Situated mathematics teaching within electrical engineering courses

The initial phase of undergraduate engineering degree programmes often comprises courses requiring mathematical expertise which in some cases clearly exceeds school mathematics, but will be imparted only later in mathematics courses. In this article, an approach addressing this challenge by way of example within a fundamentals of electrical engineering course is presented. The concept focuses on gaining specific mathematical knowledge and competencies in the technical context of this course. For this purpose, a complementary blended learning scenario centring around a web-based learning platform and involving an adaptation of the course was developed. The concept particularly considers the heterogeneity of today's student groups and is discussed with regard to related approaches, didactical considerations, and technical implementation. For the interventions, the results of a questionnaire-based evaluation proving students' acceptance and positive influence on examination performance are presented.     

Fitting the school to the child: The mission of Leta Stetter Hollingworth,founder of gifted education

We are fond of stating that “what is valued and viewed as gifted in one culture may not be considered gifted in another culture.” This assertion appears in gifted education textbooks and in the writings of several scholars. However, beyond stating this assertion and providing a few examples to support it, scholars in gifted education, ourselves included, have not provided a substantive treatment of the concept of “culture” in their works. This void is addressed in this article where we share definitions and functions of culture, along with a theoretical model for understanding culture. The article ends with implications for gifted education.     

Using virtual microscopy to scaffold learning of pathology: a naturalistic experiment on the role of visual and conceptual cues

New representational technologies, such as virtual microscopy, create new affordances for medical education. In the article, a study on the following two issues is reported: (a) How does collaborative use of virtual microscopy shape students’ engagement with and learning from virtual slides of tissue specimen? (b) How do visual and conceptual cues scaffold students’ reasoning? Fifteen pairs of medical students participated in two sessions in which the students used a virtual microscope as a diagnostic tool in the context of learning pathology. The slides provided the students with varying levels of visual and conceptual cueing. The sessions were videotaped, and the students’ reasoning while using the microscope was analysed. The students’ written answers were analysed in terms of the findings they made and the diagnoses suggested. At a general level, the results show that students engage actively in this kind of virtually-mediated environment. The visual and/or conceptual cues improve students’ performance, and guide the students’ perception and reasoning in a manner that is productive from the point of view of learning to make clinically relevant observations. Scaffolding students’ reasoning process through cues furthermore assists the students in avoiding the most obvious pitfalls such as overlooking critical areas of a specimen. Overall, visual and conceptual cues improve students’ reasoning in perceptual and cognitive terms, while still allowing space for the making of “relevant mistakes” that may further the students’ diagnostic skills.     

Doctoral students’ experiences leading to completion or attrition: a matter of sense,progress and distress

A central trend in qualitative studies investigating doctoral students’ dropout is to stress the importance of students’ integration and socialisation in their working environment. Yet, few of these studies actually compared the experiences of doctoral students who completed or quit their PhD. In order to overcome this limitation and identify the factors that differentiate these two groups, the present study interviewed 21 former doctoral students: 8 completers and 13 non-completers. The results show that what best differentiates these two groups of participants is the extent to which they feel that they are moving forward, without experiencing too much distress, on a research project that makes sense to them. We assume that this set of factors is central in the dropout process. Support from doctoral peers was found to play a positive role overall but did not contribute to differentiating the two groups, presumably because peers have a limited impact on dissertation progress. Supervisors’ support was central to the participants’ stories; it is thus assumed to play a role in the process, but this role is complex and needs further investigation. These results call for a stronger consideration of the doctoral task itself when investigating the process of persistence and attrition and for a more integrated framework that considers jointly both task- and environment-related aspects.     

Impacts of a Comprehensive School Readiness Curriculum for Preschool Children at Risk for Educational Difficulties

This article reports findings from a cluster‐randomized study of an integrated literacy‐ and math‐focused preschool curriculum, comparing versions with and without an explicit socioemotional lesson component to a business‐as‐usual condition. Participants included 110 classroom teachers from randomized classrooms and approximately eight students from each classroom (N = 760) who averaged 4.48 (SD = 0.44) years of age at the start of the school year. There were positive impacts of the two versions of the curriculum on language, phonological awareness, math, and socioemotional outcomes, but there were no added benefits to academic or socioemotional outcomes for the children receiving explicit socioemotional instruction. Results are discussed with relevance to early childhood theory, policy, and goals of closing the school readiness gap.     

Multimodal Literacies in Science: Currency, Coherence and Focus

Since the 1990s, researchers have increasingly drawn attention to the multiplicity of representations used in science. This issue of RISE advances this line of research by placing such representations at the centre of science teaching and learning. The authors show that representations do not simply transmit scientific information; they are integral to reasoning about scientific phenomena. This focus on thinking with representations mediates between well-resolved representations and formal reasoning of disciplinary science, and the capacity-limited, perceptually-driven nature of human cognition. The teaching practices described here build on three key principles: Each representation is interpreted through others; natural language is a sign system that is used to interpret a variety of other kinds of representations; and this chain of signs or representations is ultimately grounded in bodily experiences of perception and action. In these papers, the researchers provide examples and analysis of teachers scaffolding students in using representations to construct new knowledge, and in constructing new representations to express and develop their knowledge. The result is a new delineation of the power and the challenges of teaching science with multiple representations.     

Innovation policy for system-wide transformation: The case of strategic innovation programmes (SIPs) in Sweden

The orientation towards grand societal challenges can be seen as a new wave or paradigm for innovation policy. Such policy aims at system-wide transformation and is often referred to as system innovation policy. While insights from transition studies have provided novel and useful rationales for innovation policy targeting system-wide transformation, it remains unclear how to design, implement and evaluate such policies. The contribution of this paper is to translate and concretize the challenges of system innovation policy towards scope for policy action and analysis. Building on insights from transition studies we group the challenges into four domains: directionality, experimentation, demand articulation, and policy coordination and learning. We relate challenges within the four domains to three generic features of innovation systems: interests and capabilities of actors, networks, and institutions. The derived framework is applied in a case study on the strategic innovation programmes, a recent policy initiative by Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency, targeting system innovation.