Involving Older Adults as Co-researchers in Social Work Education

This article examines the contribution of older adults as co-researchers to the evaluation of a gerontological social work course. The evaluation was conducted at an Israeli college as part of a collaborative project with a United Kingdom university. Here, we follow the older adults who are service users through their transition to the role of co-researchers and reflect on their experiences in the process. Insights gained by the different stakeholders from the co-researching experience are discussed, and the growing interest in service-user contributions to social work education in various fields such as aging and disabilities is recognized.     

In Support of Pair Programming in the Introductory Computer Science Course

A formal pair programming experiment was run at North Carolina to empirically assess the educational efficacy of the technique in a CS1 course. Results indicate that students who practice pair programming perform better on programming projects and are more likely to succeed by completing the class with a C or better. Student pairs are more self-sufficient which reduces their reliance on the teaching staff. Qualitatively, paired students demonstrate higher order thinking skills than students who work alone. These results are supportive of pair programming as a collaborative learning technique.     

Understanding pictorial information in biology: students’ cognitive activities and visual reading strategies

ABSTRACT

In classroom, scientific contents are increasingly communicated through visual forms of representations. Students’ learning outcomes rely on their ability to read and understand pictorial information. Understanding pictorial information in biology requires cognitive effort and can be challenging to students. Yet evidence-based knowledge about students’ visual reading strategies during the process of understanding pictorial information is pending. Therefore, 42 students at the age of 14–15 were asked to think aloud while trying to understand visual representations of the blood circulatory system and the patellar reflex. A category system was developed differentiating 16 categories of cognitive activities. A Principal Component Analysis revealed two underlying patterns of activities that can be interpreted as visual reading strategies: 1. Inferences predominated by using a problem-solving schema; 2. Inferences predominated by recall of prior content knowledge. Each pattern consists of a specific set of cognitive activities that reflect selection, organisation and integration of pictorial information as well as different levels of expertise. The results give detailed insights into cognitive activities of students who were required to understand the pictorial information of complex organ systems. They provide an evidence-based foundation to derive instructional aids that can promote students pictorial-information-based learning on different levels of expertise.     

Epistemological resources for thought experimentation in science learning

Thought Experiments (TEs) are reasoning processes that are based on 'results' of an experiment carried out in thought. What is the validity of an experiment- that has not been actually executed- for knowledge about the physical world? What are the features that make it distinctive and how do we integrate it into learning environments to support such thought processes? This study suggests that a thought experiment draws on three epistemological resources: conceptual-logical inferences, visual imagery and bodily-motor experience. We start by stating how students' TEs are related to recent research on learning science and then proceed to describe the nature of TEs. The central part of the paper deals with cognitive theories and empirical examples of visual imagery and bodily imagery. It also deals with how these enable implicit knowledge about the world to be retrieved. Students may have, but are not aware of, such knowledge for it is hidden when learning is only based on formal representations. We show that imagination is structured, goal-oriented, based on prior experiential imagery and internally coherent. Students can, for example, mentally rotate objects at constant velocity. Students can 'zoom in and out' to inspect imaginary situations, transfer objects, predict paths of imaginary moving objects and imagine the impact of forces on mechanical systems. We show that the TEs are powerful because of these capabilities. We further claim that these are not exploited by school learning environments and offer a first step towards understanding imagery in science learning.     

Retired Teachers Reflect on Learning from Experience

An attempt to clarify how learning from experience takes place and the role memory plays in the process was carried out in the frame of a study of retired teachers' accounts of their teaching, focusing on their views on the transformation of experience into professional wisdom. Forty-three retired teachers participated in the study and were asked to talk about their professional memories. The stimulus question was: 'What can you tell me about recollected events of your teaching practice?'. Further data was collected through lengthy and repeated interviews with 15 teachers. In the interviews, retired teachers were asked what the role of experience was in the development of their professional knowledge. They focused on the necessary conditions for learning from experience, as well as on the process itself. Among the necessary conditions for learning from experience, teachers in the present study mentioned time, maturity, and interaction with others. The following characteristics of the learning process were identified: the importance of narratives; the emotional aspects of learning from experience; and the role of disequilibrium and reframing. Teachers' recollections concerning their practice and insights about learning from experience represent cases of practice that can be analyzed and discussed in pre-service and in-service courses. They serve to create a sense of professional identity and continuity.     

Book review

This paper reports an evaluation of an innovative university–school partnership in which teacher practitioners work as university lecturers in a regional Australian pre‐service teacher education programme. The philosophy of this programme encompasses authentic partnerships between universities, schools and other industry employers. The study was motivated by an interest inunderstanding the experiences and outcomes for the teacher practitioners and in documenting their experiences. Staff members who are currently on contract as university lecturers as well as teachers who have completed secondments and returned to school settings are surveyed. This paper focuses on suggestions to improve the partnership and discusses future directions for the partnership.     

Conceptual Construction of Fields Through Tactile Interface

This paper examines the role of tactile perception in conceptual construction of forces and fields. The learning environment includes a simulation of a force field. The force applied by the field on an object is transferred to the learner's hand through a tactile interface designed as a trackball. The learner experiences varying resistance from the trackball when moving an object on the screen. The forces are actually “felt”, exerted on the screen-object as if the learner's hand is immersed in the “field.” We hypothesize that a tactile interface acts as an agent aimed at recruiting the body non-propositional knowledge, for construction of formal physics knowledge on fields of forces. Twelve subjects were asked to explore the structure of several invisible fields through tactile interface, then to design a series of situations that generate current and that energetically trap a particle in a particular area. The results of the study show that s tudents with no background in physics constructed a graphical representation of a field force of a single and double center of forces similar to the formal physics representation, though they had no conceptual background (i.e., vectors, field lines). Based on the tactile information, they constructed a representation of force as a vector, of force lines, equal-force lines (potential lines for particular cases), potential well (“trap”) and motion of a charged particle in a field of forces. We show that computer tactile interface acts as a trigger for access to non-propositional knowledge employed in everyday bodily activity, but not in formal learning. The computer environment turns into a virtual environment, carrying the features of perception within “reality”, providing opportunities for conceptual construction.     

Embracing New Policies,Technologies, and Community Partnerships: A Case Study of the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control

As the City of Houston's Bureau of Air Quality Control embraced new policies, technologies, and rhetorical strategies, they simultaneously moved through Lukensmeyer and Torres's “four levels of public involvement,” which include the information, consultation, engagement, and collaboration levels (Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2006 Lukensmeyer, C. J., & Torres, L. H. (2006). Public deliberation: A manager's guide to citizen engagement. IBM Center for the Business of Government Collaboration Series. Retrieved November 2007 from http://www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/LukensmeyerReport.pdf  [Google Scholar]). Because of the technical and scientific nature of air quality inspections, increasing public involvement, especially the involvement of those in a predominantly African American and a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, has been a challenge. This article describes the Bureau's journey through the information level, where the Bureau opens public access and participation in the investigation and reporting process; the consultation level, where Bureau staff go door-to-door in poor and minority neighborhoods collecting citizen feedback regarding perceived environmental hazards; the engagement level, where the Bureau conducts monthly environmental meetings with neighborhood residents; and the collaboration level, where citizens are taught to collect evidence of environmental violations.     

Interlibrary Loan—Reference Collaboration: Filling Hard-to-Find Faculty Requests

We have implemented a successful in-house outsourcing program between University of Oregon Library departments. Collaboration between interlibrary loan staff and subject specialists appropriates ILLiad e-mail routing capabilities to enable subject specialists to join the workflow in processing difficult ILL requests. The goals of the program are to fill more requests, fill requests more quickly, give subject specialists the opportunity to learn more about their faculty members’ research needs, and to create a stepping stone to a purchase-on-demand program.