Citizen reactions to municipalities’ Instagram communication

In this paper, we explore how local governments are using Instagram as a communication tool to engage with their citizens, using data from the municipalities of Andalusia (Spain). We seek to identify the determinants of local government use of Instagram, the determinants of activity in this channel and the determinants of citizen reactions in order to understand the influence of media types (picture, video or album) used in municipality posts, and to understand content type (what the post is about). Instaloader, an open source intelligence (OSINT) tool for Instagram, was applied. It made it possible to automatically extract all posts of the analysed municipalities (14,742 posts). These were later automatically analysed using R, an open source software. It was determined that of the 29 Andalusian local governments with the highest populations, only those that maintain an account on Instagram, totalling 17 municipalities (58.62%), would be part of the final analysis. Our findings demonstrate that when local governments have a high level of debt, they do not maintain and actively use Instagram accounts. We also found that quality of posts’ content is more important than quantity of followers, since there is no significant relationship between citizen reactions and the number of inhabitants of a municipality or the number of followers (audience), while there is a significant negative relationship between the number of posts (activity) and reactions. Our results also highlight that the level of reactions can be stimulated by certain media and content types.     

Drivers of teachers’ intentions to use mobile applications to teach science

Education and Information Technologies - Using mobile applications in science education has proven to be effective as it adds multiple benefits including learning gains, motivation to learn, and...     

Mexican Immigrant Students' Schooling Experiences and the Construction of Disengagement in Mathematics Learning Contexts

Through an ethnographic and narrative inquiry approach, this study draws attention to the plight of 4 Mexican immigrant high school students and their pursuit of education and mathematics learning. Their elementary school stories and experiences show a deep relationship between the learning contexts in which these students largely do school (i.e., an English learner context) and the nature of students' relationships (or lack thereof) with teachers and their process of disengagement from mathematics learning and school. Doing school is used to convey a key distinction from simply attending school. Attending school assumes uniformity/neutrality in how students might experience schooling and is a passive way of describing student participation in school. Doing school implies that students make sense of and respond to their schooling experiences in different ways and accounts for how these experiences are shaped and/or influenced by other forces (e.g., structural forces, social forces) in and out of school.     

The Power of the Pen: Writing Mentorship and Chicana/o M.A. Students

This article draws on my experience as an adjunct professor in the Master's program of the Department of Mexican-American Studies at a large public university in California. Seeing my students’ struggles with writing, I conceived of a set of practices of writing mentorship anchored by a series of writing workshops held in Summer 2012. In this article, I document the pedagogy and content of these writing workshops in order to think about the unique struggles and opportunities Chicana/o Master's students face in the writing process and to provide an outline for other instructors interested in developing a practice of writing mentorship.     

IMPACT OF EXPLICIT PRESENTATION OF SLOPES IN THREE DIMENSIONS ON STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF DERIVATIVES IN MULTIVARIABLE CALCULUS

In two dimensions (2D), representations associated with slopes are seen in numerous forms before representations associated with derivatives are presented. These include the slope between two points and the constant slope of a linear function of a single variable. In almost all multivariable calculus textbooks, however, the first discussion of slopes in three dimensions (3D) is seen with the introduction of partial derivatives. The nature of the discussions indicates that authors seem to assume that students are able to naturally extend the concept of a 2D slope to 3D and correspondingly it is not necessary to explicitly present slopes in 3D. This article presents results comparing students that do not explicitly discuss slopes in 3D with students that explicitly discuss slopes in 3D as a precursor to discussing derivatives in 3D. The results indicate that students may, in fact, have significant difficulty extending the concept of a 2D slope to a 3D slope. And that the explicit presentation of slopes in 3D as a precursor to the presentation of derivatives in 3D may significantly improve student comprehension of topics of differentiation in multivariable calculus.

     

Developing an audiovisual notebook as a self‐learning tool in histology: Perceptions of teachers and students

Videos can be used as didactic tools for self‐learning under several circumstances, including those cases in which students are responsible for the development of this resource as an audiovisual notebook. We compared students' and teachers' perceptions regarding the main features that an audiovisual notebook should include. Four questionnaires with items about information, images, text and music, and filmmaking were used to investigate students' (n = 115) and teachers' perceptions (n = 28) regarding the development of a video focused on a histological technique. The results show that both students and teachers significantly prioritize informative components, images and filmmaking more than text and music. The scores were significantly higher for teachers than for students for all four components analyzed. The highest scores were given to items related to practical and medically oriented elements, and the lowest values were given to theoretical and complementary elements. For most items, there were no differences between genders. A strong positive correlation was found between the scores given to each item by teachers and students. These results show that both students' and teachers' perceptions tend to coincide for most items, and suggest that audiovisual notebooks developed by students would emphasize the same items as those perceived by teachers to be the most relevant. Further, these findings suggest that the use of video as an audiovisual learning notebook would not only preserve the curricular objectives but would also offer the advantages of self‐learning processes. Anat Sci Educ 7: 209–218. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.     

Beyond Punnett Squares: Student Word Association and Explanations of Phenotypic Variation through an Integrative Quantitative Genetics Unit Investigating Anthocyanin Inheritance and Expression in Brassica rapa Fast Plants

Genetics instruction in introductory biology is often confined to Mendelian genetics and avoids the complexities of variation in quantitative traits. Given the driving question “What determines variation in phenotype (Pv)? (Pv=Genotypic variation Gv + environmental variation Ev),” we developed a 4-wk unit for an inquiry-based laboratory course focused on the inheritance and expression of a quantitative trait in varying environments. We utilized Brassica rapa Fast Plants as a model organism to study variation in the phenotype anthocyanin pigment intensity. As an initial curriculum assessment, we used free word association to examine students’ cognitive structures before and after the unit and explanations in students’ final research posters with particular focus on variation (Pv = Gv + Ev). Comparison of pre- and postunit word frequency revealed a shift in words and a pattern of co-occurring concepts indicative of change in cognitive structure, with particular focus on “variation” as a proposed threshold concept and primary goal for students’ explanations. Given review of 53 posters, we found ∼50% of students capable of intermediate to high-level explanations combining both Gv and Ev influence on expression of anthocyanin intensity (Pv). While far from “plug and play,” this conceptually rich, inquiry-based unit holds promise for effective integration of quantitative and Mendelian genetics.     

Teaching practices in kindergarten and first grade: different strokes for different folks

This study assessed the nature of instruction in 314 kindergarten and first-grade classrooms from 155 schools in 48 school districts in three states. The schools served a relatively high proportion of low-income children and children of color. Despite the restricted range in student populations served, qualities of the schools and observed classroom instruction were associated with the demographics of the student body. Schools serving relatively high proportions of low-income children and children of color were rated by teachers to have more negative social climates. Teachers in these schools emphasized basic skills more and engaged in more didactic teaching and less constructivist teaching practices. At the classroom level, teaching approaches were predicted by teachers’ goals, the ethnic composition of their classroom, and the degree to which teachers perceived the families of the children in their classroom to have challenges associated with poverty. Didactic teaching was particularly common in classrooms with a high proportion of African–American students and in which teachers believed poverty-related problems inhibited parent involvement in their children's education; constructivist teaching was high in classrooms with a high proportion of Caucasian children.     

The Reading–Spelling Connection: Developing and Evaluating a Beginning Spelling Intervention for Children at Risk of Reading Disability

Abstract In this article, we describe the development and evaluation of a beginning spelling intervention for young children at risk of reading disability. We first summarize the literature that supports beginning spelling as an ideal method for strategically integrating the beginning reading big ideas of phonemic awareness and alphabetic understanding. We then summarize the literature on effective instructional principles for students at risk of reading disability. Next, we describe how instructional design was applied to the development of an intervention for young children at risk of reading disability, then summarize the findings of an experimental study supporting the effectiveness of this intervention. Finally, we provide selected examples from the spelling intervention to illustrate the findings' translation into instructional practice.