Reweaving the tapestry of teacher education

Abstract

This article describes what happened to an elementary education preparation program when a few faculty members started asking questions, looking at practice, making changes, and collecting data based on the changes. The current program has many outstanding attributes; but when student perceptions were examined, holes were found and ways to mend these holes have been implemented. The authors describe the process of weaving concept Strands throughout the entire four‐year program.     

Recall of the pattern,sequence, and names of concepts presented in instructional diagrams

Forty-one high school students studied a series of five circuit diagrams. These either showed the electronic components as standard symbols or as squares. Each component was labelled and numbered. Students either had to remember the pattern of the elements in the diagram and draw it from memory, or they had to remember the elements in sequence. It was found that students who saw diagrams with symbols performed better on the sequence task and worse on the pattern task than the students who saw the diagrams with squares, whose performance on the two tasks was the opposite. A subsequent experiment found that requiring the students to label the elements in the diagrams did not interfere with their ability to remember the patterns of the components. It was concluded that students' success in completing tasks that require holistic or analytic processing depends upon the amount of detail in the elements in instructional diagrams. It was also suggested that designers of diagrams used to teach science can exercise some control over whether students process the information holistically or analytically by varying the amount of detail in the diagrams' elements.     

MTL 2.0: A Report on the Social Media Usage and User Engagement of the “Big Four” Academic Libraries in Montréal

Although academic libraries continue to use social media to encourage student use of libraries and promote library resources and services, there has not yet been a study of social media use by the academic libraries in Montréal. This paper examines the social media accounts of the four university libraries in Montréal and, based on data gathered over the course of an 8-month period, seeks to determine the influence of each libraries' social media activity. Success was defined by measurable growth in the number of followers during the period studied. For the three universities with Facebook and Twitter accounts, the account considered most successful was the one with the highest engagement rate. The results indicate that all of the libraries were successful on the first measure, and the libraries with the fewest number of posts had higher levels of user engagement.     

Some implications of cognitive theory for instructional design

This article examines some of the implications of recent developments in cognitive theory for instructional design. It is argued that behavioral theory is inadequate to prescribe instructional strategies that teach for understanding. Examples of how instructional designers have adopted relevant aspects of cognitive theory are described. However, it is argued that such adoption is only a first step. The growing body of evidence for the indeterminism of human cognition requires even further changes in how instructional designers think and act. A number of bodies of scholarly research and opinion are cited in support of this claim. Three implications of cognitive theory for design are offered: instructional strategies need to be developed to counter the reductionism implicit in task analysis; design needs to be integrated into the implementation of instruction; designers should work from a thorough knowledge of theory not just from design procedures.     

Instructional design and intelligent systems: shifts in the designer's decision-making role

In instructional design, decisions about which instructional methods to use are made well in advance of their implementation. While expert teachers select methods while instruction is underway and are well placed to adapt instruction to changing conditions, designers must try to predict ahead of time how instructional conditions will change. This is difficult to do because design procedures are non-deterministic and instructional theory is incomplete. In intelligent instructional systems, it is possible to shift certain aspects of decision-making back to the implementation phase of instruction. This enables systems to adapt to changing conditions and to present information in a variety of formats. The designer becomes less concerned with selecting methods and puts more effort into writing rules that allow systems to select methods once instruction has begun.