Classwide peer tutoring for elementary and high school students at risk: listening to students’ voices

Teaching has become a very challenging profession with the requirements to provide appropriate individualised instruction in large and diverse classes. Problem behaviours displayed by students with special needs exacerbate the difficulties. This is especially true and intense in physical education, where students are exposed to extreme emotional situations under physical demands. Classwide peer tutoring (CWPT) is an evidence‐based teaching strategy that involves programmed interactions between peers and holds promise for the education of students at risk who display antisocial behaviours. This article discusses the implementation and modification of CWPT in third and eighth grades in a K‐12 inner‐city charter school in the USA, directed towards students who have special educational and social needs. First, the two CWPT applications are described. Second, authors share the students’ reactions to the pedagogy. Third, based on students’ responses and the teacher's accumulated experience delivering CWPT, the article discusses how to tailor CWPT better to each of the grade levels.     

Hope as a Mediator of Loneliness and Academic Self‐efficacy Among Students With and Without Learning Disabilities during the Transition to College

The transition to college often occasions excitement as well as elevated stress for students. The latter may be especially the case for those with learning disabilities (LD), who can encounter problems both socially and academically. This study follows students both with and without LD during the first month of college to explore the relationships between LD status and two outcomes: loneliness/social distress and academic self‐efficacy. In particular, we hypothesized that hope and optimism would mediate the relationship between LD status and these outcomes. The sample consisted of 344 first‐year undergraduates at the beginning of the academic year (Time‐1) and a month later (Time‐2). Results showed that LD status predicted Time‐2 levels of academic self‐efficacy and loneliness only indirectly, demonstrating that relationships between LD and loneliness as well as between LD and academic self‐efficacy are mediated by hope.     

Measuring college students' reading comprehension ability using cloze tests

Recent investigations challenge the construct validity of sustained silent reading tests. Performance of two groups of post‐secondary students (e.g. struggling and non‐struggling) on a sustained silent reading test and two types of cloze test (i.e. maze and open‐ended) was compared in order to identify the test format that contributes greater variance in reading comprehension. One hundred participants were recruited from students enrolled in a preparatory course for a high‐stakes statewide reading examination. Our results suggest that all three measures have good concurrent validity. There was no evidence that open‐ended cloze performance was more related to verbal ability than any other reading measure. Maze performance did the best job at discriminating between our struggling and non‐struggling readers. Implications for reading comprehension assessment in post secondary‐aged adults are discussed.     

The GLOBE Visualization Project: Using WWW in the Classroom

Though commercial interest in the World Wide Web is growing, the potential uses of the medium as a learning tool are numerous. The GLOBE Visualization Project is one such educational application. We have designed and implemented a WWW-based, user-friendly, language-independent, graphical user interface providing access to visualizations created for GLOBE, a multinational program of education and science. The target users of the system are K–12 students and their teachers from over 1100 schools in 39 countries; other clients include the GLOBE scientific investigators and members of the public internationally. Navigation is intuitive, and employs the metaphors of a Control Panel which changes the image appearing in a Viewscreen. The interface can be learned empirically by persons of all ages regardless of technical expertise or native language; context-sensitive help is provided for users who prefer documentation. The GLOBE Visualization server is on the World Wide Web at URL http://globe.gsfc.nasa.gov/globe/.     

Does Augmented Visual Feedback from Novel,Multicolored, Three-Dimensional-Printed Teeth Affect Dental Students' Acquisition of Manual Skills?

Although three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is increasingly used in dental education, its application regarding the provision of online visual augmented feedback has not been tested. Thus, this study aimed to: (1) develop two generations of multicolored 3D-printed teeth that provide visual augmented feedback for students conducting the cavity preparation process, (2) assess students' clinical performance after training on the 3D models, and (3) acquire student feedback. For the first-generation model, augmented feedback was obtained from five 3D-printed teeth models for five cavity preparation procedures. Each model comprised three layers printed in green, yellow, and red indicating whether preparation was acceptable, limited, or unacceptable, respectively. The study used a crossover design in which the experimental group trained on five multicolored models and 10 standard plastic teeth, and the control group trained on 15 standard plastic teeth. Students gave positive feedback of the methodology but complained about the printed material's hardness. Therefore, a second-generation model was developed: the model's occlusal plane was replaced with a harder printed acrylic material, and the experiment was repeated. During training, instructors provided external terminal feedback only for performance on standard plastic teeth. Manual grades for cavity preparations on standard plastic teeth were compared. No significant differences were found between the control and experimental groups in both generations' models. However, less instructor time was needed, and similar clinical results were obtained after training with both generations. Thus, multicolored 3D-printed teeth models promote self-learning during the process of acquiring manual skills and reduce student dependency on instructors.     

Flocking to the crowd: Cultural entrepreneur mobility guided by homophily,market size,or amenities?

Economic activity and innovation clusters in urban areas. Urban economics points to important knowledge and productivity spillovers in cities, in addition to other factors like thicker markets, lower transportation costs, and consumptive amenities. Yet thus far little work has analyzed how these different factors drive migration decisions of arts-related entrepreneurs, especially when they work in online platforms for fundraising. We use data on the largest US crowdfunding platform to identify relocating creators, allowing us to identify which kinds of regions are attracting and retaining more of this sort of talent. We test for the influence of clustering based on homophily, migration to larger markets, and relocation toward particular geographic amenities. Overall we find the strongest evidence for homophily and some distinct tendencies favoring certain regional amenities. Importantly, we both identify general relocation patterns among crowdfunding creatives and break down the attracting features for different types of creators. An examination of (net) migration by different categories of projects, such as musicians or filmmakers, reveals important heterogeneity in the attractors. For example, musicians are drawn stronger music sectors, while writers seek more isolation from other writers. This helps inform the interregional competition for talent and “creative class,” especially among a group of relatively footloose arts- and culture-intensive entrepreneurs.

     

Pedagogical content knowledge of experienced teachers in physical education: functional analysis of adaptations

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is the teacher's ability to pedagogically adapt content to students of diverse abilities. In this study, we investigated how teachers' adaptations of instruction for individual students differed when teaching stronger and weaker instructional units. We used functional analysis (Hanley, Iwata, & McCord, 2003) of the instructional interaction to examine PCK. We observed and measured student-teacher interactions and their appropriateness. Participants were 2 experienced elementary physical educators who taught stronger and weaker units. Primarily, the appropriateness data indicated PCK differences between the stronger and weaker units. Results show that functional analysis of instructional adaptations is an effective strategy for examining PCK and that teachers were better able to meet students' needs in the stronger unit.     

Designing for discovery learning of complexity principles of congestion by driving together in the TrafficJams simulation

We propose and evaluate a framework supporting collaborative discovery learning of complex systems. The framework blends five design principles: (1) individual action: amidst (2) social interactions; challenged with (3) multiple tasks; set in a (4) a constrained interactive learning environment that draws attention to (5) highlighted target relations. The framework addresses a persistent tension in discovery-based pedagogy between offering students the freedom to initiate, experiment, and explore and providing them with tailored experiences with many instances of particular relations underlying the target conceptual structure. The framework was realized with TrafficJams, a participatory simulation in which students drive together. A class of high-school students worked with TrafficJams over 2.5 h. The teacher’s role was to orchestrate the activity but there was no explicit instruction of the traffic and complexity principles. The students completed pre- and post-test questionnaires and their activities were observed and logged. In terms of driving in the simulation, the students learned to drive in ways that reduced congestion in traffic by decreasing lane and speed changes, and keeping their speed down. Even though there was no explicit teaching, half of the students learned that car speed distribution alone can generate traffic jams with no additional causes; and, keeping a safe following distance from the next driver increases everyone’s speed. Our study suggests that the learning environment partially met both the overarching design goal of constrained discovery and the specific content goal of systems reasoning.     

Medical students’ help-seeking recommendations for a person with Alzheimer’s disease: relationships with knowledge and stigmatic beliefs

ABSTRACT

Primary care physicians play a central role in the process of providing a timely diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Recent reviews reported that their lack of knowledge and stigmatic beliefs about the disease are important barriers to providing an adequate diagnosis and even affect physicians’ referral recommendations for help-seeking (HS). This topic however, has not been examined among medical students. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine Israeli medical students’ HS recommendations for a person with AD, and their associations with knowledge about the disease and stigmatic beliefs, including agism and AD stigma. A convenience sample of 142 six-year medical students completed a structured questionnaire (60% female; mean age = 25.8). Overall, regarding nonprofessional sources, the vast majority of the participants stated they would recommend seeking help from close family members and friends. Regarding medical sources, almost all the participants recommended seeking help from family physicians and neurologists. Results showed that AD stigma mediated the relationship between knowledge about AD and HS recommendations. Our results stress the importance of investing efforts during the training and socialization phases of future clinicians in order to improve the timely diagnosis of AD, placing special attention on AD stigma.