Comparing two types of model progression in an inquiry learning environment with modelling facilities

The educational advantages of inquiry learning environments that incorporate modelling facilities are often challenged by students’ poor inquiry skills. This study examined two types of model progression as means to compensate for these skill deficiencies. Model order progression (MOP), the predicted optimal variant, gradually increases the specificity of the relations between variables, whereas model elaboration progression (MEP) gradually expands the number of variables in the task. The study utilized a between-subject design with three conditions: a MOP condition (n = 28), a MEP condition (n = 26), and a control condition without model progression (n = 30). Consistent with expectations, model progression enhanced students’ task performance; a comparison among the two model progression conditions confirmed the predicted superiority of the MOP condition. These results are discussed in relation to the inconsistent findings from prior research. Based on this discussion ways to optimize model order progression are advanced.     

Empowering satisfaction: analyzing the relationship between empowerment,work conditions,and job satisfaction for international center managers

Tertiary Education and Management - The rising cost of higher education has driven researchers and practitioners alike to identify areas of waste and search for practices associated with increasing...     

Teaching teachers to teach ICT integration—T3

Based upon a nation wide campaign called Public Private Partnership—Schools in the Net (PPP-SiN) (Public Private Partnership—Schule im Netz (PPP-SiN), 2000) we were able to initiate an externally financed project of in-service teacher education. The paper describes the realization of this project. Reflections are given on why teachers hesitate to integrate ICT into their teaching. Media competencies are recognized to be key in this context. We reflect upon the following five questions:

1. How do we educate the right thing as well as educate the right way?
2. Which ambient conditions must be met?
3. Which preliminary actions have to be taken and implemented?
4. Which tools, methods and instruments do we need?
5. How do we make sure that the transfer of learned knowledge will take place to find its way into successful teaching?

     

Investigating teachers' ‘take-up’ of reflective practice from an In-service professional development teacher education programme in South Africa

One of the key phases in ‘the action research cycle’ is reflection (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988; McNiff, 1988). The extension of teachers' reflective capabilities is one of the stated goals of the University of the Witwatersrand's teacher education programmes. In this article aspects of the findings of a 3-year research project, which investigated teachers' ‘take-up’ from a mixed-mode, inservice professional development programme initiated by the university in 1996 are discussed. The research team has described the overall project as ‘a practice-based case study of cases’. Data sources included classroom observations, videotapes of some of the lessons observed, interviews with teachers, written teacher narratives and questionnaires, and samples of learners' work- all obtained from working with the same sample of primary and secondary school teachers of English, Mathematics and Science for each of the 3 years of the project. The authors engage with what counts as ‘evidence’ of the reflective practices of teachers and consider what factors might enable or constrain the development of reflective capability by teachers working in underresourced, multi-lingual contexts. They reflect on their practices as teacher educators and outline some changes to the programme that could assist teachers to become more reflective practitioners in their classrooms and schools.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Analogy learning: a means to implicit motor learning

Two experiments were conducted to examine the hypothesis that learning by analogy will invoke characteristics of an implicit mode of motor learning. In the first experiment, table tennis novices learned to hit forehand topspin implicitly, explicitly or by analogy. The results showed that the analogy and implicit learning groups accumulated equivalently fewer explicit rules than the explicit learning group during the learning phase. When a concurrent secondary task was added, the explicit learning group suffered from a significantly more serious performance impairment than the analogy and implicit learning groups; no significant differences were seen between the latter two groups. Self-perceived performance was correlated to actual performance in the explicit learning group but not in the analogy or the implicit learning groups. In the second experiment, the performance of an explicit learning group was found to be impaired by both a stress intervention and a thought suppression intervention, whereas the performance of an analogy learning group was not. These characteristics of analogy learning parallel those reported in the implicit learning literature, suggesting that analogy learning may be an effective method for teaching skills implicitly in sport.