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Early Childhood Education Journal -     

学习科学：推动教育的深层变革

当前教育信息化蓬勃发展,在备受赞赏的同时也屡被质疑。至于原因,恐怕还是“人究竟是怎么学习的,怎样才能促进有效学习？”这一根本性问题依然未得到彻底解决。该文从教育信息化的发展现状谈起,剖析目前存在的问题及解决方法,然后仔细梳理了学习科学的发生、发展和研究现状,指出脑科学与学习、基于大数据的学习分析和技术增强的学习等学习科学研究将有助于推动教育从更深的层面发生变革。     

Validation of the Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) in a self‐directed instructional setting aimed at working with technology

The ARCS Model of Motivational Design has been used myriad times to design motivational instructions that focus on attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction in order to motivate students. The Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS) is a 36‐item situational measure of people's reactions to instructional materials in the light of the ARCS model. Although the IMMS has been used often, both as a pretest and a posttest tool serving as either a motivational needs assessment prior to instruction or a measure of people's reactions to instructional materials afterward, the IMMS so far has not been validated extensively, taking statistical and theoretical aspects of the survey into account. This paper describes such an extensive validation study, for which the IMMS was used in a self‐directed instructional setting aimed at working with technology (a cellular telephone). Results of structural equation modeling show that the IMMS can be reduced to 12 items. This Reduced Instructional Materials Motivation Survey IMMS (RIMMS) is preferred over the original IMMS. The parsimonious RIMMS measures the four constructs attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction of the ARCS model well, and reflects its conditional nature.     

What and how teacher educators prefer to learn

In which areas and domains do individual teacher educators prefer to work on their professional development? What kind of learning activities do they want to take on and with whom? Are there significant differences in these preferences between teacher educators? This article reports on a recent survey (N = 268) about the professional development of teacher educators and differences in learning preferences between less and more experienced teacher educators and between university-based and school-based teacher educators. Findings show, for example, that while most university-based teacher educators were mainly interested in improving their teaching, less experienced school-based teacher educators were more focussed on aspects such as coaching skills. In this study, ‘learning profiles’ have been developed for four categories of teacher educators. These profiles may help to create more meaningful arrangements for teacher educators’ initial education and further professional development in a context where teacher education is required to have a more school-based as well as a more research-based orientation.