Face-to-face contact in blended learning for intercultural education: the role of teachers

In societies experiencing or emerging from conflict, teachers often deliver educational programmes designed to build community cohesion. We report on research which examined teachers’ views of the implementation of a programme involving both face-to-face and online contact between pupils. Findings suggest that this blended approach is highly motivational, enhancing online work and relationship building. The research underlines the importance of the political, educational and historical context for work of this sort and the impact this has on the particular blend of online and face-to-face interaction. Implications for policymakers and teachers include value for money and sustainability of blended intercultural education in similar contexts.     

A synthesis of research concerning creative teachers in a Canadian context

Effective teachers are often creative ones, yet an examination of creative teaching is largely invisible in the North American creativity literature. Even within education there is little about teachers’ own creative practice. Nonetheless, there are benefits to studying creative teachers: in education it can explicate ways of enhancing teachers’ creativity and enriching praxis; and in psychology it can extend our understanding of social and interpersonal creativity, as well as everyday creativity. This paper reviews 12 Canadian case studies of creative teaching conducted by a creative teaching research group. An in-depth elaboration of two themes, creative person and community, is presented.     

Designing Reading Comprehension Assessments for Reading Interventions: How a Theoretically Motivated Assessment Can Serve as an Outcome Measure

When designing a reading intervention, researchers and educators face a number of challenges related to the focus, intensity, and duration of the intervention. In this paper, we argue there is another fundamental challenge—the nature of the reading outcome measures used to evaluate the intervention. Many interventions fail to demonstrate significant improvements on standardized measures of reading comprehension. Although there are a number of reasons to explain this phenomenon, an important one to consider is misalignment between the nature of the outcome assessment and the targets of the intervention. In this study, we present data on three theoretically driven summative reading assessments that were developed in consultation with a research and evaluation team conducting an intervention study. The reading intervention, Reading Apprenticeship, involved instructing teachers to use disciplinary strategies in three domains: literature, history, and science. Factor analyses and other psychometric analyses on data from over 12,000 high school students revealed the assessments had adequate reliability, moderate correlations with state reading test scores and measures of background knowledge, a large general reading factor, and some preliminary evidence for separate, smaller factors specific to each form. In this paper, we describe the empirical work that motivated the assessments, the aims of the intervention, and the process used to develop the new assessments. Implications for intervention and assessment are discussed.     

Using interactive management to facilitate a student-centred conceptualisation of critical thinking: a case study

Critical thinking (CT) is a metacognitive process, consisting of a number of sub-skills and dispositions, that, when used appropriately, increases the chances of producing a logical solution to a problem or a valid conclusion to an argument. CT has been identified as a fundamental learning objective of third-level education; however, students often report not being given the opportunity to adequately understand and cultivate CT skills. Though most CT interventions are designed based on academic or expert definitions of CT skills, students are rarely, if ever, asked to guide their instruction by describing their perspectives on what constitutes CT. The current case study investigated students’ conceptualisations of what constitutes good CT using a collective intelligence methodology, interactive management. Interactive management (IM) is a computer-assisted process that allows a group to build a structural model describing relations between elements in a system. Though decades of research on group decision-making in educational and social psychology highlight the many limitations associated with group problem solving (e.g. as a result of an over-reliance on heuristics, cognitive biases and ‘groupthink’), a fundamental skill for making decisions and solving problems is the ability to collectively visualise the structure of a shared problem, and use this knowledge to design solutions and strategies for collective action. Results of IM group work from the current case study revealed five core CT skills (clarity of expression, conversational skill, inference, evaluation, and explanation), five CT dispositions (detachment, listening, systematicity, recognising uncertainty, and self-questioning) and fourteen structural relationships among them. The ability to detach, listen and engage in conversation with others, were seen as fundamental drivers of all other competencies in the system. Results are discussed in light of research and theory on CT and best practice for CT instruction.     

An ergonomics model of the soccer training process

An ergonomics model of training is described in which the demands of the game and the fitness profiles of soccer players are placed in perspective. The demands of the game may be gauged by monitoring the work rate of players during matches and the concomitant physiological responses. These indices suggest an increased tempo in contemporary professional soccer compared with previous decades, a trend replicated in the fitness levels of players. The simulation of the exercise intensity corresponding to match-play has enabled sport scientists to study discrete aspects of play under laboratory conditions. Observations highlight the value of exercising with the ball where possible, notably using activity drills in small groups. Small-sided games have particular advantages for young players, both in providing a physiological training stimulus and a suitable medium for skills work. While complementary training may be necessary in specific cases, integrating fitness training into a holistic process is generally advisable.     

Learning to rank with (a lot of) word features

In this article we present Supervised Semantic Indexing which defines a class of nonlinear (quadratic) models that are discriminatively trained to directly map from the word content in a query-document or document-document pair to a ranking score. Like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), our models take account of correlations between words (synonymy, polysemy). However, unlike LSI our models are trained from a supervised signal directly on the ranking task of interest, which we argue is the reason for our superior results. As the query and target texts are modeled separately, our approach is easily generalized to different retrieval tasks, such as cross-language retrieval or online advertising placement. Dealing with models on all pairs of words features is computationally challenging. We propose several improvements to our basic model for addressing this issue, including low rank (but diagonal preserving) representations, correlated feature hashing and sparsification. We provide an empirical study of all these methods on retrieval tasks based on Wikipedia documents as well as an Internet advertisement task. We obtain state-of-the-art performance while providing realistically scalable methods.     

Post-secondary Science Students’ Explanations of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Randomness</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Variation</Emphasis> and Implications for Science Learning

The concepts of randomness and variation are pervasive in science. The purpose of this study was to document how post-secondary life science students explain randomness and variation, infer relationships between their explanations, and ability to describe and identify appropriate and inappropriate variation, and determine if students can identify sources of variation. An instrument designed to test statistical concepts was administered to 282 college students from three universities, ranging from introductory non-science majors to science graduate students. Students readily distinguished between causes of variation. A naïve no-pattern concept of randomness persisted from first-year non-science majors to senior-level science majors, contributing to incorrect responses on the variation instrument. Students’ expressions of randomness were better predictors of performance on the variation instrument than their expressions of variation. It is argued that inclusion of everyday language uses of randomness in instruction can bridge the gap between vernacular and scientific uses of this term.     

The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory: Normative Data for American Sign Language

To This is a 1 test per thousand learn more about normal language development in deaf children, we have developed the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for American Sign Language (ASL-CDI), a parent report that measures early sign production. The ASL-CDI is an inventory of sign glosses organized into semantic categories targeted to assess sign language skills in children ages 8 to 36 months. The ASL-CDI uses a recognition format in which parents check off signs that their child produces. The form has demonstrated excellent reliability and validity. To date, normative data have been collected from 69 deaf children with deaf parents who are learning sign language as a first language. We discuss the development of the ASl-CDI and preliminary cross-sectional and longitudinal findings from this early data collection with particular focus on parallels with spoken language acquisition. We also discuss the acquisition of first signs, negation, wh-questions, and fingerspelling with developmental patterns provided based on age, as well as vocabulary size.     

Talent identification and development in soccer

In this review, we attempt to integrate the main research findings concerned with talent identification and development in soccer. Research approaches in anthropometry, physiology, psychology and sociology are considered and, where possible, integrated. Although some progress has been made in identifying correlates of playing success, it appears that no unique characteristics can be isolated with confidence. Both biological and behavioural scientists have indicated a strong genetic component in performance of sports such as soccer; nevertheless, the influence of systematic training and development programmes should not be underestimated. Weconclude that the sport and exercise sciences have an important support role in the processes of identifying, monitoring and nurturing talented soccer players towards realizing their potential.