Participatory action research as pedagogy: investigating social and ecological justice learning within a teacher education program

A research collective comprised of teacher candidates, graduate students, and faculty set out to investigate the role and impact of social and ecological justice learning in a teacher education program. Amidst the tensions, negotiations, and articulations of the research design, the collective came to recognize the spaces of participatory action research as sites of growth and efficacy toward justice learning. And, each began to perceive themselves as both impacted by educational structures and as agents enacting their own visions of professional practice. These outcomes are discussed in the context of the growing body of participatory action research, emphasizing the dynamic learning precipitated within the intersections of the research collective. The empirical analysis, involving survey and interview data, brought to bear the rarity of events participants (teacher candidates) recognized as invoking meaningful social and ecological justice learning, and goes some way to describe such learning in terms of embodied experience. The paper closes with a selection of testimonials provided by members of the research collective, offering personal accounts of what was gained through participating in the research process.     

Using the Internet to Enhance Student Understanding of Science: The Knowledge Integration Environment

We have developed the Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) to promote lifelong learning. We believe that science courses can promote lifelong learning by offering students science models that apply to problems they encounter in their everyday lives and by engaging students in personally relevant science projects where they connect science models to typical science resources such as those found on the Internet. Our instructional framework, Scaffolded Knowledge Integration (SKI), guides the design of the Knowledge Integration Environment. In this paper we describe the Knowledge Integration Environment and report results of “design experiments” carried out to guide improvement of Knowledge Integration Environment instruction as well as to help us improve our understanding of lifelong learning.     

Can Tracing Tools Contribute to Programming Proficiency? The LISP Evaluation Modeler

Abstract

Tracing solutions to programming problems is a long‐standing technique used to reveal the details of a solution and to expose bugs in a program. Tracing can also help programmers build a model or representation of how a programming language responds to code. This article describes the LISP Evaluation Modeler (LEM), an on‐line tracing tool designed to (a) help novices form an understanding of and facility with the LISP evaluation process, and (b) assist all programmers in designing and debugging programs. An empirical study of LEM demonstrates its advantages for design, comprehension, and debugging and suggests ways in which LEM can help novices learning LISP.     

Assessing IT Educational Pathways that Support Rural Broadband: Strategies for Aligning IT Curricula,Policy, and Employer Needs

ABSTRACT

In this National Science Foundation Advanced Technician Education program (NSF ATE) project, we aimed to explore factors that would strengthen the rural IT employee workforce and improve educational support related to broadband, telecommunications, and networks in rural settings. Using multiple methods to triangulate rural IT program curricula content with employers’ perceptions and new professionals’ on-the-job experiences, we gained an understanding of common general and technical competencies, perceived rural IT technician workforce readiness, and strategies to bring educational experiences in alignment with professional performance. We also offer findings concerning alignment of technician pathways and recommendations for how to transfer identified competencies to other similar rural markets, along with examples of extensions of this work for exploring and assessing IT pathways.     

Taking Responsibility for Learning isn't Everything: A case for developing tertiary students' conceptions of learning

This study examines first year university student perceptions of responsibility for their learning, within the context of their conceptions of learning, with a view to meeting two of the objectives of higher education in Australia: teaching students to think and to learn. A questionnaire was distributed to 100 students undertaking at least one first year subject at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) in 1998. Their written responses provided information about their conceptions of learning, as well as both direct and indirect indications of their perceptions of responsibility. Results indicated that students held perceptions of personal responsibility for their learning, but that their conceptions of learning were essentially quantitative in nature and were at the lower levels of complexity. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of university teaching and learning, and of meeting the ultimate objectives of higher education.     

Teaching philosophies reconsidered:A conceptual model for the development and evaluation of teaching philosophy statements

Increasingly, the requirements of applicants to academic faculty positions, promotion and tenure procedures, nominations for teaching awards, or other application processes for innovative teaching grants worldwide include a teaching portfolio or dossier or a statement of teaching philosophy. Current literature provides a spectrum of approaches to constructing a teaching philosophy statement. While these resources provide practical utility, this literature generally lacks conceptual models that provide clear operational definitions and comprehensive frameworks for the process of generating or evaluating a teaching philosophy statement. However, this literature does illustrate the complexity of the task. Each teaching philosophy statement reflects not only personal beliefs about teaching and learning, but also disciplinary cultures, institutional structures and cultures, and stakeholder expectations as well. This synergy among self, discipline, and institutional context guided the development of a conceptual model for constructing a teaching philosophy statement. Based on the authors' survey of the literature, a conceptual model was developed, and then refined in a series of three workshops that included input from graduate students, academic faculty, faculty developers, and academic managers (administrators). The resulting conceptual framework includes the six dimensions commonly found in a survey of faculty teaching philosophies: the purpose of teaching and learning; the role of the teacher; the role of the student; the methods used; evaluation and assessment of teaching and learning; and also includes two framing devices - a metaphor or a critical incident and a device for acknowledging the impact that contextual factors have on teacher decision making. This paper describes the development of this conceptual model, and provides an evaluation rubric that can be applied to assess teaching philosophy statements generated using the proposed framework.     

Modeling Passing Rates on a Computer-Based Medical Licensing Examination: An Application of Survival Data Analysis

The purpose of this article was to model United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 2 passing rates using the Cox Proportional Hazards Model, best known for its application in analyzing clinical trial data. The number of months it took to pass the computer-based Step 2 examination was treated as the dependent variable in the model. Covariates in the model were: (a) medical school location (U.S. and Canadian or other), (b) primary language (English or other), and (c) gender. Preliminary findings indicate that examinees were nearly 2.7 times more likely to experience the event (pass Step 2) if they were U.S. or Canadian trained. Examinees with English as their primary language were 2.1 times more likely to pass Step 2, but gender had little impact. These findings are discussed more fully in light of past research and broader potential applications of survival analysis in educational measurement.     

Teaching thermodynamics to middle school students: What are appropriate cognitive demands?

What cognitive demands foster understanding of thermodynamics for middle school science students? We successively modified the cognitive demands of a 13-week thermodynamics curriculum for four cohorts of 100-200 eighth graders while maintaining the same basic experiments and real-time data collection software. When comparing posttest performance across four versions, we found two- to fourfold increases in understanding when (a) students actively predicted outcomes and reconciled results, and (b) students used a heat-flow model of thermodynamics to integrate their experimental results. We argue that the curriculum must explicitly motivate students to construct understanding, and that middle school students benefit from what we call “pragmatic models” of scientific concepts.     

Computer technologies: Attitudes and self-efficacy across undergraduate disciplines

Computer technologies are important tools for learning, communicating, and retrieving information. For individuals to effectively employ these tools, they must feel self-efficacious in using them. For this reason it is important to examine attitudes and perceptions of competence that are encouraged by undergraduate educational programs. This paper reports on the factor validation of two affective measures related to computer technologies, ATTITUDES TOWARD COMPUTER TECHNOLOGIES (ACT) and SELF-EFFICACY FOR COMPUTER TECHNOLOGIES (SCT). ACT assesses perceived usefulness of and comfort/anxiety with computer technologies. Perceived self efficacy for computer technologies (word processing, electronic mail, spreadsheets, database programs, statistical packages, and CD-ROM databases) is measured by the SCT. In addition to data on construct validity, the results of exploratory analyses examining predictors of self-efficacy for undergraduate students in business, education, and nursing are presented, and implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Control of pigeons’ keypecking by the left-right arrangement of stimuli

Control of pigeons’ keypecking by conditionalities in the spatial arrangement of two element stimuli (designated A and B) was investigated. In Experiment 1, reinforcement for keypecking was made conditional upon the left-right location of A and B: Reinforcement was available when A was on the left and B was on the right (AB), but not on BA, AA, or BB trials. The pigeons successfully discriminated the rewarded AB configuration, but only after a stage in which a particular element in a particular location (e.g., A on left) primarily controlled pecking. Experiments 2 and 3 systematically replicated these findings and included controls to discount discrimination of the AB compound on the basis of the temporal order (e.g., A followed by B) rather than the spatial configuration of the elements. During a generalization test in Experiment 4, the elements were presented singly either in the left (AX, BX) or right (XA, XB) positions. As would be expected had the animals learned “A on the left, B on the right is rewarded,” responding on AX trials exceeded that on XA trials, and responding on XB trials exceeded that on BX trials.