Learning through personal connections: cogenerative dialogues in synchronous virtual spaces

This study describes the role of cogenerative dialogues in a synchronous virtual classroom. Cogenerative dialogues are a way for students and instructors to reflect upon in-class events and work collaboratively during the course to optimize teaching and learning. In the present study, cogen has been found to be a tool for enhancing connections among graduate students in the class leading to a reported increase of motivation and engagement. Cogenerative dialogues were essential in shifting responsibilities so that students took a more active role in their own learning while supporting each other.     

The under-recognition of the significance of social class conceptions of education in Piketty’s Capital

Abstract

Piketty’s Capital has created enormous interest around the world, not least in educational circles. One reason for this may be his readiness to refer, in a book largely focused on economic history, to the ways that education has, and might, contribute to better and more equal social outcomes. This article welcomes this approach, but argues that Piketty’s suggestions remain somewhat limited due to his adherence to a more or less distributional, rather than relational, approach, and then sets out to address this issue by arguing that the assumption that it is the distribution of credentials which accounts for their contribution is mistaken. Instead, the article advances arguments which recognize the separate contributions of the content of credentials, and their valorization. The main focus of this article is thus on the different ways educational credentials are realized, which, it is argued, is a major basis for the maintenance of educational inequality.     

Counter engagement: parents refusing high stakes testing and questioning policy in the era of the common core

This study is a critical discourse analysis of the New Jersey Opt-Out Movement. In 2015, and in response to the increasing standardization of US public school instruction, and over-use of high-stakes testing, NJ parents began to refuse to allow their children to take a key end-of-the year exam, the PARCC. We employ the concepts of master and counter narratives to exam the qualitative data that was collected in an online-questionnaire, a focus group, and refusal letters. We argue that these parents have refused this exam for their children based on differing reasons, that parents effectively changed the master narrative of the PARCC to grow their movement, and their refusal letters were key in promoting a new counter narrative.     

How valid is self-reported financial aid information?

This paper compares the accuracy of college freshmen self-reported information about financial aid awards with actual data on the types and amounts of these awards. Data from the 1986–87 National Postsecondary Aid Study (NPSAS) file are replicated with evidence from a single institution. The study shows that college freshmen are relatively accurate in reporting whether any financial aid was received. However, students' self-reports of specific financial aid awards and amounts do not correspond closely to actual data. Campus administrators would come to very different conclusions about both the types and amounts of student aid if they rely on survey data compared to actual data. The results provide evidence for how nonsampling errors may bias survery results.     

Interior Design Supports Art Education: A Case Study

Interior design, as a field of study, is a rapidly growing area of interest — particularly for teenagers in the United States. Part of this interest stems from the proliferation of design‐related reality shows available through television media. Some art educators and curriculum specialists in the nation perceive the study of interior spaces as a ‘practical application’ of the arts. This article discusses an experiential design problem, originally used in higher education interior design studio courses that was modified and shared with students in third grade to address national academic standards. Later, this same project was modified for use with high school students in the educator's community and with international design students in South Korea. Lastly, the project was presented in a workshop to art education students at a higher education institution. The project was modified to address (1) the age group level and (2) a topic relevant to the audience. Goals of the design project were: (1) to explore creative problem‐solving, (2) to explore the application of design elements and principles, and (3) to increase student understanding of spatial relationships within an interior environment. Findings indicate that the project supported several visual art standards, including perception and community. This project may be of interest to current and future art educators and others interested in the potential of interior design content supporting art education.     

The genetic and environmental origins of language disability and ability

This study investigated whether genes affect language impairment to the same extent as they affect differences in language ability following up an earlier study of 579 four-year-old twins with low language performance and their cotwins (Viding et al., in press). The present study selected low-language twins from 6,963 pairs of twins from the Twins Early Development Study assessed for vocabulary and grammar by their parents at 2, 3, and 4 years of age. For impaired groups corresponding to the lowest scoring 5% and 10% at each age, twin concordances and model-fitting analyses indicated substantial genetic influence on the mean difference between affected children and the population (h2g), generally higher than for individual differences for the entire sample (h2).     

Elementary School Students’ Mental Computation Proficiencies

Mental computation helps children understand how numbers work, how to make decisions about procedures, and how to create different strategies to solve math problems. Although researchers agree on the importance of mental computation skills, they debate how to help students develop these skills. The present study explored the existing literature in order to identify key points that are related to students’ use of different mental calculation strategies in a variety of settings and their conceptual understanding of those strategies.