Prompting undergraduate students’ metacognition of learning: implementing ‘meta-learning’ assessment tasks in the biomedical sciences

To succeed at post-secondary education, it’s essential that students develop an understanding of their own knowledge and learning processes. This metacognition of learning, or ‘meta-learning’, helps students to become more effective learners, as they become more aware of their self-regulatory processes and recognise the effectiveness of their study strategies. To increase biomedical science students’ self-awareness, we have designed and implemented meta-learning assessment tasks across our biomedical science courses. Most students reported that meta-learning tasks had a positive impact on their learning, as they prompted self-regulatory processes of forethought and self-reflection. We found that students were equally likely to change or not change their study strategies across subsequent semesters. Those students that did not change were generally high achievers, believing their study approaches were most effective, but their performance did not improve across semesters. In contrast, students who adapted, mostly by modifying how they appraised and rearranged records or improved planning and time management, performed less well overall but significantly improved their performance across semesters. Meta-learning tasks may prompt students to become more self-reflective and independent learners by affecting their approach to learning, enabling them to reflect on their study strategies, adapt and improve performance, and may enable the development of lifelong learning skills.     

PARENTAL FEARS AND EXPECTATIONS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF A COUNSELLING CENTRE FOR THE GIFTED

During the last five years the counselling centre in Hamburg has dealt with the identification, counselling and offering of special provision to gifted children aged from 5 to 17. More than 300 children and their parents have been individually interviewed, particular attention being paid to the childrens’ motivational, social, and emotional difficulties in school. Various counselling strategies have been adopted, while a number of concerns and expectancies of parents, according to the children's different IQ levels, have become apparent. Early identification and special provision for the gifted are of particular importance.     

Assessing collaborative computing: development of the Collaborative-Computing Observation Instrument (C-COI)

This paper describes the development, validation, and uses of the Collaborative Computing Observation Instrument (C-COI), a web-based analysis instrument that classifies individual and/or collaborative behaviors of students during computing problem-solving (e.g. coding, programming). The C-COI analyzes data gathered through video and audio screen recording software that captures students’ computer screens as they program, and their conversations with their peers or adults. The instrument allows researchers to organize and quantify these data to track behavioral patterns that could be further analyzed for deeper understanding of persistence and/or collaborative interactions. The article provides a rationale for the C-COI including the development of a theoretical framework for measuring collaborative interactions in computer-mediated environments. This theoretical framework relied on the computer-supported collaborative learning literature related to adaptive help seeking, the joint problem-solving space in which collaborative computing occurs, and conversations related to outcomes and products of computational activities. Instrument development and validation also included ongoing advisory board feedback from experts in computer science, collaborative learning, and K-12 computing as well as classroom observations to test out the constructs in the C-COI. These processes resulted in an instrument with rigorous validation procedures and a high inter-rater reliability.     

Yee和Lan的爱情故事

为何一个人爱恋对方时会送戒指呢？这个凄美而浪漫的传说娓娓诉说了这“爱的光环”的由来。 Once upon a time,in a solar system that is so,so far away from here that you wouldn't believe me if I told you, were two planets. Their names were Yee and Lan,and they loved each other very much. Every time they saw each other they would whisper planet secrets,or share wisps of atmosphere, or tell silly jokes. But they were a little sad.because it was so long between times that they got to be near each other,what with orbital mechanics being what     

A Shift in the Direction of the Production Effect in Children Aged 2–6 Years

Research has found mixed evidence for the production effect in childhood. Some studies have found a positive effect of production on word recognition and recall, while others have found the reverse. This paper takes a developmental approach to investigate the production effect. Children aged 2–6 years (n = 150) from a predominantly white population in Ottawa, Canada were trained on familiar words which were either seen, heard or produced, followed by a recall task. Results showed a developmental shift: younger participants showed a reverse production effect, recalling more words that were heard during training, while older children showed the typical production effect, recalling more produced words. The effect of production on recall is not unidirectional and varies by age.     

Discourses that silence: teachers and anti-lesbian harassment

This paper examines the way lesbian identities are silenced in schools particularly through anti-lesbian harassment. Based on research with 30 self-identified lesbian teachers working across high schools in New South Wales, Australia, the discussion illustrates how various responses to anti-lesbian harassment silence the recognition of such harassment, contributing to the invisibility of lesbian identities in schools generally. The argument highlights the shifting nature of both the subject and power. It illustrates how discursively (re)positioning harassers re-establishes and reinforces the harassed teacher's personal and professional power; however, this simultaneously serves to rationalise the harassment. This silences the awareness of the prevalence of anti-lesbian abuse by individualising the behaviour and pathologising the harasser, while ignoring broader socio-political discourses that maintain the frequently subordinated location of lesbian subjectivities.     

Mid-career academic women and the prestige economy

Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with women academics based in London higher education institutions in the UK, this paper investigates the gendered nature of the prestige economy in academia. We explore how mid-career academic women strategise their career development and the opportunities and barriers they perceive, particularly in relation to the accrual of academic esteem. Concept maps were used to facilitate dialogue about career plans and provided an artefact from the interviewee’s own perspective. The analysis draws on the concept of prestige, or the indicators of esteem that help advance academic careers, against the backdrop of a higher education context which increasingly relies on quantitative data to make judgements about academic excellence. The interviews indicated that women generally feel that men access status and indicators of esteem more easily than they do. Many women also had ambivalent feelings about gaining recognition through prestige: they understood the importance of status and knew the ‘rules of the game’, but were critical of these rules and sometimes reluctant to overtly pursue prestige. The findings are valuable for understanding how women’s slow access to the highest levels of higher education institutions is shaped by the value that organisations place on individual status.