Using continuous assessment to promote student engagement in a large class

The authors have developed a first-year fluids course for a class of around 230 aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering students. This paper aims to show how the teaching and assessment methodology was applied to the challenge of a large class. The lectures featured formal teaching interspersed with active learning elements. Smaller group (about 25–30 students) tutorial classes involved student practice. A 10-minute test occurred in each tutorial during weeks 3–11. Each test was based on the previous week's lecture material and the marks contributed towards 20% of the course mark. A condition for passing the course was that a student must pass at least six of the nine tests. The assessment promoted student involvement with the course – tutorial attendance was greater and more uniform than previously and exam performance improved significantly. Students recognised that the assessment system was useful in encouraging continuous learning over the semester and building confidence.     

Developing Scientific Literacy in a Primary School

The science education literature demonstrates that scientific literacy is generally valued and acknowledged among educators as a desirable student learning outcome. However, what scientific literacy really means in terms of classroom practice and student learning is debatable due to the inherent complexity of the term and varying expectations of what it means for learning outcomes. To date the teacher voice has been noticeably absent from this debate even though the very nature of teacher expertise lies at the heart of the processes which shape students' scientific literacy. The research reported in this paper taps into the expertise of (participating) primary teachers by analyzing the insights and thinking that emerged as they attempted to unravel some of the pedagogical complexities associated with constructing an understanding of scientific literacy in their own classrooms. The research examines the processes and structures within one primary school that were created to provide conditions to allow teachers to explore and build on the range of ideas that presently inform the scientific literacy debate. The research reports these teachers' views and practices that shaped their actions in teaching for scientific literacy.     

Anatomical societies find new ways to come together in a post-Covid world

The world has been turned upside down by a global health emergency caused by the Covid-19. Given the high contagiousness of the virus and the need to contain its spread, social distancing rules, self-isolation policies, and geographical lockdowns have been enforced globally. Over the pandemic emergency the majority of the planned in-person meetings and congresses of national and international anatomical societies have been postponed or canceled. It is unclear what the future holds, but times of crisis often present possibilities for re-thinking old ways to achieve a more critical approach. It has become increasingly clear that traditional in-person congress formats of scientific societies need to be reevaluated. Over the past year and a half, two types of congressional modalities have been trialed to address the challenge of the pandemic as far as scientific meetings are concerned: the fully virtual congress, in which case the conference program is live streamed to all of the attendees, and the hybrid congress, in which case some of the attendees physically participate at the congress's venue while others interact via a virtual platform. The current study set out to investigate the technical difficulties, social challenges, costs and sustainability, logistics and management issues linked to holding various types of congresses in the post-Covid world. Anatomical societies throughout the world are actively striving to reshape their response to the current global emergency and to uncover new types of conference modalities in the effort to keep scientific exchange alive and flourishing in the post-Covid era.     

Temporal integration in second-order conditioning and sensory preconditioning

Lick suppression experiments with rats revealed that the magnitude of both second-order conditioning (Experiment 1) and sensory preconditioning (Experiment 2) was superior when that conditioning was based on backward (US→CS) relative to forward (CS→US) first-order pairings of a CS and US. The superiority of backward relative to forward first-order conditioning on suppression to the higher order cues can be understood by assuming that the magnitude of higher order conditioning was determined by a memory representation of the higher order cues that provided information about the expected temporal location of the US. The results suggest that temporal information such as order between paired CSs and USs was encoded, preserved, and integrated with memory for the higher order stimuli. The relevance of these findings to memory integration in Pavlovian learning, the temporal coding hypothesis (Barnet, Arnold, & Miller, 1991; Matzel, Held, & Miller, 1988), backward excitatory conditioning, and the associative structure that underlies second-order Pavlovian fear conditioning are discussed.     

Learning about literacy: Children’s versions of the Literacy Hour

This article reports on an enquiry into the responses of a class of Year 1 children, aged 5‐6 years, to the first eight months of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). Children were given incomplete drawings to represent the four parts of the Literacy Hour. In completing the drawings the children made their own interpretations of the Literacy Hour. They could choose to write thought or speech bubbles, draw faces and expressions, make written or dictated comments about the teacher and the children portrayed. The methodology enabled these young children to articulate detailed responses to their experience of a particular style of teaching. Each child documented a range of attitudes to and feelings about whole class teaching, group work and the plenary session. These insights, which were often challenging, put the emotional dimension of learning at the centre of their experiences of the NLS.     

On Rest-from-Deliberate-Learning as a Mechanism for the Spacing Effect: Commentary on Chen et al. (2021)

Educational Psychology Review - In their recent paper, Chen et al. (Educational Psychology Review, 2021) propose that rest periods between deliberate learning characterize the spacing effect and...