First Principles of Attitudinal Change: a Review of Principles,Methods and Strategies

Knowing how to effectively design attitudinal change instruction for various learning settings is essential for instructional designers. However, the research on instructional design for attitudinal change instruction has been relatively dispersed and lacks cohesion, despite its increasing importance. The purposes of this paper are to 1) reignite the scholarly conversation on designing attitudinal change instruction, and 2) provide directions for future research. Using Merrill’s first principles of instruction as a guide and framework, we review the existing research to identify and discuss the principles for designing attitudinal change instruction.     

Conceptual change and anomalous data: A case study in the domain of natural sciences

Cognitive conflict has been proposed as a strategy to promote conceptual change. The history and philosophy of science have shown the importance of anomalous data to change scientific theories and to the progress of science. Often, scientists use anomalous data to develop new interpretations that lead to new conceptualizations and finally, to a deep conceptual change. To be aware of contradiction seems to be a first step in the process of conceptual change. A study to explore novice students responses to anomalous data has been carried out. Sixty nine ninth graders, fifty seven eleventh graders and sixty three twelfth graders participated in the study. A paper and pencil task about the origin of life on the Earth was designed. Subjects were divided into two conditions. In condition “A” only anomalous data were presented to the subjects. In condition “A+B”, both anomalous and confirmatory data were presented. Results indicated that younger students were less aware of contradiction than older students when both anomalous and confirmatory data were presented. However, no differences have been found among them when just anomalous data were presented (condition A). Twelfth graders were aware of contradiction in both conditions. Some students’ epistemological beliefs influenced their response to anomalous data. Although no conceptual change (weak or strong restructuring) was achieved, as it could be predicted by the low domain-specific knowledge of the subjects and the complexity of the topic, presenting anomalous data facilitated the achievement of the first steps of the conceptual change process.     

Singaporean Early Childhood Teachers' beliefs about Literacy Development in a Multilingual Context

It is widely recognised that teachers' pedagogical practices are influenced by many factors, including their personal experiences, their theoretical knowledge and the institutional context in which they work. Yet little is known about the beliefs held by Singaporean teachers about language and literacy development. Given the significance of early childhood for subsequent academic achievement, this study employed a survey method to explore the beliefs about literacy held by 79 teachers of 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children in prior‐to‐school settings. The findings indicate that almost all teachers viewed their primary goal as fostering children's ability to communicate and express themselves. They believed in using an eclectic approach rather than focusing on one or other ‘method’. The findings have implications for early childhood teacher education programs, professional development and implementation of Government policies in Singapore.     

Two sides of the same coin: video annotations and in-video questions for active learning

Educational technology research and development - Video in education has become pervasive. Globally, educators are recording instructional videos to augment their students’ learning and, in...     

Using cluster validation criterion to identify optimal feature subset and cluster number for document clustering

This paper presents a cluster validation based document clustering algorithm, which is capable of identifying an important feature subset and the intrinsic value of model order (cluster number). The important feature subset is selected by optimizing a cluster validity criterion subject to some constraint. For achieving model order identification capability, this feature selection procedure is conducted for each possible value of cluster number. The feature subset and the cluster number which maximize the cluster validity criterion are chosen as our answer. We have evaluated our algorithm using several datasets from the 20Newsgroup corpus. Experimental results show that our algorithm can find the important feature subset, estimate the cluster number and achieve higher micro-averaged precision than previous document clustering algorithms which require the value of cluster number to be provided.     

Prevention–Permission–Promotion: A Review of Approaches to Errors in Learning

Errors are often perceived as undesirable events to be avoided at all costs. However, a growing body of research suggests that making errors is, in fact, beneficial for learning. Building on human resource development literature, the present review proposes a 3P framework of approaches to errors during learning: prevention (avoiding or observing errors), permission (allowing errors), and promotion (inducing or guiding errors). This framework is applied to examine and integrate the empirical evidence on errors that have been commonly investigated in cognitive, educational, and applied psychology research. The psychological mechanisms of each error approach are discussed, and implications for education are considered. This review then concludes by highlighting the ways in which the various error approaches interact with learner characteristics and learning contexts, as well as discussing the role of feedback in error correction and proposing directions for future research toward understanding how errors can be optimized in learning.     

Social constructivism, projective identity, and learning: case study of nathan

In this paper we consider the significant issue of identity and how it relates to learning. Importantly, we narrow down the study in terms of how projective identity interplays with learning from the point of view of the learner and his/her social community. Self and community cannot be divorced. In order to illustrate this concept, we describe a case study involving an 11 years old boy in a learning context commonly referred to as an informal learning environment. This environment would include the community in which projective identity evolves. The trajectory of identity projection can be conceived in Ricoeurian terms of a plot where actors perform actions in role playing situations. This plot metaphor is consistent to the many interactions within MMPOGs and fictional worlds currently in existence. We conceive of an identity projection framework as our contributions to knowledge.     

Towards a situative view of extending and scaling innovations in education: a case study of the Six Learnings framework

This article seeks to draw from contemporary understandings of translation science to highlight and elaborate upon possible norms and procedures which the authors have found to be critical in the successful extension and scaling of design-based research interventions in education into wider practitioner-based adoption and adaptation. The impetus for this interrogation is the desire to mediate the tensions which sometimes arise between researcher, practitioner, and other stakeholders in educational research—such as policy-makers and funding agencies. It is hoped that these explications will contribute to the as yet nascent body of literature on translation science as applied to innovation in education.     

Analysing meritocratic (in)equality in Singapore: ideology,curriculum and reproduction

In this article I first discuss how in Singapore the concept of meritocracy captures both elitist and egalitarian aspirations, and the ways in which its education policies have for a long time vacillated between these conflicting dimensions. I then argue that critical studies of meritocracy need to go beyond an understanding of the term as an inherently unstable concept instantiated problematically in policy and practice. Rather, as I develop the argument further, the dynamics of meritocracy needs to be appreciated as an ideology that is negotiated by dominant social groups as these seek to legitimize particular distributions of social resources. Such dominant ideologies, however, are not only produced in the education system; they are also reproduced through it, often in far more complex ways. To see how these ideologies and their tensions animate the very mechanism that sits at the centre of the reproduction of (in)equality, viz. the curriculum, the rest of the article provides an account of how one particular subject area is differently taught in an elite and a mainstream school.