Linking a learning progression for natural selection to teachers' enactment of formative assessment

Learning progressions, or representations of how student ideas develop in a domain, hold promise as tools to support teachers' formative assessment practices. The ideas represented in a learning progression might help teachers to identify and make inferences about evidence collected of student thinking, necessary precursors to modifying instruction to help students advance in their learning. The study reported in this article took the novel approach of using a learning progression for natural selection to support teachers' enactment of formative assessment. Sources of data include interviews and videotapes of six high school biology teachers leading assessment conversations around the same formative assessment questions. Results indicate that while teachers picked out and made inferences about student ideas related to the learning progression during assessment conversations, they did not use all parts of the learning progression in the same way. Furthermore, several of the teachers seemed to use the learning progressions simply as catalogs of misconceptions to be “squashed” rather than drawing upon the developmental affordances offered by a learning progression. Results are framed in terms of the utility of learning progressions as supports for classroom practice. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1181–1210, 2012     

Traits and skills theories as the nexus between leadership and expertise: Reality or fallacy?

The assumption that effective leaders differ in some identifiable and fundamental ways from other people is still a large part of mainstream industrial‐organizational psychology. Based on a research review on the trait theory of leadership and the concept of expertise, this article finds a convergence between leader and expert traits. Results suggest that leaders and experts may share similar characteristics, with expertise encompassing skills theory. Implications for performance improvement and human resource developers are discussed.     

The Impact of Professional Development on Library Faculty Attitudes,Practices, and Knowledge of Student Learning Assessment

In order to align with university-wide assessment initiatives and to promote a systematic approach to one-shot assessment within our library, a team of five librarians participated in a campus-wide professional development program about student learning assessment. We then implemented library-specific professional development about student learning assessment for one-shot instruction. We provide an overview of the professional development program and discuss our study that explored the impact of the program on librarians’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes about student learning assessment. Our findings indicate that faculty participants had a positive change in practice, knowledge, and attitude after participating in the professional development program.     

“Feeling Much Smaller than You Know You Are”: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists

Interviews with women working as sports journalists showed that they must negotiate several tensions, including balancing their conflicting identities as woman and as professional journalist. Nevertheless, in the end, they also saw the two as compatible. They fell along a spectrum of resistance to traditional values in sports and journalism, providing evidence of cracks in hegemonic notions of what it means to be a woman covering sports.     

Focusing on the Thinking,Not the Tools: Incorporating Critical Thinking Into an Information Literacy Module for an Introduction to Business Course

Two librarians at the University of Louisville explain how a university-wide Quality Enhancement Plan focused on critical thinking led to positive changes in information literacy instruction at their institution. A revised information literacy module for an introductory business course serves as an example of a new instructional approach that emphasizes critical thinking about information, rather than library tools such as catalogs and databases.     

Personalizing twitter communication: an evaluation of ‘rotation-curation’ for enhancing social media engagement within higher education

Social media content generated by learning communities within universities is serving both pedagogical and marketing purposes. There is currently a dearth of literature related to social media use at the departmental level within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This study explores the multi-voiced interactions of a UK Psychology department’s ‘rotation curation’ approach to using Twitter. An in-depth analysis of a corpus of 4342 tweets by 58 curators (14 staff, 41 students, and 3 guest curators) was carried out using a combination of computer-assisted and manual techniques to generate a quantitative content analysis. The interactions received (e.g. retweets and favorites) and type of content posted (e.g. original tweets, retweets and replies) varied by curator type. Student curators were more likely to gain interactions from other students in comparison to staff. This paper discusses the benefits and potential limitations of a multi-voiced ‘rotation curation’ approach to social media management.     

Primary teachers’ perceptions of multi-grade classroom grouping practices to support inclusive education

ABSTRACT

Previous research has focused on inclusive classroom practices in mainstream primary schools but little is documented regarding practices in multi-grade classrooms. The purpose of this paper was to report mainstream primary teachers’ perceptions of multi-grade classroom grouping practices to support inclusive education specifically for students with special educational needs (SEN). The findings indicated that despite the difficulty of covering the curricula of the various grades, multi-grade teachers reported the implementation of flexible grouping practices (ability, mixed ability, social) for academic or social reasons. However, the tension between meeting the needs of the grade groups and the individual student with SEN were apparent, with some practices documented not necessarily inclusive. The importance of using appropriate grouping practices to enable teachers to include all students, thereby avoiding potentially negative effects of treating some students differently was emphasised.     

Service ‘CUIDE'‐‐Coopération Universitaire pour l'Information et la Documentation des Enseignants

The ongoing reform in science education in many countries, including Israel, has attainment of scientific literacy for all as one of its main goals. In this context, it is important to provide teachers with the opportunity to construct meaning for the term science literacy and by doing so to obtain a clear understanding of the new teaching goals. Here we report on a study in which teachers, as part of their professional development, were involved in defining the term ‘chemical literacy’; they discussed the need for it, and suggested educational experiences that are necessary in order to attain it. The programme was conducted as part of a reform in the content, as well as in the pedagogy, of chemistry education in Israel. The collected data provide some insights regarding the process by which the teachers’ perception of ‘chemical literacy’ developed and the way actual school practice influences teachers’ perception of ‘chemical literacy’.     

Education through Fiction: Acquiring opinion‐forming skills in the context of genomics

The present study examined the outcomes of a newly designed four‐lesson science module on opinion‐forming in the context of genomics in upper secondary education. The lesson plan aims to foster 16‐year‐old students’ opinion‐forming skills in the context of genomics and to test the effect of the use of fiction in the module. The basic hypothesis tested in this study is whether fiction stimulates students to develop opinions with regard to socio‐scientific issues. A quasi‐experimental pre‐test and post‐test design was used, involving two treatment groups and one control group. One of the experimental groups received a science module incorporating movie clips (i.e., the movie group). The other experimental group received the same science module, but only news report clips were used (i.e., the news report group). Prior to and after the module, 266 secondary school students completed a questionnaire to test their opinion‐forming skills. The results demonstrate that the science module had a significant positive effect on students’ opinion‐forming skills and that the movie group improved their skills more compared with the news report group. It may be concluded that the use of fiction—to be more specific, movie clips about genomics extracted from feature films—to introduce a socio‐scientific issue in the classroom stimulates students to develop their opinion‐forming skills.