Enhancing student engagement in one institution

Student engagement is important to further and higher education institutions: it is understood to be a proxy for quality teaching and governments attach a proportion of funding to student retention and completion. Many institutions are taking part in student engagement surveys, using the data generated to initiate changes to policies and practice. This article presents an overview of literature on student engagement and quality teaching. It then briefly describes three projects in one institution in New Zealand that were designed to improve teaching and student engagement, and outlines key findings from them. The projects are then related to four of Chalmers’ five levels of quality teaching and Leach and Zepke’s six perspectives on engagement, enabling some conclusions about what Massey University is doing successfully and what more it could do to enhance student engagement. It is suggested that other institutions could use this different approach to review their current pedagogy and student engagement strategies.     

Object Properties and Knowledge in Early Lexical Learning

The ease with which young children learn object nouns suggests that they possess strategies to identify properties critical to lexical category membership. In previous work, young children used a same-shape criterion to extend new count nouns. The present research tested the generality of this shape bias. 2- and 3-year-olds were asked either to extend a novel count noun to new instances, or to choose unnamed objects to go together. The objects varied in shape, size, and texture. For half of the subjects, the objects had eyes--a property strongly associated with certain material kinds. If young children know this association, they should attend to texture as well as shape in classifying objects with eyes. With named objects only, both 2- and 3-year-old children classified eyeless objects by shape and objects with eyes by both shape and texture. The results suggest that very young children possess considerable knowledge about conditional relations between kinds of perceptual properties. Knowledge of such conditional relations may aid children in forming new categories and thus in discovering new word meanings.     

Measuring Educators' Attitudes and Beliefs About Evaluation: Construct Validity and Reliability of the Teacher Evaluation Experience Scale

This study presents the reliability and validity of the Teacher Evaluation Experience Scale–Teacher Form (TEES-T), a multidimensional measure of educators' attitudes and beliefs about teacher evaluation. Confirmatory factor analyses of data from 583 teachers were conducted on the TEES-T hypothesized five-factor model, as well as on alternative models. The five- and four-factor model yielded acceptable fit to the data. Information-theory-based indices of relative fit (i.e., AIC₀, BCC₀, and BIC₀) indicated that the TEES-T four-factor model yielded superior fit to either the five-factor or one-factor models. The TEES-T evidenced good internal consistency, freedom from item bias, and convergent validity with the Collective Efficacy Scale. Implications are discussed.     

Considering science and language arts connections: A study of teacher cognition

The Elementary Science Integration Project (ESIP) brought together teachers knowledgeable about, and committed to, whole-language instruction with their science-oriented counterparts to explore connections between the disciplines and build from teachers' strengths. By recognizing commonalities, that both hands-on science and whole language center on inquiry and focus on children's learning processes, ESIP was designed to reveal the issues both groups of teachers see as important as they go about making classroom decisions. The ultimate goal of the project was to promote science as central to cross-curricular study, thus increasing the comfort level of teachers, the amount of time devoted to science in the classroom, and an interest in inquiry. This article described the project and identified the considerations teachers used to evaluate science–language-arts connections. Twenty expert and 7 novice teachers worked together over a 2-year period to construct and elaborate their own understandings of curricular integrátion, designing action research projects to explore their newfound understandings. Teachers kept journals and participated in extensive group discussions and interviews that provided the data sources for this article. Results revealed the influence of teachers' scholarly and pedagogical orientations on the way they think about science–language-arts connections and the influence of personal experiences in convincing teachers that science–language-arts connections are worth fostering in the classroom.     

Technology in the Home and the Achievement of Young Children: Findings From the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study

Because technology in the home is becoming ever more available, understanding the role of technology in early childhood development is increasingly an opportunity and a concern for educators. This report examines data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, to provide an overview of the role of technology in the home and its impact on reading and math achievement in the early grades. The results show that access and use of technology influence children's academic achievement. Although the results show that having access to technology can contribute significantly to the achievement of young children, mere access is unlikely to be sufficient for all young children to benefit from technology in the home. Adults will need to mediate the use of these potential learning tools for children. Based on the findings of this report, policymakers should support increasing the availability of computers for low-income families and continue to discourage extensive viewing of TV, and researchers should focus on the specific methods that parents can enact to realize the learning potential of an increasingly ubiquitous resource: computers and the Internet in the home.     

Approaches to studying and perceptions of academic quality in electronically delivered courses

The Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) and a short form of the Approaches to Studying Inventory (ASI) were administered to students who were taking electronically delivered courses in computer science. The constituent structure of the CEQ was preserved in this distinctive context, and a second-order factor analysis confirmed its role as an index of perceived academic quality. The students' scores on the individual scales of the CEQ and the ASI shared nearly two-thirds of their variance. In short, approaches to studying in electronically delivered courses are strongly associated with students' perceptions of the academic quality of those courses.     

Spaces of inclusion: investigating place,positioning and perspective in educational settings through photo-elicitation

This paper presents findings from a collaborative research study which sought to explore perspectives and understandings of the concept of inclusion, as played out in schools and colleges in northwest England, via the use of images. The research had two parts: in the first part, children and young people took photographs in their school setting that they felt represented inclusion or exclusion, offering an explanation for their choice. Some of these photographs and the accompanying comments were anonymised and formed the second part of the research that sought the viewpoints and perspectives of student-teachers, serving teachers, teaching assistants and academics via seminars and workshops. It is the responses received in the seminars and workshops that form the focus of this paper. Four images and a range of responses to them have been selected for discussion and are framed within three key inter-related themes of place, positioning and perspective. Such an analysis is made to consider how self-positioning might inform diverse interpretations of the cultural construction and visual representation of inclusion and exclusion.