The impact of teachers’ individualized practices on gifted students in rural,heterogeneous classrooms

Several factors have increased teachers’ frustrations in the regular classroom as they try to meet the needs of students with varying levels of ability. Limited educational funding, the attitude that gifted students can do without special services, and a push for increased heterogeneous grouping have all contributed to the teacher's problem. The Mustard Seed Project was developed and supported by a grant from the Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education program to train teachers to differentiate for student needs by curricular adaptations. The training for teachers modeled the process of individualization for each learner's level, pace and style. A follow‐up support system of human and material resources was implemented to sustain the teachers through the difficult transition required of change. The sites participating in this study were all rural, ethnically diverse, and economically disadvantaged. Profiles of six gifted fifth‐graders were developed using interviews and classroom observations. The research questions sought to determine the extent of the gifted child's intellectual challenge, exploration of in‐depth selected topics of interest, and social and emotional satisfaction in adapted classrooms.     

An associative analysis of instrumental biconditional discrimination learning

Three different techniques were employed to analyze the associative structures mediating performance on an instrumental biconditional discrimination. In all three experiments, rats were trained concurrently on two tasks in which different stimuli signaled which one of two responses would be followed by reward. In each task, one response was rewarded in one stimulus and the other response was rewarded in the other stimulus. Correct responses earned pellets in one task and sucrose in the other task. The transfer procedure was used in Experiment 1A to identify whether or not an association developed between a biconditional discriminative stimulus and its instrumental outcome. Evidence was obtained that a biconditional cue elevated preferentially a new response trained with the same outcome. Experiments 1B and 3 examined the potential contribution of this stimulus-outcome association to biconditional performance by training the biconditional cues as signals (S-s) for the nonreinforcement of a different response. There was no evidence that this operation interfered with the ability of a biconditional cue to control performance of its correct response. In Experiments 1B and 2, the value of the instrumental outcome was reduced in an attempt to assess the contribution of stimulus-response associations to performance on the biconditional discrimination. The results of Experiments 1B and 2 reveal that correct responses were depressed following devaluation of the outcome used to train them, suggesting that learning about the response-outcome relation occurs. The implications of these results for binary and hierarchical models of instrumental learning are discussed.     

Motivators and Inhibitors for University Faculty in Distance and e-learning

This article reports on four United States studies of how rewards systems, extrinsic and intrinsic, could play an important role in providing incentives for university faculty to teach (or remain teaching) electronic and distance education courses. The first three studies conducted prior to 2003 reported faculty were inherently motivated to teach e-learning and distance education. The fourth study in 2003 reported key findings that differed from the earlier studies. Using a principal components analysis, the researchers found nine indicators of motivation to participate or not participate in electronic or distance education. The implications from the fourth study indicated that, while faculty members were inherently committed to helping students, faculty members wanted their basic physiological needs met by university administration through extrinsic motivators, such as salary increases and course releases.     

Strategic Developments in Open and Distance Learning in Central and Eastern Europe

This article provides a synopsis of the findings of a strategic study on developments in open and distance learning in Central and Eastern Europe. The study was undertaken during 1999 under the aegis of the PHARE Multi-country Programme in Distance Education. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the issues addressed by the study. These include contextual issues relating to the development of open and distance learning and the changing nature of higher education, an exploration of developments across Europe and the problems associated with those developments, and a discussion of possible solutions to those problems in Central and Eastern Europe with particular reference to legislation, quality assurance and recognition, and strategic management.     

Developing and Validating a Novel Anonymous Method for Matching Longitudinal School-Based Data

Prospective longitudinal data collection is an important way for researchers and evaluators to assess change. In school-based settings, for low-risk and/or likely-beneficial interventions or surveys, data quality and ethical standards are both arguably stronger when using a waiver of parental consent—but doing so often requires the use of anonymous data collection methods. The standard solution to this problem has been the use of a self-generated identification code. However, such codes often incorporate personalized elements (e.g., birth month, middle initial) that, even when meeting the technical standard for anonymity, may raise concerns among both youth participants and their parents, potentially altering willingness to participate, response quality, or generating outrage. There may be value, therefore, in developing a self-generated identification code and matching approach that not only is technically anonymous but also appears anonymous to a research-naive individual. This article provides a proof of concept for a novel matching approach for school-based longitudinal data collection that potentially accomplishes this goal.     

Intuitive rules in science and mathematics: the case of ‘Everything can be divided by two’

In the last twenty years, researchers have studied students’ mathematical and scientific conceptions and reasoning. Most of this research is content‐specific. It has been found that students often hold ideas that are not in line with accepted scientific notions. In our joint work in mathematics and science education, it became apparent that many of these alternative conceptions hail from a small number of intuitive rules. We have so far identified two such rules: ‘The more of A, the more of B’, and, ‘Everything can be divided by two’. The first rule is reflected in students’ responses to many tasks, including all classical Piagetian conservation tasks (conservation of number, area, weight, volume, matter, etc.), all tasks related to intensive quantities (density, temperature, concentration, etc.), and tasks related to infinite quantities. The second rule is observed in responses related to successive division of material and geometrical objects, and in seriation tasks. In this paper we describe and discuss the second rule and its relevance to science and mathematics education. In a previous paper (Stavy and Tirosh 1995, in press) we described and discussed the first rule.