PERSONALISED LEARNING: AMBIGUITIES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Abstract:  This paper traces the origins of the concept of personalisation in public sector services, and applies it to school education. The original conceptualisation stressed the need for 'deep' rather than shallow, personalisation, if radical transformation of services were to be achieved. It is argued that as the concept has been disseminated and implemented through policy documents, notably the 2005 White Paper, it has lost its original emphasis on deep personalisation. The focus in this article is particularly upon gifted and talented students whose education provides the best case example of how the theory of personalisation might work in practice. Two examples of the lessons in a sixth form college are used to illustrate the character of personalised pedagogy in practice. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Cultural Constructions of Childhood and Early Literacy

This paper is based on the findings of two research teams, working collaboratively, between 1998 and 2000 in four countries: Australia, Singapore, France and England (see David et al 2000). Taking an ecological stance (Bronfenbrenner 1979), both teams adopted a cross‐cultural approach in order to gain a better understanding of the contexts in which young children become familiar with literacy. The team led by Bridie Raban worked in Singapore and Australia, that led by Tricia David in France and England. Early years practitioners in all four countries responded to questionnaires, were observed in action and interviewed. (Information about their training and about entry to primary school in each of the countries is given in the endnote.) In addition, the research teams carried out document analyses on Governmental, research and training literature and teachers’ plans, and discussed their findings with others in positions to be able to ‘authenticate’– or refute – findings. Further data were obtained through group interviews with parents of children attending selected settings involved in the research. Here we provide some of the evidence about the different views expressed by practitioners, our observational findings and analysis of the different pressures relating to literacy experienced in early childhood education and care settings. In each case the learning experiences practitioners provided for children were influenced by a range of factors, such as the contested role of preschools as preparation for schooling. In some settings this preparation was not explicit and practitioners often emphasised the importance of the ‘here and now’ nature of young children’s experiences. Rosenthal’s (2000) framework for exploring ‘collectivist’ and ‘individualist’ cultures in relation to their valued educational practices was applied to our findings, in order to identify how the cultural assumptions about literacy, learning and young children influenced the teaching approaches selected.     

Prevention of fatherhood disorders — Accompanying early father-child interaction in day-care centers

Over the last fifteen years, increasing numbers of fathers have been attending medical or day-care centers for young children, traditionally “reserved” for mothers and babies. Thus the professionals who work there are able to take an active part in the “co-construction of the fathers” by accompanying their emerging fatherhood. The Research-Action-Training approach used in partnership with the public health service (“Mother and Child Protection” in Paris) has proven to be a particularly interesting tool for modifying the routine found in day-care centers. Through the transfer of knowledge on fatherhood processes and new triadic models, it has led to improvements in the manner fathers are welcome but also babies and the whole family.     

Training self-regulated learning skills with video modeling examples: Do task-selection skills transfer?

Self-assessment and task-selection skills are crucial in self-regulated learning situations in which students can choose their own tasks. Prior research suggested that training with video modeling examples, in which another person (the model) demonstrates and explains the cyclical process of problem-solving task performance, self-assessment, and task-selection, is effective for improving adolescents’ problem-solving posttest performance after self-regulated learning. In these examples, the models used a specific task-selection algorithm in which perceived mental effort and self-assessed performance scores were combined to determine the complexity and support level of the next task, selected from a task database. In the present study we aimed to replicate prior findings and to investigate whether transfer of task-selection skills would be facilitated even more by a more general, heuristic task-selection training than the task-specific algorithm. Transfer of task-selection skills was assessed by having students select a new task in another domain for a fictitious peer student. Results showed that both heuristic and algorithmic training of self-assessment and task-selection skills improved problem-solving posttest performance after a self-regulated learning phase, as well as transfer of task-selection skills. Heuristic training was not more effective for transfer than algorithmic training. These findings show that example-based self-assessment and task-selection training can be an effective and relatively easy to implement method for improving students’ self-regulated learning outcomes. Importantly, our data suggest that the effect on task-selection skills may transfer beyond the trained tasks, although future research should establish whether this also applies when trained students perform novel tasks themselves.     

Anticipatory Reaching by Infants and Adults: The Effect of Object Features and Apertures in Opaque and Transparent Screens

Perception of the manner in which objects may be grasped was examined in a series of experiments with adults and 10-month-old infants; visuomotor adjustment in hand orientation before making contact with objects served as the index throughout. In the first experiment, infants modified their hand orientation to match more closely the long axis of an object. They did so even though the target object could have been grasped by either end with hands oriented orthogonally to the long axis of the object. In two subsequent experiments involving reaching through narrow apertures to grasp the target, anticipatory adjustments in hand posture were evident for adults but not for infants. However, anticipatory adjustments by infants, sometimes appropriate and sometimes inappropriate, were made when the object was of such a size that it could neither be grasped nor retrieved through the aperture. In the final experiment, infants directed their hands first toward a handle, the only graspable part of an object, and oriented their hands so as to be nearly parallel with it prior to contact. This was the only orientation in which a grasp was possible. It was concluded that infants at 10 months respond more appropriately to object properties than to surface apertures that place limitations on how an object may be grasped.     

Peer and Cross-Age Tutoring in Math:Outcomes and Their Design Implications

This review of the literature on peer and cross-age tutoring emphasizes programs in mathematics and suggests that such programs have positive academic outcomes for African American and otherminority students as well as for White students who participate as tutors, as tutees, or both. Such programs also appear to have a positive impact on a variety of attitudinal and socioemotional outcomes, such as students' attitudes towards school, their self-concepts, and their sense of academic efficacy. This review also explores whether specific features of the tutoring programs (e.g., tutor training and amount of tutoring) or characteristics of the students (e.g., academic level prior to tutoring and gender composition of tutor-tutee pairs) affect various outcomes. Role theory is used as a theoretical framework to explain some intriguing and surprising findings (e.g., why tutors show academic gains even when they do not receive additional subject matter instruction, whylonger and/or more substantial tutoring programs may not foster greater immediate academic gains than shorter programs, and why mixed-sex pairs do not consistently reap benefits equal to those of same-sex pairs). Finally, implications of the review for the development of peer and cross-age tutoring programs are discussed.     

Student Constructions of Fit: Narratives About Incongruence at a Faith-Based University

Decades of student persistence and retention literature has brought to light factors of social, academic, and religious fit that influence a student's decision to remain at or depart from an institution. At Christian institutions, increasing student pluralism raises the likelihood that students will not fit religiously. This qualitative study of 21 first-time, full-time students contributes to the existing literature by exploring how students who already feel they do not fit for religious reasons work at constructing a sense of fit at a Christian research university. Many participants coped with religious discontinuity by redefining specifically Christian practices and teachings in terms that were personally palatable: as either general moral lessons that would help them to be a better person or as cultural insights that would benefit them social and professionally in the future. In many cases, university staff were instrumental. Finally, participants worked to construct an acceptable level of fit, or fit threshold, through various combinations of social fit, academic fit, and religious fit, often compensating for one with others. As Christian institutions increasingly invite students from diverse religious backgrounds into their campus community, understanding ways that these students attempt to adapt to religious incongruence will be paramount.     

Quantitative analysis of approaches to group marking

Abstract

Group work, where students work on projects to overcome challenges together, has numerous advantages, including learning of important transferable skills, better learning experience and increased motivation. However, in many academic systems the advantages of group projects clash with the need to assign individualised marks to students. A number of different schemes have been proposed to individualise group project marks, these include marking of individual reflexive accounts of the group work and peer assessment. Here, we explore a number of these schemes in computational experiments with an artificial student population. Our analysis highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each scheme and particularly reveals the power of a new scheme proposed here that we call pseudoinverse marking.

Abbreviations

SOPP: Self organised peer assessment; RA: Reflexive accounts; MRA: Mark-adjusted reflexive accounts; NPA: Normalised peer assessment; PR: Peer ranking; PiM: Pseudoinverse marking