Accessibility in post secondary education： Application of UDL to college curriculum

The inclusion of students with disabilities at the university is a relatively new occurrence in the field of special education. Although legislation in the United States has supported the acceptance of students with disabilities at the post-secondary level, it has only provided minimal support with the emphasis on the learner rather than the curriculum. Now we are looking for multiple ways for students to access learning and demonstrate mastery. Universal Design for Learning （UDL） is currently seen as a means to reconceptionalize curriculum. This study examines the experience of four professors and their effort to use a Classroom Performance System （CPS） as part of reformatting their courses using UDL. The Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST （2001） states that the goal of Universal Design for Learning is to develop teaching methods that enable all students with diverse learning needs, including those with disabilities and cultural differences, to have equal access to classroom curriculum. This paradigm shift echoes the move in special education from a deficit model to a minority rights model put forward by Hahn （1989）, and which is the basis of inclusive educational philosophy. Together inclusion and UDL create learning environments that strive to serve all students. This research describes the implementation of clickers as part of the CPS program in college courses in a special education teacher preparation program. The case study demonstrates how technology can provide access for all learners with positive outcomes such as increased participation and application of knowledge. It also illustrates some of the difficulties in making this pedagogical paradigm shift particularly in the use of technology, and the value of overcoming the existing barriers in place.     

Methodological concerns: the feeling-of-knowing task affects resolution

In traditional feeling-of-knowing procedures, participants make judgments on unrecalled items only (e.g. Hart 1965). However, many researchers elicit feeling-of-knowing judgments (FOKs) on all items. When FOKs are made on all items, participants may use recall as a basis for judgments, leading to higher magnitude judgments for recalled items, but causing a relative floor effect for judgments for unrecalled items. We suspected that resolution (relative accuracy) would be better when FOKs are made on all items than when they are made on unrecalled items only. We examined the issue by comparing across studies, reanalyzing data from another experiment, and by conducting an original experiment. In the literature review, we included 83 conditions across 52 studies. We found that feeling-of-knowing judgments made on all items showed higher resolution than feeling-of-knowing judgments made on unrecalled items. This was replicated in the reanalysis of existing data of a single study that used both methods. In the original experiment, we collected feeling-of-knowing judgments for general-information questions. The experiment confirmed that resolution for predicting recognition was higher when feeling-of-knowing judgments were made on all items than when they were made only on unrecalled items. We discuss both methodological and theoretical implications of these data.     

Foreign language learning using e-mail in a task-oriented perspective: Interuniversity experiments in communication and collaboration

From 1988 to 1990 several collaborative cross-country intermediate French classes at Harvard and Stanford became one class. Students combined their efforts and insights in the accomplishment of a semester-long task, in most cases the publication of a student newspaper or magazine, using the electronic mail (e-mail) network to contact each other, elaborate their plans, and bring their projects to successful conclusion. Additional experiments of a similar nature took place between Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh (in the spring of 1990) and between Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh during 1991–1993. This paper suggests that this type of task-oriented learning through distance-communication is applicable at many different course levels and has considerable merit as an approach to teaching and learning. The key phases of this task-based model are presented along with technological information regarding computers and networks, as a guide to colleagues interested in pursuing similar lines of experimental teaching. Also included are samples of student messages, with their varied and often highly colorful discourse features, which attest to the motivation of students and reveal the strong personal investment made by the participants as they join hands across the miles in a productive, communication-based enterprise. The language and learning styles generated by technology and computers fully deserve closer investigation by researchers and teaching practitioners alike. The authors summarize the experiments, discuss assessment, and present research issues, concluding that good pedagogy and quality technology must share a vision of what can be accomplished in this rapidly evolving educational work place.The original collaborative project, on which this article is based, was undertaken at the suggestion of Professor Ralph M. Hester, Chair of the Department of French and Italian, Stanford University, and was funded by the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning. The authors would also like to thank Francçoise Herrmann, Garth McCavana, and Louise Wills for their assistance.     

Changes in Students’ Views about Nature of Scientific Inquiry at a Science Camp

Although nature of science (NOS) and nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI) are related to each other, they are differentiated as NOS is being more related to the product of scientific inquiry (SI) which is scientific knowledge whereas NOSI is more related to the process of SI (Schwartz et al. 2008). Lederman et al. (Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 65–8, 2014) determined eight NOSI aspects for K-16 context. In this study, a science camp was conducted to teach scientific inquiry (SI) and NOSI to 24 6th and 7th graders (16 girls and 8 boys). The core of the program was guided inquiry in nature. The children working in small groups under guidance of science advisors conducted four guided-inquiries in the nature in morning sessions on nearby plants, animals, water, and soil. NOSI aspects were made explicit during and at the end of each inquiry session. Views about scientific inquiry (VASI) (Lederman et al. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 65–8, 2014) questionnaire was applied as pre- and post-test. The results of the study showed that children developed in all eight NOSI aspects, but higher developments were observed in “scientific investigations all begin with a question” and “there is no single scientific method,” and “explanations are developed from data and what is already known” aspects. It was concluded that the science camp program was effective in teaching NOSI.     

On the benefits of bi-literacy: just a head start in reading or specific orthographic insights?

In a previous study [Schwartz et al. (2005). Written Language and Literacy, 8, 179–207] we showed that early literacy in Russian (L1) facilitated decoding acquisition in Hebrew (L2) among Russian-Hebrew first graders. The present study examined two alternative explanations for this finding. The first account concerns the general benefits of an early start in literacy. The second relates to the specific meta-linguistic insights engendered by early exposure to a fully fledged orthography—Russian. We therefore compared two groups who had acquired literacy prior to the onset of schooling: bi-literate bilinguals (Russian L1 literates and Hebrew L2 learners) (n = 26) and early-literacy monolinguals (Hebrew-speaking monolinguals) (n = 18). The research was conducted in two stages. First, linguistic, meta-linguistic and cognitive tasks in Hebrew were administered to all children and in Russian to the bilinguals at the beginning of the first grade. Next, reading and writing skills in Hebrew were assessed at the end of the first grade. Bi-literate bilinguals showed superior levels of phonological awareness on an initial phoneme isolation task in Hebrew compared to other three groups. In addition, the bi-literate bilinguals were found to be superior to the early-literacy monolinguals on measures of word and pseudoword accuracy, which are known to depend heavily on phonological processing efficiency, but not on fluency and spelling measures, which are more reliant on stored orthographic information. This pattern of outcomes was attributed to the facilitating effects of an orthography characterized by a fully fledged alphabet, in contrast to Hebrew’s primarily consonantal orthography, as well as the complex syllabic structure of Russian.