Context-based learning in the middle years: achieving resonance between the real-world field and environmental science concepts

ABSTRACT

There is growing interest in how to engage middle school students in science to improve their enthusiasm for science and to arrest the decline in uptake in the senior years. Also, there is interest in improving students’ application of science to real-life situations, a requirement for international tests. One approach that offers hope for improving students’ connections between concepts and context is the context-based approach. Context-based units that connect canonical science with the real-world of the student’s local community have been trialled in the senior years but are new in the middle years. Research in senior classes has shown that students who were taught through a context-based approach demonstrated fluid transitions between the context and concepts in written work and student-student conversations. In the current ethnographic study we built on our previous work and investigated how students make connections between the environmental science concepts and the context of the weekly visits to the local creek. Students were immersed in the real-world context by completing an 11-week environmental science unit that required assessment of the health of a creek. Two assertions emerged; firstly, student-student conversations at the creek afforded students the opportunity for interconnections between environmental science concepts and the context (defined as resonance); and secondly, students’ written reports about the health of the creek demonstrated resonance. Furthermore, group work encouraged students the agency to complete sets of tasks that privileged visually obvious environmental science concepts such as pollution, identification of plants/animals or turbidity/flow rate.     

Expanding the Foundation: Climate Change and Opportunities for Educational Research

Human-caused climate change is a dominant global challenge. Unlike other disciplines and fields, there has as yet been only limited attention to climate change in educational research generally, and in educational foundations in particular. Education is key to assisting humanity in mitigating and adapting to climate change, and educational researchers working within diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions and a broad array of research contexts need to engage in this most pressing of challenges. We argue that the field needs a new commitment to a form of educational justice appropriately scaled to the size of the challenge we face. We address this gap by reviewing current thinking on the human dimensions of climate change and summarizing what research has been conducted in the area of climate change education as a means of identifying a range of possibilities for educational research and praxis.     

The effect of short-duration sprint interval exercise on plasma postprandial triacylglycerol levels in young men

Abstract

It is well established that regular exercise can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, although the most time-efficient exercise protocol to confer benefits has yet to be established. The aim of the current study was to determine the effects of short-duration sprint interval exercise on postprandial triacylglycerol. Fifteen healthy male participants completed two 2 day trials. On day 1, participants rested (control) or carried out twenty 6 s sprints, interspersed with 24 s recovery (sprint interval exercise – 14 min for total exercise session). On day 2, participants consumed a high-fat meal for breakfast with blood samples collected at baseline, 2 h and 4 h. Gas exchange was also measured at these time points. On day 2 of control and sprint interval exercise trials, there were no differences (P < 0.05) between trials in plasma glucose, triacylglycerol, insulin or respiratory exchange ratio (RER). The area under the curve for plasma triacylglycerol was 7.67 ± 2.37 mmol · l^–1.4 h^–1 in the control trial and 7.26 ± 2.49 mmol · l^–1.4 h^–1 in the sprint interval exercise trial. Although the sprint exercise protocol employed had no significant effect on postprandial triacylglycerol, there was a clear variability in responses that warrants further investigation.     

Increasing appropriate classroom behaviour and academic performance by reinforcing correct work alone

The present study examined indirect effects of modifying appropriate classroom behaviour by itself and academic performance by itself. Of particular interest were changes in appropriate behaviour as students were reinforced for correct work. Five disruptive boys were given arithmetic assignments during daily 20-minute experimental sessions. Changes in appropriate behaviour and arithmetic performance were measured during the following phases: (a) an initial baseline phase; (b) reinforcement for appropriate behaviour alone; (c) return to baseline; (d) reinforcement for correct arithmetic work. It was found that reinforcing appropriate behaviour increased that behaviour, but produced little improvement in arithmetic performance. However, reinforcing arithmetic performance not only increased correct work, but resulted in a high rate of appropriate behaviour as well. The implications of these findings for the management of classroom behaviours were discussed.     

Academic conferences: representative and resistant sites for higher education research

The overarching argument made in this article is twofold. Firstly, academic conferences are posited as sites for higher education research. Secondly, the well-recognised emotional and social processes of conferences are used to make space at the boundaries of higher education research for psychosocial analysis. The article theorises conferences in relation to the current concerns of higher education, such as globalisation, technologisation and neoliberalisation, but simultaneously delves into the micro-conventions of academic spaces. This latter mode of analysis is adapted from Butler's (1997) work Excitable speech: A politics of the performative (New York: Routledge), around naming and vulnerability to language. An autobiographical example of naming and misnaming at a conference is worked through, both zooming in to micro-processes and zooming out to the wider concerns of higher education research. The article asserts the importance of recognising the connection between micro- and macro-scale analyses of higher education.