Eliciting Metacognitive Experiences and Reflection in a Year 11 Chemistry Classroom: An Activity Theory Perspective

Concerns regarding students’ learning and reasoning in chemistry classrooms are well documented. Students’ reasoning in chemistry should be characterized by conscious consideration of chemical phenomenon from laboratory work at macroscopic, molecular/sub-micro and symbolic levels. Further, students should develop metacognition in relation to such ways of reasoning about chemistry phenomena. Classroom change eliciting metacognitive experiences and metacognitive reflection is necessary to shift entrenched views of teaching and learning in students. In this study, Activity Theory is used as the framework for interpreting changes to the rules/customs and tools of the activity systems of two different classes of students taught by the same teacher, Frances, who was teaching chemical equilibrium to those classes in consecutive years. An interpretive methodology involving multiple data sources was employed. Frances explicitly changed her pedagogy in the second year to direct students attention to increasingly consider chemical phenomena at the molecular/sub-micro level. Additionally, she asked students not to use the textbook until toward the end of the equilibrium unit and sought to engage them in using their prior knowledge of chemistry to understand their observations from experiments. Frances’ changed pedagogy elicited metacognitive experiences and reflection in students and challenged them to reconsider their metacognitive beliefs about learning chemistry and how it might be achieved. While teacher change is essential for science education reform, students are not passive players in change efforts and they need to be convinced of the viability of teacher pedagogical change in the context of their goals, intentions, and beliefs.     

‘Go somewhere,do something’. How students responded to the opportunity to complete an unstructured,five-day,wilderness solo in the Cantabrian Mountains,Northern Spain

This study explored the response of 28, second year undergraduate students to an innovative approach to a five-day solo. Periods of solitude are more likely to lead to positive outcomes when they are freely chosen than when they are programmed as part of a course. The extent to which a programmed solo can be ‘freely chosen’ by the individual is traditionally perceived as being constrained by logistic, safety and group needs. This study describes a solo, delivered as a required part of a core academic module, in which these perceived limitations were challenged. It describes an attempt to empower students to make their own choices about the nature of their solo experience and risk management. The study evaluates the extent to which individual students felt that they had freedom of choice; the choices they made and the outcomes of their solos. An intrinsic case study approach was used to explore the choices made by all students before, during and immediately after their solo as well as the more considered responses of 14 students eight months later. The data suggest that the pre-solo mindset was the most important factor in determining positive outcomes for participants and that offering students the opportunity to take responsibility for the structure of their own solo increased the likelihood that this would be achieved.     

Telecommunications and an Alternative Practicum: collaborative entrepreneurship in teacher education

ABSTRACT

As in many schools of education, the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta has initiated a number of collaborative projects with partnership schools in an attempt to remove the gap between the traditional, university‐based component of practicum courses, and the practice of the school‐based component. One model, described in this paper, uses telecommunications technology to deliver field‐based experiences. Technology‐based, inter‐institutional collaborative projects contain elements of innovation, that are usually managed with reference to change strategy processes described by Fullan (1982), Havelock (1973), Rogers (1983, 1986) ‐and others. However, these processes take time and planning and may actually mitigate against adoption and implementation of rapidly evolving technologies. In this paper, we argue that telecommunications technology‐based, collaboratively developed models of teacher education may be better served by entrepreneurial thinking than by carefully planned change strategies. One such project is described from initiation through implementation, and components of entrepreneurial partnering are suggested.     

Popular Culture and Advertising

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MADISON AVENUE? ADVERTISING IN THE '90s by Martin Mayer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991—$22.95, ISBN 0-316- 55154-6, 269 pp.)

THE CODES OF ADVERTISING: FETISHISM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MEANING IN THE CONSUMER SOCIETY by Sut Jhally (New York: Routledge, 1990—price not given, paper, ISBN 0-415-90353-X, 225 pp.)

ROCK AROUND THE BLOCK: A HISTORY OF ROCK MUSIC IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE SOVIET UNION by Timothy W. Ryback (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990—$21.95, ISBN 0-19-505633-7, 272 pp.)

MUSIC AT THE MARGINS: POPULAR MUSIC AND GLOBAL CULTURAL DIVERSITY by Deanna Campbell Robinson, Elizabeth B. Buck, and Marlene Cuthbert (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991—$39.95/19.95, ISBN 0-8039- 3192-1 hard, 0-8039-3193-X paper, 312 pp.)

THE MANY LIVES OF THE BATMAN: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO A SUPERHERO AND HIS MEDIA edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991—$39.95/13.95, ISBN 0-415-90346-7 hard, 0-415-90347-5 paper, 213 pp.)

BROADCAST ADVERTISING: A COMPREHENSIVE WORKING TEXTBOOK by Sherilyn K. Zeigler and Herbert H. Howard (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991—$34.95, ISBN 0-8138-0072-2, 358 pp.)

FUNDAMENTALS OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH by Alan Fletcher and Thomas Bowers (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991—price not given, ISBN 0-534-14778-X, 364 pp.)

THIS BUSINESS OF MUSIC by Sidney Shemel and M. William Krasilovsky (New York: Billboard/Watson-Guptill, 1991—$27.50, ISBN 0-8230-7706-3, 688 pp.)     

Crash Course in Reference

The importance to libraries of the collection development policy statement was underscored with the publication of the ALA Guidelines for Collection Development in 1978. The actual process of putting together such a statement is outlined in this article. Consideration is given to the composition of the collection development policy committee, the use of the Guidelines by the committee, and the sources of information that need to be analyzed for the policy, such as resource sharing, historical strengths and changing curriculum goals. The problems of determining collection levels, reconciliation of ambitions with actual practice, and how to handle interdisciplinary areas are also addressed.