How to facilitate freshmen learning and support their transition to a university study environment

Most freshmen enter universities with high expectations and with good motivation, but too many are driven into performing instead of true learning. The issues are not only related to the challenge of comprehending the substance, social and other factors have an impact as well. All these multifaceted needs should be accounted for to facilitate student learning. Learning is an individual process and remarkable improvement in the learning practices is possible, if proper actions are addressed early enough. We motivate and describe a study of the experience obtained from a set of tailor-made courses that were given alongside standard curriculum. The courses aimed to provide a ‘safe community’ to address the multifaceted needs. Such support was integrated into regular coursework where active learning techniques, e.g. interactive small groups were incorporated. To assess impact of the courses we employ the feedback obtained during the courses and longitudinal statistical data about students' success.     

Making Space for Place: Mapping Tools and Practices to Teach for Spatial Justice

This article presents a set of spatial tools for classroom learning about spatial justice. As part of a larger team, we designed a curriculum that engaged 10 learners with 3 spatial tools: (a) an oversized floor map, (b) interactive geographic information systems (GIS) maps, and (c) participatory mapping. We analyze how these tools supported learning using notions of politicization. The floor map fed conceptual understandings of the map as a representational text and served as the terrain for an embodied activity to support proportional reasoning about inequitable distributions of resources. The data-rich GIS maps and their zoomability allowed for coordinating across multiple variables to connect patterns in inequities to other social processes. The participatory mapping enabled learners to make discoveries about, connect, and share beyond the individual classroom counterstories from people in the lived streets of their neighborhood. In aggregate, this set of spatial tools produced a complex, hybrid view of the city’s space, which contributed to learners’ political formation.     

Examining Teachers’ Attitudes and Experiences with Coaching to Inform Research-Based Practice: An Iterative Developmental Design Study

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine teachers’ attitudes and experiences with coaching. This study was conducted in advance of a planned randomized controlled trial of a coaching intervention to better align the model with teachers’ needs and goals. Thirty-four K–5 general (n = 26), special education (n = 6), and educational support staff (n = 2) working in two high-poverty schools participated in focus groups. Interrater reliability between independent coders was high (К = 0.92; range: 0.76–1.0). Thematic analyses identified facilitators and barriers to teacher participation in the planned intervention and were used to improve upon the existing coaching model. Themes focused on advantages and disadvantages to coaching and characteristics of effective coaches and coaching models. Implications of findings for research and practice are discussed.     

Leveraging critical literacies for social change: questioning the culture of compliance at an ‘F’ school

This article traces the experiences of two veteran elementary school teachers in the urban Southwest, who are positioned by district and state policy ‘texts’ as insubordinate and failing, and who employ critical literacy practices to reconstruct and redesign these texts as they seek to create more equitable and humane conditions in schools. Stemming from a larger phenomenological study, this article explores how teachers in a ‘failing’ elementary school in the Southwestern US understand and negotiate district, state, and federal policies and examines how these policies shape and inform their identities as professionals. This research has important implications concerning the potential of critical literacy as a mode of resistance, the promise inherent in school/university partnerships for promoting change, and the ways in which the practice of deconstructing/reconstructing dehumanizing texts can foster a re-professionalization of teaching.     

Patterns of participation in year 9 academic testing and factors predicting absence on the day of test

Policies aiming to improve educational outcomes are typically based on academic testing data. However, such data only reflect the performance of students who completed the tests. It is possible that students who were absent have shared characteristics. The proportion of students absent out of all eligible school students and whether they have shared characteristics has not been investigated, as this is only possible through the use of linked administrative data. Participants were born in Western Australia in 1994 and 1995, and their birth records were linked to participation status in the Year 9 academic tests to determine the proportion of students who were absent. Logistic regression was conducted to investigate characteristics which predicted absence on test day. A proportion of non-Aboriginal (3.2 %) and Aboriginal students (21.9 %) were absent on test day. Risk factors which predicted the absence included contact with Child Protection and Family Services, history of maternal mental health problems, and fathers aged below 20 years at the time of their child’s birth. A significant proportion of students was absent and therefore not represented in academic achievement information. These students were more likely to have experienced adverse events and therefore are not randomly absent. As these data are typically used to inform policies which aim to improve educational outcomes, they may lack the necessary information to adequately address the complex needs of students who are absent on test day. However, findings suggest that service providers, as well as schools may play an important role in encouraging participation in school.     

我国国立科研机构全链条式创新的模式研究――以中国科学院物理研究所的锂离子电池研究为例

全链条创新经历基础研究到最终产业化,周期长,涉及核心关键技术多,是国家实现创新驱动发展的重要路径之一。但是要实现全链条周期的穿越,以及从学术界到产业界的跨越,涉及科技、市场、评价、人才等众多要素,是一个复杂和充满挑战的过程,锂离子电池技术的研究以及产业化就是一个典型的例子。中国科学院物理研究所在过去40余年中,围绕锂离子电池领域进行了很多有益的探索,对全链条创新所需的生态和条件积累了一些初步认识。文章通过对该过程的梳理与分析,对新时期科研机构探索践行创新驱动发展战略提供可供借鉴的经验。     

A uniformly loaded infinite-length thin plate bent to a cylindrical surface in the presence of couple-stresses

Exact solutions, based on couple-stresses plane strain theory of elasticity, are presented for the normal, shear and couple-stresses, displacements and rotations of an infinite-length (in z-axis) rectangular thin plate simply supported at two opposite edges (i.e.x=±L) and bent by a uniform load. Exact solutions reduce to classical values as l→0. Here l is defined as the new elastic material constant taking account of couple stresses.     

Information Economy and Changing Occupational Structure in Singapore

Using population census data since 1921, this article traces changes in employment and occupational structure in Singapore in the past 80 years. This is a follow-up to an earlier paper by Kuo and Chen (1987) that reported the nascent formation of the information society in Singapore till the 1980s. It also makes an assessment of the role of proactive government policies in directing industrial restructuring and occupational changes in this city-state. It is found that the long-term growing trend in information-related occupations has been in tandem and supportive of industrial changes in Singapore. One more wave of growth of information producers (and certainly, innovators) and information distributors is expected in the next couple of decades. The momentum has started, and competition from regional countries similarly aspiring to be information and knowledge economies will quicken the pace. The government has initiated fundamental changes in the educational system to meet the challenges of the knowledge-based economy. The small city-state has also long adopted an adaptive philosophy to be responsive to the ever-changing environment, either in technology or in regional politics. Based on the trend analysis, it is expected that the emergent information society will graduate into full status when Singapore attains a developed country status in the forthcoming decades.