neutralization and academic misconduct was noted.