Emergent patterns of teaching/learning in electronic classrooms

Novel patterns of teaching/learning have emerged from faculty and students who use our three teaching/learning theaters at the University of Maryland, College Park. These fully-equipped electronic classrooms have been used by 74 faculty in 264 semester-long courses since the fall of 1991 with largely enthusiastic reception by both faculty and students. The designers of the teaching/learning theaters sought to provide a technologically rich environment and a support staff so that faculty could concentrate on changing the traditional lecture from its unidirectional information flow to a more collaborative activity. As faculty have evolved their personal styles in using the electronic classrooms, novel patterns of teaching/learning have emerged. In addition to enhanced lectures, we identified three common patterns: (a) active individual learning, (b) small-group collaborative learning, and (c) entire-class collaborative learning.     

The Use of the Microgenetic Method with Children with Disabilities: Discovering Competence

In this paper, we advocate the use of the microgenetic method, a methodology that combines dense sampling of observations across time and extensive trial-by-trial analysis, to examine strategy change in children with disabilities. This methodology has revealed new information about normally achieving children's cognition, such as large individual variability in strategy use among children of the same age and more gradual patterns of strategy change than previously assumed. In this paper, we review data from three different microgenetic studies in the domains of memory, arithmetic, and reading with children with or at risk for mental retardation and normally achieving children. Our review indicates that there are similar sequences of strategy change, similar rates of strategy change, and similar frequency of strategy discovery and use in children with and without mental retardation (compared to mental age peers). Implications are discussed for the use of this methodology to design instructional techniques for children with disabilities.     

Geographical education and ideology in England and Wales

Conclusion If ideology is a nexus of ideas which represent the values of a society and the way that society operates, then clearly such ideas, in so far as they are held by those who have power in society, are bound to affect what is taught within the system of education. This may not be openly avowed, though in totalitarian regimes the education system is determinedly used to enforce the only ideology—that of those in power. The saving grace in a democratic system is that those being educated have access ideologies other than the dominant one. In England and Wales and to some extent elsewhere in the United Kingdom, there is little doubt that the geography curriculum has tended to serve the dominant ideology during the heyday of the British Empire and even during its period of decline in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1960s and 1970s, an alternative ideology stressing the rights of the underprivileged became manifest in a geography curriculum that was not controlled centrally. The 1980s saw a reversal of this trend by those who had political power, though the reason advanced for the greater control of the curriculum was couched in terms of the economic needs of the nation and the desire to raise standards. But clearly those in power considered that theraison d'être of education was to promote an enterprise culture. However, in practice no ideology is ever pure. When the enterprise culture came into contact with long-cherished ideas of national sovereignty, marrying the two proved difficult. This was reflected in the neutral (not to say negative) position of the national curriculum in geography with respect to the European Union. Original language: English Norman Graves (United Kingdom) Professor Emeritus of Geography Education at the University of London Institute of Education. He is consultant to UNESCO in association with the International Geographical Union. Author of numerous works on geography education, he is involved in curriculum and textbook planning and is an acknowledged expert in his field of research.     

Cognitive assessment of function knowledge

Two theories of assessing function knowledge were compared for intuitive physics. The choice assessment theory, derived from Piaget, presents subjects with two physical situations, each specified by the values of two physical variables; subjects choose the situation which will yield the greater value of a dependent variable. Functional measurement presents subjects with a single physical situation; subjects make a quantitative estimate of the dependent variable. Forty subjects made both choice and functional measurement responses for two situations of intuitive physics. The choice theory showed substantial frequencies of stepwise rules, implying that subjects failed to integrate the two given physical variables. Functional measurement, in contrast, showed that most subjects integrated the two variables, following exact addition or multiplication rules. It is concluded that functional measurement gives a more correct assessment of function knowledge and should be useful in science instruction. J Res Sci Teach 34: 359–376, 1997.     

Teachers' understanding of the nature of science and classroom practice: Factors that facilitate or impede the relationship

The purpose of this multiple case study was to investigate the relationship of teachers' understanding of the nature of science and classroom practice and to delineate factors that facilitate or impede a relationship. Five high school biology teachers, ranging in experience from 2 to 15 years, comprised the sample for this investigation. During one full academic year, multiple data sources were collected and included classroom observations, open‐ended questionnaires, semistructured and structured interviews, and instructional plans and materials. In addition, students in each of the teachers' classrooms were interviewed with respect to their understanding of the nature of science. Using analytical induction, multiple data sources were analyzed independently and together to triangulate data while constructing teacher profiles. The results indicated that teachers' conceptions of science do not necessarily influence classroom practice. Of critical importance were teachers' level of experience, intentions, and perceptions of students. The results have importnat implications for teacher education as well as the successful implementation of current reforms. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 916–929, 1999     

Biot's paper and Arago's plates. Photographic practice and the transparency of representation

Fran?ois Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot, two of the physicists most involved in early photography, mobilized this new technology for their ongoing debates about the proper boundaries of the public in France. Each threw his weight behind one of the competing photographic processes, Arago supporting daguerrian silver plates and Biot favoring paper soaked in silver solution. For both men, disagreement at the level of materials and techniques was further bound up with disagreement about what kind of visual evidence the photograph was and who was capable of understanding it. Biot argued for a severely restricted community of photographic practitioners. His papers, he claimed, revealed an invisible world of chemical radiation accessible only to those who understood the chemistry involved. Arago's reliance on resemblance, on the other hand, permitted him to present daguerreotype plates as a form of representation available to all, even incorporating them into his campaign for universal male suffrage.     

Authors in the Mathematical Reviews/MathSciNet Database

The Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division Vendor Update Session at the Special Libraries Association 2010 Annual Conference in New Orleans had a panel of four representatives of organizations involved in author authority work. In my presentation I described the involvement of Mathematical Reviews/MathSciNet in author authority work, from the hand work done with file cards in 1940 through the present day work combining computer systems and hand work. This article is an expanded version of my comments.     

The development of attitudes and social characteristics of students attending predominantly black colleges: A longitudinal study

The study was designed to assess the development of Family Independence (FI), Peer Independence (PI), Liberalism (L), Social Conscience (SC), and Cultural Sophistication (CS) among students attending three predominantly black colleges. Responses to the Attitudes section of the College Student Questionnaires were obtained from 334 students when they were entering freshmen, end-of-year freshmen, and graduating seniors. The data were analyzed with a repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance design. College, Sex, and Time were the independent variables, and the five attitude scales were the dependent variables. The tests for the main effects of time revealed overall gains on all five scales. A significant Sex × Time interaction indicated that PI scores for males increased, while females' PI scores decreased, during the freshman year; the females' PI scores increased during the subsequent three year period. Significant College × Time interactions were found for FI and CS. College × Sex × Time interactions were significant for L and CS. The results indicated that students who attended these predominantly black colleges developed greater self-reliance and autonomy and broadened interests in political, social, and cultural affairs. The extent of change in these attitudes varied, however, according to the college attended and/or sex of the student.