An evaluation of a full-time work study program for undergraduates

The present study examined the effects of combining full-time on-the-job learning with full-time course work for a group of 26 students enrolled in the University Year for Action Program. Results indicated that, although students perceived the agency learning environments much more positively than parallel classroom learning environments, participating in the program had relatively little impact on variables such as concept knowledge and moral judgment, which were hypothesized as relevant outcome dimensions. Students' direct evaluations of their year-long experience provided information which has been used in modification of the program.     

Representación y magnitud de los sumandos en la resolución de problemas aditivos

Resumen

Se estudia la incidencia del nivel de abstracción y de la magnitud de los sumandos en la resolución de tareas aditivas elementales. Para ello, dos muestras de niños de 5 a 7 años pasaron diferentes pruebas. Los resultados muestran en general que los factores edad, modo de representación y el tamaño y posición de los sumandos son estadísticamente significativos. Más en conaeto, los niños pequeños son especialmente sensibles al grado de abstracción de los sumandos, mientras que el grupo de los mayores se ve afectado principalmente por el tercer factor. Por otra parte, el repertorio de estrategias empleado es pobre en los preescolares y variado en los escolares.     

Camila,the earth,and the sun: Constructing an idea as shared intellectual property

Recent research has challenged traditional assumptions that scientific practice and knowledge are essentially individual accomplishments, highlighting instead the social nature of scientific practices, and the co‐construction of scientific knowledge. Similarly, new research paradigms for studying learning go beyond focusing on what is “in the head” of individual students, to study collective practices, distributed cognition, and emergent understandings of groups. These developments require new tools for assessing what it means to learn to “think like a scientist.” Toward this goal, the present case study analyzes the discourse of a 6th‐grade class discussing one student's explanation for seasonal variations in daylight hours. The analysis identifies discourse moves that map to disciplinary practices of the social construction of science knowledge, including (1) beginning an explanation by reviewing the community's shared assumptions; (2) referencing peers' work as warrants for an argument; and (3) building from isolated ideas, attributed to individuals, toward a coherent situation model, attributed to the community. The study then identifies discourse moves through which the proposed explanation was taken up and developed by the group, including (4) using multiple shared representations; (5) leveraging peers' language to clarify ideas; and (6) negotiating language and representations for new, shared explanations. Implications of this case for rethinking instruction, assessment, and classroom research are explored. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:619–642, 2010     

How do secondary students approach different types of division with remainder situations? Some evidence from Spain

Division-With-Remainder (DWR) problems are particularly complex, as suggested in many studies. The purpose of this work was to establish whether students’ difficulties in DWR problems came from an inadequate initial representation or from an inadequate final interpretation of the numerical answers, and whether remainders could be grouped into two blocks depending on the kind of answer, either directly matching the terms of the division or not. Forty-five Spanish secondary students, aged 12–13, were requested to solve two Types of Division Situations (i.e., Equal Groups and Comparison), each one involving four Types of Remainder (i.e., Remainder-Not-Divisible, Remainder-Divisible, Remainder-as-the-Result, and Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments). Our data showed that: (a) the selection of the correct solution procedure depended on the Type of Division Situations, being easier in Equal Groups than in Comparison problems; (b) correct interpretations were higher than the percentages reported in other researches; and (c) success in problems whose answers were the quotient or the remainder was higher than in Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments problems. The results obtained suggest that students’ difficulties originate in the initial representation of the DWR problems and that it would be more adequate to refer to the difficulty of Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments problems in particular, rather than to the difficulty of DWR problems in general.     

Writing at university: are we on the same page? / Escribir en la universidad: ¿nos entendemos?

Abstract

This study seeks to analyse the characteristics and functions that students and faculty attribute to written genres in Spanish universities, to what extent these representations are shared by both groups, and how they contribute to the construction of disciplinary knowledge in Spanish higher education. Accordingly, we classified students’ and teachers’ responses into 12 genre families grouped into five functions: Disciplinary Knowledge (DK), Critical Analysis (AC), Personal Reflection (PR), Research (R) and Professional Practice (PP). In terms of functions, demonstration of disciplinary knowledge appeared as the most frequently mentioned goal for both groups, whereas the genres targeted at research were the least frequent ones, along with the genres used for personal reflection. The most common genre family for both groups was Explanation, which was linked to demonstration of knowledge acquired in the discipline.