Supporting Personalized Learning through Individualized Learning Plans

Individualized Learning Plans (ILPs), an effective strategy to promote students’ college and career readiness, are increasingly used in US school systems as a mechanism to encourage students’ career exploration and identification of career goals. After describing features of ILPs, we provide an example of the ILP process developed and implemented in the junior high schools in McLean County (Illinois) Unit District No. 5. Based upon this experience, we share important factors for school leaders that can affect successful implementation in their schools.     

社会主义生态文明建设评价指标体系:一个基于AHP的构建脚本

本文以解决生态文明建设评价指标体系量化问题为基本任务,概括了社会主义生态文明建设评价指标体系的基本特征,总结了生态文明建设评价指标体系应当遵循的基本原则。文章从8个方面构建了一个包含3层评价指标的社会主义生态文明建设评价指标体系,采用AHP方法确定权重,并提出了运用这一评价指标体系的对策措施。     

PISA truth effects: the construction of low performance

This article seeks to unpack the taken-for-granted notion of low performance, arguing that performance and competency are not a given categories; rather they are “objects-for-thought” that receive their discursive and material contours through a chain of translations. As suggested previously by Gorur, PISA is analyzed through the lens of Latourian Science and Technology Studies. The arguments in this article are based on an analysis of situations constructed to observe how performance is enacted in socio-material practice, as 15-year-old students collaboratively solve PISA scientific-literacy items. As background a text analysis, concerning how scientific literacy and performance are discursively constructed in various PISA materials, is reported. We suggest the notion of ‘competency’ be linked to the historical event of trying to start to detect it and argue that PISA results are products of the situated adjustments that are enacted by students and items created in the very moments of scientific measurement.     

Factors behind low reading literacy achievement

The initial results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicated that Finnish and Swedish students' are among the best readers in all OECD countries. However, the literacy performance of 7% of Finnish and 12% of Swedish students' remains at a level which is not sufficient for further studies or active citizenship. This article reports a further comparative study which explores, compares and contrasts, by means of two‐level logistic regression models, students' personal, socio‐economic and cultural factors and their effects on low as opposed to average reading literacy achievement in Finland and Sweden. The results indicate that the risk of being a low achiever is strongly determined by gender and by several sociocultural factors as well as by students' personal characteristics, attitudes and activities both at and outside school. The constructed model was relatively similar and predicted with approximately equal degrees of probability membership in the risk group in both countries. This lays a solid foundation for joint pedagogic developmental efforts.     

The Interplay Between Content, Expressions and Their Meaning When Expressing Understanding

In the intentional-expressive approach, a development within the phenomenographic tradition, an alternative view of the role of language is adopted. The approach focuses the learner’s use of expressions and intended meanings, in relation to his/her conception of a phenomenon. The article presents empirical findings from a study made at a university of technology using a special dialogue structure. The aim of the dialogue is to capture the individual’s way of reflecting on the interplay between the expressions he or she uses, their intended meanings, and his or her conception of the phenomenon. Twenty-four students participated and were presented an everyday situation involving the physical motion of a body. The results show that the interplay was ambiguous and dynamic. The relationships between expression and meaning were much weaker than between meaning and conception. In learning situations, this may cause problems concerning students’ knowledge formation, since a stable relationship is often taken for granted in learning and teaching.     

Policies to promote user innovation: Makerspaces and clinician innovation in Swedish hospitals

As it becomes apparent that users are an important source in innovation in society and in organizations, scholars are realizing that user-directed innovation policy might contribute to improving social welfare. How such policy might be designed, however, is uncertain, as are the costs and benefits of such policies. It is also not clear whether there is a problem for user-directed policy to solve, or what that problem is.As a first empirical step to answering these questions, we report the results of providing hospital clinicians with access to ‘makerspaces’, i.e. staffed facilities with prototyping tools and the expertise in using them.Findings suggest that almost all innovations developed in the makerspaces are user innovations; that the potential returns from the innovations developed in the makerspaces’ first year of operation are more than tenfold the required investment; and that most of the innovations would not have been developed without access to makerspaces. Due to lack of diffusion, only a limited share of potential returns is realized.This suggests not only that there are problems of non-development and under-development that policy can solve and that doing so supports social welfare. It also suggests makerspaces as an effective form of user-supporting innovation policy.     

Longitudinal Study of Student Attitudes in a Biology Program

This is among the first longitudinal studies to report student attitudes across 4 yr of a university program. We found that the attitudes of students in biology become significantly more expert-like from the first year to the fourth year of the program, that is, there was a significant positive shift in students’ overall percent favorable scores from 64.5 to 72%, as opposed to the expert response, which averaged 90%. There was a significant positive shift for the real world connection category (78–85%), the enjoyment (personal interest) category (74–82%), and the conceptual connections/memorization category (66–74%). Moreover, there was a significant correlation between students’ overall percent favorable scores and performance (cumulative grade point average) at the end, but not at the beginning, of the fourth year, with high-performing students having significantly more expert-like attitudes than low-performing students. The correlation between percent favorable score and performance was the strongest for the problem solving: synthesis and application category, in which the highest-performing students finished their fourth year with 90% favorable compared with 35% favorable for the lowest-performing students. A comparison of these results with previously reported results and their implications for teaching are discussed.