The science-ethics nexus: a speculative posthumanist examination of secondary school science

Cultural Studies of Science Education - School science curricula habitually encourages students to develop science knowledge alongside ‘ethical understanding’, the moral theory of right...     

Understanding Co-Design Practice as a Process of “Welldoing”

Co-design and other associated design approaches often deploy creative and making approaches in facilitating collaborative practices. In a therapeutic setting, engagement in creative and making activities have been associated with improvements in people's well-being, yet when deploying these as part of co-design practices, these outcomes are often overlooked. This paper presents the results from a series of workshops that focused on the well-being benefits of participating in co-design practices. The research uses Max-Neef's (1991). Theory of Needs to explore how innate human needs might be satisfied through participation in co-design practices, and demonstrates how this framework might be used for planning and evaluating co-design practices through a wellbeing lens. Finally, it suggests that future generations of design practitioners would benefit from exposure to the consideration of co-design as a process of “welldoing.”     

Reasons for student dropout in an online course in a rural K–12 setting

Rural schools in the USA use online courses to overcome problems such as attracting and retaining teachers, geographic isolation, low student enrollment, and financial constraints. This paper reports on the reasons that 39% of rural high school students who enrolled in an online Advanced Placement course subsequently dropped the course. Students who dropped the course were asked to provide an email statement detailing their reasons for doing so. On-site facilitators—local staff members situated in the small rural schools where students were enrolled—also provided reasons whenever one of their students dropped the course. Results indicate that the reasons given by students and on-site facilitators for dropping the course often agreed, and tended to fall within the following five categories: scheduling and time constraints, academic rigor and motivation, technology problems, problems with online medium and lack of teacher immediacy, and parental influences.     

The Renewal of Science Teachers’ Knowledge: a pilot professional development project

This paper describes a pilot project for the professional development of science teachers, a major aim of which was to update teachers’ science content knowledge. The paper focuses on the rationale and background of the project, the model of inservice education, the arrangements for credentialling and recognising participating teachers, and the findings of the external evaluation of the initial stages of the project. It concludes with a summary of the features of the project which appear to be facilitating the achievement of its aims.     

Journaling During a School-Based Secondary Methods Course: Exploring a Route to Teaching Reflection

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

“Cooperate is when you don't fight”: Students' Understandings of Their Classroom Learning Environment

This interpretative study of a Grade 8 science classroom in Western Australia investigated students' understandings of the nature of the classroom learning environment. Student and teacher interviews about selected items in a learning environment questionnaire are used to reveal several patterns in participants' understandings of their environment. We conclude with some theoretical insights about how individuals experience their environment and some methodological implications for future classroom environment research. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Interplay of Teacher and Student Actions in the Teaching and Learning of Geometric Proof

Proof and reasoning are fundamental aspects of mathematics. Yet, how to help students develop the skills they need to engage in this type of higher-order thinking remains elusive. In order to contribute to the dialogue on this subject, we share results from a classroom-based interpretive study of teaching and learning proof in geometry. The goal of this research was to identify factors that may be related to the development of proof understanding. In this paper, we identify and interpret students' actions, teacher's actions, and social aspects that are evident in a classroom in which students discuss mathematical conjectures, justification processes and student-generated proofs. We conclude that pedagogical choices made by the teacher, as manifested in the teacher's actions, are key to the type of classroom environment that is established and, hence, to students' opportunities to hone their proof and reasoning skills. More specifically, the teacher's choice to pose open-ended tasks (tasks which are not limited to one specific solution or solution strategy), engage in dialogue that places responsibility for reasoning on the students, analyze student arguments, and coach students as they reason, creates an environment in which participating students make conjectures, provide justifications, and build chains of reasoning. In this environment, students who actively participate in the classroom discourse are supported as they engage in proof development activities. By examining connections between teacher and student actions within a social context, we offer a first step in linking teachers' practice to students' understanding of proof.     

Electronic Roads in Historical Documents: A Student Oriented Approach

The new educational approaches, as far as teaching of history in secondary education is concerned, are characterized by a shift away from sterile memorization and towards a critical approach of historical facts and phenomena; the aim is to contribute to both the development of students' historical concept and conscience and the promotion of critical thought. These teaching goals are pursued by promoting initiative of the students through self study assignments in the form of projects; students can be greatly supported in such tasks by computer-based applications, which can offer access to vast amounts of historical texts and data to be used next to the main scholar textbook and be analyzed by students. Still, existing applications seem to be quite inadequate for this purpose, as they require that the student be already informed on a matter, before the initiation of a quest for data. In this paper, we describe an intelligent information system that is designed to facilitate browsing of educational material and historical sources, thus allowing students to efficiently retrieve information on topics that are not yet known to them and expand in this way their historical knowledge. This can help in fulfilling the aforementioned teaching goals. Our system relies on the notion of the Electronic Road.