Children's understanding of their research rights before and after debriefing: informed assent, confidentiality, and stopping participation

This study explored children's understanding of their research rights in the context of an investigation of how children cope with peer provocation. Participants were 178 children (97 girls and 81 boys) who had finished the second, fourth, and sixth grades (average ages: 8, 10, and 12, respectively). After children agreed to take part in research on "how kids get along together," as well as after debriefing, their perceptions of free assent, their understanding of what they would be doing and why, their belief in voluntary participation and freedom to withdraw, and their comprehension of confidentiality were assessed. The vast majority of participants gave assent freely and reported no undue pressure from their families or the experimenters to participate. Older children knew before participating in the research what their participation would involve, comprehended confidentiality, and understood the study's purpose after their participation, but second graders were less likely to understand these issues than fourth and sixth graders were. Following debriefing, children's understanding of their research rights was largely unchanged; most children still had difficulty describing the research goals.     

Teacher Research Experiences, Partnerships With Scientists, and Teacher Networks Sustaining Factors From Professional Development

This study examined some long-term impacts of a professional development program, Teachers in the Woods. Several outcomes of the program were acknowledged by participants as having been valuable: a network of like-minded teachers, a network of scientists and teachers, and an increase in teachers' ecological knowledge and field skills. The authors made 3 observations with regard to professional development. First, engaging teachers in real-world field science research is an effective way for them to gain ecological knowledge and skills. Second, the collegiality among teachers and scientists developed during the period of field work can enhance science learning. Third, collegiality among teachers provides opportunities to discuss pedagogy-related issues. Both aspects of collegiality provide support mechanisms that sustain teachers' efforts to modify their teaching practices.     

Sighting horizons of teaching in higher education

This conceptual paper tackles the matter of teaching in higher education and proposes a concept of ‘horizons of teaching’. It firstly offers an overview of the considerable empirical literature around teaching—especially conceptions of teaching, approaches to teaching and teaching practices—and goes on to pose some philosophical and social theoretical considerations that open further the territory around teaching in university. Against this background, we propose the concept of ‘horizons of teaching’. Horizons of teaching provide a context in which it makes sense for teachers to give themselves to the teaching enterprise and to go on giving themselves to teaching. Horizons include diverse and intricate layers at both micro- and macro-levels that interact in a permanent and dynamic way; they involve persons and collectivities; and they concern structures and agency. The paper concludes by proposing that horizons of teaching configure and delineate curricula and the pedagogical relationship in a way that might contain a revolutionary potentiality in recasting teaching in higher education.     

Cognitive ability and the instructional efficacy of collaborative concept mapping

Data were gathered from 248 secondary students (14 years old, 56% female) who learned about the circulatory system in 77 self-selected collaborative groups. The learning outcomes of biology students who summarised by collaborative concept mapping were compared with those of students who summarised by collaborative writing. Learning groups randomly assigned to construct concept maps instead of conventional summaries generated more relations in the summary task and their members obtained higher individual scores on a post-test. The concept mapping strategy was found to be advantageous only for students whose cognitive ability was below the median for the sample and who were placed in groups with other students having low cognitive ability.     

Who Studies Women's Studies?

ABSTRACT This article reports the initial findings of a study of the cohort of students who entered Liverpool John Moores University, England, to study women's studies in the autumn of 1994, basing its focus on the survey carried out as soon as the students entered the University and the in-depth interviews carried out later in that semester. The work proceeded within the tradition of grounded theory research and endeavoured to avoid prepared hypotheses in order to allow the themes to emerge from the students' answers. From the initial findings, the very strong emphasis on the salience of the students' choice of women's studies and the experiential importance of identity as a concept was striking. The article debates the theoretical difficulties in the theorising of identity in relation to the empirical, existential project of the students.     

Being and becoming: a student trajectory

This article analyses the intellectual discourses of adult development and adult learning. It argues that through a process of transformative adult learning individuals can experience the disintegration and reintegration of past and present human growth. The development of adults is considered not in terms of discrete theories but as a collage of theories. The writers analyse and interpret the literature that attempts to study the interaction of individuals in the total context of the inner and outer forces that impinge on their life.

We conclude from a study of the literature that adult development, from a transformative perspective, is more than adjustment to a particular society; it is a qualitative change in how one views the world; it involves tension and struggle that are productive of a new consciousness. This change occurs through a dialectical process that calls for movement through the old style of meaning‐making to a reconstruction of meaning that is a synthesis of the old and the new. It is also concluded that adult learning can foster critical awareness and critical consciousness that can effect a transformation in the way adults see themselves and others. The route to transformative adult development and transformative learning lies in acknowledging contradictions and differences and working through them, as opposed to ignoring or circumventing them.