In Search of Unicorns and Effective Teacher Education

This article examines the merits of WebQuests in facilitating students’ in-depth understanding of science concepts using the four principles of learning gathered from the National Research Council reports How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (1999) and the How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom (2005) as an analytic framework. Modifications needed to make a well-constructed WebQuests for science teaching aligned to the four principles include (1) integrating student science interests and cultural and social backgrounds to curricular goals and then using this as means to design WebQuests, (2) providing students opportunities to examine science-related Internet websites to discriminate credible and false information and then giving them the opportunity to include and use the websites for the task step in WebQuests, and (3) providing cognitive tools and guidance within the process step so that students are engaged in argumentation and negotiation akin to a community of scientists.     

How the relationship between text and headings influences readers’ memory

Two questions regarding signals’ influence on memory were examined. First, the relationship between headings and text was manipulated to determine whether headings serve as visual cues, directing readers to recall all subsequent information, or content-specific cues, directing readers to recall only to certain information. Second, distance between headings and signaled information was manipulated to determine the extent to which headings focus readers’ recall. College students read a multiple-topic expository text. Free recall for main topics was facilitated by being related to headings and being close to headings and inhibited by being unrelated to headings and distant from headings. Conditional recall (recall of subordinate information pertaining to a main topic) was not affected by either relatedness of heading or distance. Results are consistent with research showing signals’ mixed influence on recall and suggest relation and distance as factors to consider when writing and reading exposition.     

Participation Studies and Cross-National Comparison: Proliferation,Prudence, and Possibility

Over the last three decades the practice of surveying a country's population to gauge participation in various arts and cultural activities has spread. This paper considers twenty different contemporary participation studies, which cover thirty-five countries (thirty-six if you distinguish the study for the United Kingdom from the study for England) plus the Canadian province of Québec. The paper is restricted to what might be described as “traditional” participation studies—random surveys of the adult population to ascertain the participation of various demographic groups in one or another cultural behavior in the previous twelve months. Typically, the results of these surveys are summarized in a participation rate—the percentage of the demographic group that has reported a particular form of participation. Collectively, the studies summarized here provide forty-five different sets of participation rates.

That so many participation studies now exist for so many countries invites comparison. But what sort of comparison is possible? The paper begins with a consideration of the various definitions of “participation” and looks at the history of participation studies. I then address the issue of comparability, particularly with respect to variation in the design of participation studies. I also address the issue of facilitating the interpretation and use of participation data, which inevitably leads to the question of the extent to which the results of participation studies actually impact policy choices. Comparable data are not necessarily usable data, but neither are usable data necessarily comparable data.

Differences in methodology, it turns out, severely restrict one's ability to compare responsibly. Nevertheless, it does seem possible to articulate some broad hypotheses across countries. Still, the primary conclusion is that while one should be wary of ex post harmonization of participation studies, one should also be wary of ex ante harmonization. What has been created, in the end, is a research terrain in which (cross-national) comparability is traded off against (local) usability.     

Cross-domain effects of achievement goals: social costs and benefits

European Journal of Psychology of Education - In this research, we examined cross-domain effects of achievement goals. In two experimental studies, we manipulated achievement goals and assessed...     

Transfer of metacognitive skills in self-regulated learning: an experimental training study

Metacognition and Learning - Training interventions for self-regulated learning foster the use of strategies and skills as well as their transfer to new learning tasks. Because cognitive strategies...