Using Tutors to Improve Educational Games: A Cognitive Game for Policy Argument

How might we balance assistance and penalties to intelligent tutors and educational games that increase learning and interest? We created two versions of an educational game for learning policy argumentation called Policy World. The game (only) version provided minimal feedback and penalized students for errors whereas the game+tutor version provided additional step-level teaching feedback and immediate error correction. A total of 105 university students played either the game or game+tutor version of Policy World in a randomized, controlled, two-group, between-subjects experiment, during which we measured students’ problem-solving abilities, interest in the game, self-reported competence, and pre- and posttest performance. The game+tutor version increased learning of policy analysis skills and self-reported competence. A path analysis supported the claim that greater assistance helped students to learn analysis better, which increased their feelings of competence, which increased their interest in the game. Log data of student behavior showed that debate performance improved only for students who had sufficiently mastered analysis. This study shows that we can design interesting and effective games to teach policy argumentation and how increasing tutoring and reducing penalties in educational games can increase learning without sacrificing interest.     

Multirelational semantic maps

Research on multirelational semantic maps is laden with promise for educational applications, but the development of knowledge mapping systems has been largely unsystematic. This paper describes the distinctive features of knowledge maps, discusses their origins, and explores some of the strengths and weaknesses of the wide variety of maps and mapping approaches that have been appearing in the literature over the past several years. Research findings pertaining to maps' potential and actual uses in educational settings are summarized, with some indepth attention to the more programmatic efforts of Novak as well as to our own mapping system. Suggestions are made for future exploration of, and experimentation on, maps as unique tools for organizing, representing, and communicating a wide variety of knowledge domains.     

Bilingual education in Ontario: Issues and directions

Conclusions The impact of the immersion phenomenon in Ontario has been striking and complex. This brief review of research on bilingual education and its relationship to a variety of language teaching settings has shown that the immersion experiment has produced several constructive side effects. First, it has caused the re-examination of first language teaching in regular English classrooms and it is now sparking a move toward increased contact between educators of French as a first language and French as a second language. Second, it has heightened parental interest and led to the increased involvement of parents in their children's education. Canadian Parents for French, a national association formed in 1977, grew directly out of the excitement and interest created by bilingual education programs in Canada. Along with increased parental involvement has come the realization that the school — whether it is francophone or anglophone — cannot be expected to go it alone, that support for French must be generated in the media and in the community.Two recent conferences have resulted in part from this realization:Apprenons en français/Learning in French held at Glendon College in June, 1978, and the OISE Conference on French Language Instruction, the proceedings of which make up this issue ofInterchange. These were landmark events, since never before in Ontario had educators and parents involved in French as a first language and French as a second language come together to share their problems, ideas and hopes. Such meetings could and should represent the beginning of a continuing dialogue.     

Early career teachers’ emotion and emerging teacher identities

The goal of our project was to develop an understanding of the connections among emotional episodes and emerging professional teacher identities of first year teachers. We interviewed eight first year mathematics and science teachers. We asked them to reflect on emotional episodes and talk about how those emotions informed their teaching identities. Our data yielded a model of ‘identity-work’ that reflected the teachers’ engagement in a reflective process of understanding themselves as it related to those emotional episodes. Our model includes four key processes: (1) Teacher incoming identity beliefs; (2) Teacher identity emotional episodes; (3) Teacher attributions and (4)Identity adjustment. All of our teachers exhibited a form of this process with some teachers elaborating on the ways in which pleasant emotional experiences confirmed their identities and others elaborating on the ways in which unpleasant emotional experiences caused them to confront and/or adjust their emergent identities. Implications for future research and teacher education are discussed.     

Culturally reimagining education: Publicity,aesthetics and socially engaged art practice

Abstract

This paper sets out to reimagine education through a cultural perspective and explores education as a performative practice that establishes certain borders of ‘public’ belonging. Wide-spread debates about the public dimension of schools and universities have focused on how economic rationales need to be replaced with alternative visions of education. This paper seeks to contribute to this revisioning of the public in education by reclaiming education as a specifically cultural endeavour, one tied to practices that are at once both performative and aesthetic. To this end, I draw on theoretical notions of publicity that highlight its performative character. I then offer a reading of a socially engaged art project in order to suggest ways in which this performative character of publicity can be seen to be educational. This paper argues that education itself emerges through various cultural enactments that delineate the contours of who counts as a public and who does not.     

The Effects of Group Counselling on Classroom Behaviour and Self‐concept among Elementary School Learning Disabled Children

This study investigated the effects of participation in group counselling sessions on the classroom behaviour and self‐concept of learning disabled (LD) children in elementary school. Sixty LD children were randomly assigned to experimental (n = 30) and control (n= 30) conditions. Participants in the treatment group were divided into three groups and participated in group counselling sessions which met for approximately one hour per week for 10 weeks. Dependent measures included Acting Out and Distractibility from the Walker Problem Behavior Identification Checklistand Personal Self, Social Self, and Intellectual Self from the Primary Self‐Concept Inventory.Results indicated that participation in group counselling sessions improved behaviour in the classroom and enhanced some positive self‐evaluations (Social Self). The intervention appears to be beneficial in improving acting out and distractibility behaviours and one area of self‐concept.     

Technology Integration and the Classroom Learning Environment: Research for Action

This article describes initial results of a collaborative action research endeavor between a regional university and a local school (Grade 6 level) using learning environments research to monitor alignment of classroom learning activities with a constructivist viewpoint while integrating technology into the curriculum. Student perceptions as measured by the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES) were explored. Teacher logs, teacher interviews, and fieldnotes from team discussion groups and classroom observation provided further understanding of interactions in the classroom. A one-way analysis of variance in which the set of four classroom learning environment variables for the CLES, the set of five variables for each of the CLES-Mathematics and the CLES-Science and time of administration (prior to technology integration and after technology integration) yielded no significant changes in student perceptions of the classroom learning environment over the duration of the academic year. Interpretation of results led teachers to construct a new set of questions and a new plan of action to bring their classroom learning environment into closer alignment with a constructivist perspective for teaching and learning. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Being Mentored: The Experience of Women Faculty

Mentoring has been proposed as a means to enhance the career success of women faculty in the academic environment. This phenomenological study was undertaken to understand and describe the essential nature and meaning of the experience of being mentored for women faculty. In-depth conversational interviews were conducted with nine women faculty who stated that they had been mentored while in a faculty role. Their mentoring relationships were formal and informal, with male and female mentors of varying ranks, and both internal and external to the protégés' institutions. Through an analysis of the interview text, five essential themes of the experience of being mentored for women faculty emerged. These essential themes are (a) having someone who truly cares and acts in one's best interest, (b) a feeling of connection, (c) being affirmed of one's worth, (d) not being alone, and (e) politics are part of one's experience.     

Urban Schools Rethink Themselves: Developing Instructional Skills in the Process of Change

The Urban Review - Educational reform challenges teachers to change both their schools and their craft. Can skills learned in the process of school improvement transfer to teaching? The Accelerated...