An ethic of care and educational practice

This article explicates the theoretical framework of an ethic of care and outlines recommendations for applying the framework to practice in adventure education, offering possibilities for re-imagining organizations as centrally concerned with compassion and care. Focusing on the work of Gilligan and Noddings, we suggest an understanding of an ethic of care that is contextual, ungendered, and inclusive of both the private and public spheres of life, and draw parallels between this ethic and the philosophies underlying Outward Bound specifically, and adventure education more generally. Finally, we outline possibilities for organizing educational curricula around centres of care for self, others, and the natural world, using Noddings' suggested curricular components of modeling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation.     

Teaching Science as a Process,Not a Set of Facts

Science & Education - The widespread misperception of science as a deliverer of irrefutable facts, rather than a deliberative process, is undermining public trust in science. Science education...     

Good practices for student learning: Mixed‐method evidence from the Wabash National Study

Kathleen M. Goodman, Marcia Baxter Magolda, Tricia A. Seifert, and Patricia M. King review both quantitative and qualitative data to understand students' college experiences and provide powerful information to guide educators.     

Patterns in the form of formative feedback and student response

Formative feedback currently receives attention as an effective means of increasing student learning. However, how to frame feedback to achieve the best effect is an ongoing debate. In this study we analyse a written data-set of 174 segments of teacher feedback and student response, coded using 10 emergent feedback and 14 response categories. As it is argued that feedback is a dialogue between students and teacher, links between feedback and response segments are viewed as a dialogical framework that we visualise and understand using network analysis. From this network we conclude that some ways of formulating feedback are more productive and likely to lead to types of responses that signify learning than others. We thus identify the reflection group of responses, consisting of the categories reflective response, explanation and students investigate own thinking. The feedback categories that link primarily to the reflection group are open question, wondering question and leading question, which we categorise as the questioning group of feedback. We discuss these patterns against a previously published framework, and by discussing specific examples we further our understanding of what makes feedback formative.     

Measuring Graph Comprehension,Critique, and Construction in Science

Interpreting and creating graphs plays a critical role in scientific practice. The K-12 Next Generation Science Standards call for students to use graphs for scientific modeling, reasoning, and communication. To measure progress on this dimension, we need valid and reliable measures of graph understanding in science. In this research, we designed items to measure graph comprehension, critique, and construction and developed scoring rubrics based on the knowledge integration (KI) framework. We administered the items to over 460 middle school students. We found that the items formed a coherent scale and had good reliability using both item response theory and classical test theory. The KI scoring rubric showed that most students had difficulty linking graphs features to science concepts, especially when asked to critique or construct graphs. In addition, students with limited access to computers as well as those who speak a language other than English at home have less integrated understanding than others. These findings point to the need to increase the integration of graphing into science instruction. The results suggest directions for further research leading to comprehensive assessments of graph understanding.     

Action research: a methodology for transformative learning for a professor and his students in an engineering classroom

ABSTRACT

An engineering professor of a first-year thermodynamics course and a PhD student with a focus in engineering education in a large research university in Canada participated in an ethnographic action research study with the intention of increasing active learning in the classroom to enhance student engagement and learning. Unexpected findings included transformative changes to the professor’s epistemology of teaching and learning. Through the action research cycle of planning, implementing, observing, and critically reflecting, modifications were made to the instructional strategies and the learning environment that created a micro engineering community of practice where both students and teaching assistants engaged in deep learning and legitimate peripheral participation on the trajectory to ‘becoming engineers’. Qualitative interview data from the professor, three students, and three teaching assistants are analysed through approaches to learning research and situated learning theory. Engaging in action research had profound repercussions in this case. The authors make the argument for action research as a catalyst for transformative learning required for teachers to engage students in the twenty-first century classroom.     

Designing and Validating Assessments of Complex Thinking in Science

Typical assessment systems often measure isolated ideas rather than the coherent understanding valued in current science classrooms. Such assessments may motivate students to memorize, rather than to use new ideas to solve complex problems. To meet the requirements of the Next Generation Science Standards, instruction needs to emphasize sustained investigations, and assessments need to create a detailed picture of students’ conceptual understanding and reasoning processes.

This article describes the design process and potential for automated scoring of 2 forms of inquiry assessment: Energy Stories and MySystem. To design these assessments, we formed a partnership of teachers, discipline experts, researchers, technologists, and psychometricians to align curriculum, assessments, and rubrics. We illustrate how these items document middle school students’ reasoning about energy flow in life science. We used evidence from review by science teachers and experts in the discipline; classroom experiments; and psychometric analysis to validate the assessments, rubrics, and automated scoring.     

Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times

This paper is concerned with the twinning of sustainability with priorities of economic neoliberalization in education, and in particular via the mobility or diffusion of education policy. We discuss the literature on policy mobility as well as overview concerns regarding neoliberalism and education. The paper brings these analyses to bear in considering the uptake of sustainability in education policy. We ask to what extent sustainability as a vehicular idea may be twinning with processes of neoliberalization in education policy in ways that may undermine aspirations of, and action on, environmental sustainability. Toward the end of the paper, we draw on data from an empirical study to help elucidate how the analytic frames of policy mobility can inform our analyses of the potential concerns and possibilities of sustainability as a vehicular idea. In particular, we investigate how sustainability and related language have been adopted in the policies of Canadian post-secondary education institutions over time. The paper closes by suggesting the potential implications of the proceeding analyses for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers concerned with sustainability in education policy.     

The Choice of Response Probability in Bookmark Standard Setting: An Experimental Study

Evidence of the internal consistency of standard-setting judgments is a critical part of the validity argument for tests used to make classification decisions. The bookmark standard-setting procedure is a popular approach to establishing performance standards, but there is relatively little research that reflects on the internal consistency of the resulting judgments. This article presents the results of an experiment in which content experts were randomly assigned to one of two response probability conditions: .67 and .80. If the standard-setting judgments collected with the bookmark procedure are internally consistent, both conditions should produce highly similar cut scores. The results showed substantially different cut scores for the two conditions; this calls into question whether content experts can produce the type of internally consistent judgments that are required using the bookmark procedure.     

Taking stock of sustainability in higher education: a review of the policy literature

Abstract

This paper provides a review of the current literature that examines the uptake of sustainability policies in higher education. Articles were retrieved from both ERIC and Scopus databases and then manually reviewed to ensure that they focused on each of: higher education; sustainability; and policy. A total of 91 articles were analysed using a multi-stage process that involved sorting data according to typologies (i.e. temporal, terminology, methodology, geography), coding the text of the articles based on topical content, and an indexing method used to label data for further analysis and the development of broader code categories. Results suggest that drivers and barriers associated with the integration of sustainability policy in higher education are well known; yet increased research is needed to understand best practices and processes by which sustainability can be furthered through higher education policy. In addition, findings demonstrate the need for future research to focus on various aspects of the policy process, including policy development and enactment, and on implications of policy for practice. While there have been some reviews of sustainability policy in higher education research to date, this review contributes to this literature by highlighting research primarily focused on sustainability policy within higher education.