Urban High School Student Engagement Through CincySTEM iTEST Projects

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This paper focuses on the notable heightening of underrepresented students’ engagement in STEM education through project-based learning CincySTEM...     

Categorization skills in infants

The prototypical category-learning experiences with which infants are confronted are ones in which they have had prior experience with and have clearly noted the differences among a set of objects. Their task, then, is to notice also the similarities among the objects and to form a category based on these similarities. The goals of the current experiments were to create a laboratory situation in which it was clear that 10-month-old infants were distinguishing one category exemplar from another, and then to determine the structure of the category representation the infants developed under these learning conditions. A set of artificially created face stimuli was used in which the mean and modal prototypes were distinct. The infants' performance could not be explained by the context theory; they appear to have retained a count of the feature values observed during study. These data give support to the claim that prior to language, infants have available strategies for abstracting category-level information from their perceptual experiences with discriminable objects and events.     

OF MANNERS AND MORALS

ABSTRACT:  In this paper I explore the role of manners and morals.¹ In particular, what is the connection between emotional demeanor and the inner stuff of virtue? Does the fact that we can pose faces and hide our inner sentiments, i.e., 'fake it,' detract from or add to our capacity for virtue? I argue, following a line from the Stoics, that it can add to our virtue and that, as a result, moral education needs to take seriously both a commitment to good character and a commitment to the 'aesthetic' of character.     

An innovative academic seminar model

This paper describes a collaboration between an urban antipoverty agency, Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), and a private higher education institution, Lesley College. This collaboration is providing a bachelor's degree program for adults associated with human service agencies. The introductory course, which is the focus of this paper, served to validate the students' experiential learning, helped them gain needed skills, and empowered them to make positive changes in both their perceptions and behaviors. Within a remarkable short period, the individuals in this group made significant changes in their lives. The program described can serve as a model in creating nontraditional partnerships to address the needs of underserved adult populations.     

Understanding teachers with extreme individual learning differences: developing more effective teachers

Three teachers, who held extreme preferences for the ways they learn, participated in a year‐long professional development course, designed to sensitize teachers to their own and colleagues’ individual learning differences (ILDs). The case study focuses on their extreme learning preferences and discusses the impact of these preferences on their language, beliefs and practice, both before and after the course. The teachers’ learning preferences were determined from their scores on seven learning/cognitive styles tools and understood further from field notes, interviews and pre‐/post‐test responses. The study suggests that teachers with extreme learning preferences tend to: (a) teach the way they prefer to learn; (b) overgeneralize and project their own learning needs onto students; and (c) hold initial pathognomonic (“blame the learner”) beliefs about students mismatched to them. After the course, the teachers changed their language, beliefs and practice in the direction of becoming more effective teachers, e.g., they held more interventionist beliefs (“I can intervene to help the learner”). The three teachers were strong prototypes who can provide insights about the importance of ILDs in learning, practice and professional development.