UNDERGRADUATE PROJECT WORK

A study of the stages and processes involved in final‐year Undergraduate projects at the University of Bath was conducted over a two‐year period. The phases and the factors which influence them were identified in the first year of the investigation and this scheme for a project formed the framework for the following year. Both student and staff opinions, based on questionnaires and interviews, form the data on which discussion of the phases of a project is based.     

Exploring the dimensionality of kindergarten written composition

Reading and Writing - Despite increasing pressure for children to learn to write at younger ages, there are many unanswered questions about composition skills in early elementary school. The goal...     

How do children read multisyllabic words? Some preliminary observations

Multisyllabic words have been neglected in determining the relationship between spelling and sound in reading development. In a preliminary exploration of this topic, sensitivity to the phonological and orthographic composition of multisyllabic words and nonwords is examined amongst a group of English‐speaking 11‐year‐olds. The nature of the English language suggests that the syllable structure and stress pattern of words may influence the acquisition of higher‐order reading skills. A phonological awareness task confirms that syllable boundaries are ambiguous in certain English words. Furthermore, accuracy at reading multisyllabic words and nonwords appears sensitive to this ambiguity as a small advantage emerges for stimuli with more stable syllable structures. Nonword but not word reading is affected by syllable length, and nonwords are assigned stress patterns which appear to be related to the lexical syllables that were used to construct these items. These findings are related to current connectionist models of word recognition.     

Writing in/of/and educational leadership: reflections of a journal editor

In this article, I deal with a journal’s relation to its field and issues involved in writing and publishing, especially in educational administration and educational leadership. Some issues discussed include: the social construction of the field; the conservatism of educational administration and, later, educational leadership; status hierarchies in the field; the false dichotomy of theory/practice; and the hegemony of the quantitative.     

Structural characteristics of university engineering students' conceptions of energy*

This study examined structural characteristics of university engineering students' conceptions of energy elicited through paragraph writing and their relations with categories of their conceptions specific to energy in solution processes identified through interviews. We found that structures of students' conceptions are characterized primarily by characteristic, example‐of/type‐of, and lead‐to types of relations, and these relations correspond with categories of students' conceptions. More specifically, categories of students' conceptions are exclusively related to energy transformation, and students failed to apply the notion of energy conservation demonstrated in structures of their conceptions to explain the temperature change in solution processes. It is concluded that although paragraph writing and interviews solicit different student conceptions, the conceptions identified from the two sources are related and paragraph writing tends to provide a more holistic picture of students' conceptions. This conclusion has clear implications for science curriculum development and instruction. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 423–441, 2002