Students Designing Video Games about Immunology: Insights for Science Learning

Exposing American K–12 students to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) content is a national initiative. Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration targets students from underserved communities and uses their interest in video games as a way to introduce science, technology, engineering, and math topics. This article describes a Game Design Through Mentoring and Collaboration summer program for 16 high school students and 3 college student mentors who collaborated with a science subject matter expert. After four weeks, most students produced 2-D video games with themes based on immunology concepts from the educational science game Immune Attack. Findings from three groups that finished their games and one group with an uncompleted game are explored.     

Applying brand management to higher education through the use of the Brand Flux Model™ – the case of Arcadia University

Within an increasingly more competitive landscape, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are becoming more marketized and promotionalized. Brand building is becoming a strategic administrative goal, yet clear brand management models are lacking. This paper utilizes the Brand Flux Model^? to assist in tracking the fluxing nature or historical patterns of branding practices, and provides a graphic representation for following changes in branding or changes in position that result in either Reinforcing an existing brand, or Revitalizing, Refocusing, Renaming, or Retiring a brand. Through a case analysis of an HEI that eventually underwent a radical renaming, the various phases of the Brand Flux Model^? are explored and the critical aspect of ongoing brand management efforts is reinforced. The paper also highlights why periodic brand audits are necessary to ascertain that what the institution believes it is promoting and projecting is consistent with the actual brand image held by stakeholders, and suggests that benchmarking brand management efforts and correlating them with the stage and actions of the Brand Flux Model^? can assist in understanding branding as a growth platform for service organizations. For practitioners, this study provides a model to assist in brand management and renaming scenarios, and offers insight into channels for optimal corporate strategy. It demonstrates that making changes in branding or changes in position in order to Revitalize, Refocus (rebrand and reposition) or even Rename a brand, and then Reinforce those decisions, is critical to maintaining brand health.     

Group Projects: Student Perceptions of the Relationship Between Social Tasks and a Sense of Community in Online Group Work

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between specific social tasks and student perceptions of a sense of community during online group work. A survey instrument was developed, piloted, and deployed to 125 students in six different online classes. Results revealed few significant relationships between each of the five social tasks examined and student perceptions of a sense of community during online group work; however, students reported that some social tasks were important. Students seemed to focus more on completing a task for a grade than seeing group projects as part of developing community to enhance learning. This might reflect a lack of understanding by the students of the importance of social tasks to successful group project completion.     

Grammar for writing? An investigation of the effects of contextualised grammar teaching on students’ writing

The role of grammar instruction in the teaching of writing is contested in most Anglophone countries, with several robust meta-analyses finding no evidence of any beneficial effect. However, existing research is limited in that it only considers isolated grammar instruction and offers no theorisation of an instructional relationship between grammar and writing. This study, drawing on a theorised understanding of grammar as a meaning-making resource for writing development, set out to investigate the impact of contextualised grammar instruction on students’ writing performance. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, with a randomised controlled trial and a complementary qualitative study. The statistical analyses indicate a positive effect on writing performance for the intervention group (e = 0.21; p < 0.001); but the study also indicates that the intervention impact differentially on different sub-groups, benefiting able writers more than weaker writers. The study is significant in being the first to supply rigorous, theorised evidence for the potential benefits of teaching grammar to support development in writing.     

Instability in students' use of intuitive and Newtonian models to predict motion: the critical effect of the parameters involved

This study reports how children switch from intuitive to scientific models of explanation of motion when the numerical conditions in the presented problem are changed. Previous studies have suggested that student knowledge of mechanics may be compartmentalized: their everyday intuition serves in everyday contexts and their scientific model is activated, if ever, in academic contexts. In this study we investigate a case where significant numbers of students appear to draw on different models of motion in what is essentially the same, academic context, i.e. the prediction of the motion of a block on a smooth surface under the action of horizontal forces. Many students exhibit combinations of Aristotelian-like intuitions and Newtonian conceptions depending on the magnitudes of the quantities involved. The students' experience of being taught Newtonian theory in mathematics and physics has small but significant effects on the explanations they offer. The notion of anchoring and bridging is re-examined as a teaching strategy in such situtions.     

Observation,Perception and Education

Summaries

English

Observations and other forms of perception are fundamental to the practice of science. These involve attention to a stimulus, and discrimination and categorization of the sensory input. The available evidence indicates that perception improves with practice; that it is helped if distinctive and discriminatory features are identified and are highlighted; and that this can be done with contrasting examples. Knowledge of categories into which stimuli may be sorted, and of relevant language, may provide a framework for perception.

The interpretation of a perceptual stimulus is influenced by previously‐learned knowledge, intellectual skills and cognitive strategies, and by the person's mental set.     

Researching social inequalities in education: towards a Bourdieuian methodology

The injustices of ‘allowing certain people to succeed, based not upon merit but upon the cultural experiences, the social ties and the economic resources they have access to, often remains unacknowledged in the broader society’ (Wacquant, 1998 Wacquant, L. J. D. 1998. “Pierre Bourdieu”. In Key sociological thinkers, Edited by: Stones, R. New York: New York University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 216). Cognizant of this, the authors argue that education requires researchers’ renewed examination and explanation of its involvement in the construction of social and economic differences. Specifically, they make the case for researchers to consider the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu, outlining what they understand by a Bourdieuian methodology, which is informed by socially critical and poststructural understandings of the world. Such methodology attempts to dig beneath surface appearances, asking how social systems work. By asking ‘whose interests are being served and how’ (Tripp, 1998 Tripp, D. 1998. “Critical incidents in action inquiry”. In Being reflexive in critical educational and social research, Edited by: Shacklock, G. and Smyth, J. London: Falmer Press.  [Google Scholar], p. 37) in the social arrangements we find, Bourdieu can help us to ‘work towards a more just social order’ (Lenzo, 1995 Lenzo, K. 1995. Validity and self‐reflexivity meet post‐structuralism: scientific ethos and the transgressive self. Educational Researcher, 52(1): 17–23.  [Google Scholar], p. 17).     

Expressions of Identifications: The Nature of Talk and Identity Tensions Among Organizational Members in a Struggling Organization

This study investigates how organizational members communicatively enact identification and more specifically how tensions in identification are expressed through members’ talk and behaviors. Using a case-study approach, we explored the experiences of members in an organization in turmoil. Semi-structured interviews, questionnaires given at two times, and observations of organizational events were used to understand the identification tensions these individuals negotiated and ways that identification, disidentification, and ambivalent identification were enacted. The study provides empirical evidence of changing identifications and articulates their communicative manifestations. The findings not only support the notion that identification is a complex and dynamic process but also contribute to the identification literature by illustrating specific ways that various forms of identification tensions are enacted and communicated in response to organizational change.     

The Literate “Illiterates” of the Northern Cape Province of South Africa—an Empirical Account

This paper discusses the concept “literacy” from an African perspective, with particular reference to the Xhosa culture. The community of Nonzwakazi Township of De Aar in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa is taken as a case study. Thc conventional Western definitions of literacy are debated within the African constructs. Three themes are explored in the paper, namely: (i) The impact of past Apartheid laws on literacy levels in the area, with special reference to the Bantu Education Act of 1953, (ii) The definition of the concept of African traditional literacy, compared to the Western definitions and (iii) An inter-disciplinary definition of literacy using Strauss' 15 Aspects of Life as a guideline.