Active Learning and Democratic Behavior in Guatemalan Rural Primary Schools

Emerging democracies such as Guatemala are beginning to experiment with active learning methodologies to improve learning and encourage democratic behavior among children. However, there exists little information on the effects of different classroom environments on children's behavior in developing countries. This study uses focused classroom observations to examine differences in the democratic behavior of children of different genders and ethnicity attending traditional rural schools and those attending rural schools with an experimental active learning program. Results show that children in the experimental program engage in significantly more democratic behaviors than their counterparts and these behaviors are related to participation in small group activities. Within the active learning program, greater democratic behavior and small group participation are also related to higher reading achievement at the classroom level.     

Migrant preschool children's school readiness and early elementary school performance

Little is known about the early educational performance of children in migrant farmworker families. The authors examined the school readiness and early school success of 289 four-year-old preschool children of migrant families attending Redlands Christian Migrant Association centers. Children's school readiness was assessed and public school records were used for longitudinal follow-up. Children improved on age-4 school readiness domains, and although some struggled with emergent English literacy, many performed well on school readiness measures and later coursework. Children quickly became proficient in oral English, and had above-average school attendance. Many scored low on high-stakes tests; however, typically well enough for grade promotion. Students in the sample were comparable to similar students in poverty. School teachers and administrators should have high expectations for students from migrant families because many of them do stay in the public school system, and appear to be quite resilient despite many challenges they face.     

The continuing politics of mistrust: performance management and the erosion of professional work

For the past two decades schools and teachers in New Zealand and elsewhere have been the subject of and subjected to intense public scrutiny of their performance and professional activities. In effect, policy solutions have cast teacher and school performance as a ‘problem’ to be solved/resolved via the intervention of the State. Consequently, the policy remedy has been the introduction of audit mechanisms such as systems of performance management to define, regulate and control teaching and teachers. That is, the State has directly intervened in the professional work and activities of teachers based on the flawed assumption that teachers cannot be trusted and therefore require the intervention of the State and its agencies to ensure their performance is aligned with organisational objectives. And while one of the hallmarks of a profession and professional practice is adherence to a set of prescribed standards, performance management has rendered teachers accountable to the State, not professional peers. And, as this article outlines, this has served to de‐professionalise teaching and teachers’ work.     

Failing at Remediation? College Remedial Coursetaking,Failure and Long-Term Student Outcomes

Research in Higher Education - Colleges offer remedial coursework to help students enrolling in post-secondary education who are not adequately prepared to succeed in college-level courses. Despite...     

Quick,incidental word learning in educational media: all contexts are not equal

Educational technology research and development - Classic studies of educational media have demonstrated that children can engage in quick, incidental word learning on the basis of a single...     

Implications of Prelecture Material on Cognitive Load and Instructional Effectiveness in Cross‐Disciplinary IS Education: The Nexus of Benford's Law and SQL

For some time, there has been a call for cross‐disciplinary teaching within the business disciplines. With the rise of data and analytics, there is an opportunity for cross‐disciplinary teaching by integrating technology throughout the business curriculum. However, many business professors have little experience in cross‐disciplinary teaching. We hope to rectify this by introducing an approach that uses prelecture material to prepare students for learning concepts and terms that are not core to the focal class. In a study that combines Structured Query Language (SQL) coding with an audit principle called Benford's Law, we analyze the impact of adding prelecture material about Benford's Law on student's cognitive load, knowledge gained, and instructional efficiency. Results indicate that students who received a prelecture on Benford's Law outperformed the control group in performance measures related to Benford's Law, and that the instructional efficiency on Benford's Law was also higher for the treatment group. We did not find any significant differences in cognitive load between the two groups, nor did the treatment group perform significantly better when tested on the SQL concepts. We conclude that cross‐discipline teaching is a fine balance between each discipline and communicating to students the importance of both disciplines is key.     

Attentional Bias for Exercise-Related Images

Abstract

This research examined attentional bias toward exercise-related images using a visual probe task. It was hypothesized that more-active participants would display attentional bias toward the exercise-related images. The results showed that men displayed attentional bias for the exercise images. There was a significant interaction of activity level by gender, and simple slopes analysis showed that active women displayed attentional bias toward the exercise-related images and inactive women displayed attentional bias toward the control images. A similar analysis with explicit attention to the pictures as the outcome variable was not significant. These findings confirm that attention for exercise-related images can be captured automatically regardless of whether people report they are attending to them.     

The role of topic‐related background knowledge in visual attention to illustration and children's word learning during shared book reading

The purpose of this study was to examine how background knowledge of a topic may influence children's attention to different elements of storybook illustrations and how that influences word learning. Forty‐one kindergarten students were administered a test about a familiar topic (i.e., birds). Participants were then read either a fictional story about a familiar topic (birds) or a fictional story about a novel topic (wugs) on an eye‐tracker monitor. Results suggest that, for children who heard the familiar story, those who knew more about the category were faster to orient to the illustration of the novel word than children with lower background knowledge. Accordingly, children who were faster to orient to the illustration were more likely to learn the word. These results may suggest that one mechanism by which background knowledge improves implicit learning in shared‐book reading contexts is by guiding attention to the named elements of the illustrations.     

Instructors’ perspectives on the utility of student ratings of instruction

This study investigates instructors’ attitudes about student ratings of instruction. The sample consisted of 357 instructors at a major Canadian university, where student evaluation is carried out in all courses at the end of each term. Instructors tend to agree that the student rating practice is an acceptable means of assessing institutional integrity, and is useful to administrators in making summative decisions. However, they consider the student evaluations only marginally valuable in their impact on enhancing instruction. Implications for the development of student ratings are discussed.