What knowledge and conceptions do Irish primary schoolteachers hold on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis rates have increased significantly in recent times. A teacher's role is crucial in determining if a child will be referred for an ADHD assessment. Teachers' opinions and observations are also required for and play a huge role in the actual assessment process. For this reason, their knowledge of ADHD is also an important part of this process. This research has measured, on a small scale, Irish primary schoolteacher's knowledge and conceptions about ADHD using the Knowledge of Attention Deficit Disorders Scale (KADDS) questionnaire. Ninety teachers participated in the research from 11 primary schools in County Clare. A quantitative method was utilised enabling the research to be comparable with other pieces of research using the same questionnaire. Data in relation to the teachers' professional background were also gathered in order to analyse significant differences based on a variety of factors. The results were analysed as prescribed in KADDS test manual using the statistical software package SPSS. This research shows that Irish primary schoolteachers are more knowledgeable in regards to ADHD symptoms and diagnosis than they are in the areas of associated features or treatments. It also shows that knowledge levels of Irish primary schoolteachers are higher than teachers in earlier research using the same questionnaire.     

Building Conceptual Understanding of Multiplicative Reasoning Content in Third Graders Struggling to Learn Mathematics: A Feasibility Study

This formative study of a multiplicative reasoning (MR) intervention explored the intervention's potential for improving the ability of third-grade struggling students’ ability to reason with multiplicative concepts and procedures. The feasibility of the study was examined in a school setting before a randomized control trial was conducted. Students who scored between the 10th and 35th percentile on a district-administered math screening test received the MR intervention from their teachers. We developed intervention units to build a conceptual foundation in a student-centered approach to Tier 2 instruction that included opportunities for students to engage in critical thinking as they generalized big ideas, participated in classroom discourse, and modeled multiplicative relationships with multiple representations. Preliminary data demonstrate the potential of the intervention to promote students’ MR skills. Instructional implications are discussed in terms of opportunities for these students to engage in grade-level mathematics content.     

The role of design ethics in maintaining students' privacy: A call to action to learning designers in higher education

Maintaining students' privacy in higher education, an integral aspect of learning design and technology integration, is not only a matter of policy and law but also a matter of design ethics. Similar to faculty educators, learning designers in higher education play a vital role in maintaining students' privacy by designing learning experiences that rely on online technology integration. Like other professional designers, they need to care for the humans they design for by not producing designs that infringe on their privacy, thus, not causing harm. Recognizing that widely used instructional design models are silent on the topic and do not address ethical considerations such as privacy, we focus this paper on how design ethics can be leveraged by learning designers in higher education in a practical manner, illustrated through authentic examples. We highlight where the ethical responsibility of learning designers comes into the foreground when maintaining students' privacy and well-being, especially in online settings. We outline an existing ethical decision-making framework and show how learning designers can use it as a call to action to protect the students they design for, strengthening their ethical design capacity.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic

• Existing codes of ethical standards from well-known learning design organizations call upon learning designers to protect students' privacy without clear guidance on how to do so.
• Design ethics within learning design is often discussed in abstract ways with principles that are difficult to apply.
• Most, if not all, design models that learning design professionals have learned are either silent on design ethics and/or do not consider ethics as a valid dimension, thus, making design ethics mostly excluded from learning design graduate programs.
• Practical means for engaging in ethical design practice are scarce in the field.

What this paper adds

• A call for learning designers in higher education to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being, strengthening their ethical design capacity.
• A demonstration of how to use a practical ethical decision-making framework as a designerly tool in designing for learning to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being.
• Authentic examples—in the form of vignettes—of ethical dilemmas/issues that learning designers in higher education could face, focused on students' privacy.
• Methods—using a practical ethical decision-making framework—for learning design professionals in higher education, grounded in the philosophy of designers as the guarantors of designs, to be employed to detect situations where students' privacy and best interests are at risk.
• A demonstration of how learning designers could make stellar design decisions in service to the students they design for and not to the priorities of other design stakeholders.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• Higher education programs/institutions that prepare/employ learning designers ought to treat the topics of the designer's responsibility and design ethics more explicitly and practically as one of the means to maintain and protect students' privacy, in addition to law and policies.
• Learning designers in higher education ought to hold a powerful position in their professional practice to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being, as an important aspect of their ethical design responsibilities.
• Learning designers in higher education ought to adopt a design thinking mindset in order to protect students' privacy by (1) challenging ideas and assumptions regarding technology integration in general and (2) detecting what is known in User Experience (UX) design as “dark patterns” in online course design.