Educational psychology and the adult learner

The middle years of life, from the 20s through the 50s, have been neglected by psychology in general and educational psychology in particular. The current increase in numbers of mature learners calls for more, better, and better-understood psychological data so that learning can be enhanced in this age group. This issue of Contemporary Educational Psychology addresses five relevant questions: (1) What does research tell us about the capacities of adults to learn and retain? (2) What factors other than cognitive functioning affect adult performance? (3) How and in what ways does the adult wish to involve himself as a learner? (4) How might we go about guiding the mature learner, using present knowledge? (5) What theoretical concerns arise from consideration of the foregoing?     

Interdisciplinary Exploration Supports Sternberg’s Expansion of Giftedness

Robert Sternberg’s (2017) Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (ACCEL) framework provides a helpful way to align gifted education with the complexities of 21st-century socioeconomic and cultural environments. The recommendation that we shift away from pseudoquantitative precision in conceptions of giftedness aligns with similar recommendations in other fields including political science, economics, and mathematics. The emphases on ethics and wisdom are reinforced by analyses of the need for more ethical awareness in societies. These analyses arise from research and theory in other fields, including ethical philosophy, political science, economics, history, sociology, and journalism. These transdisciplinary similarities are interpreted to be conceptual triangulation supporting the importance of Sternberg’s model as a catalyst for the development of more holistic conceptions of giftedness and talent.     

Understanding by Design: A Framework for Effecting Curricular Development and Assessment

Successful learning outcomes require the integration of content and meaningful assessment with effective pedagogy. However, development of coherent and cohesive curriculum is seemingly overwhelming even to experienced teachers. Obviously this creates a barrier to successful student learning. Understanding by Design (UbD) overcomes this impasse by providing concise and practical guidance for experienced and inexperienced teachers. In programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, teams composed of University of Wyoming graduate students and science teachers from grades 6 to 9 designed motivating, inquiry-based lesson plans intended to get students to think and act like scientists. In this process, teams utilized principles outlined in UbD with great success. UbD describes a practical and useful “backward” design process in which anticipated results are first identified; acceptable evidence for learning outcomes is established and, only then, are specific learning experiences and instruction planned. Additionally, UbD provides procedures to avoid content overload by focusing on “enduring principles.” WHERE, the UbD sieve for activities, was used effectively to develop tasks that are engaging, that are consistent with state educational standards, and that promote self-directed, life-long learning.     

Ethics in Assessing and Developing Academic Quality

Assessing quality in higher education makes important ethical assumptions, some of them questionable. A more satisfactory ethical view is required if assessing quality in higher education is to be sound. However, political intrusion in system‐wide assessment brings an influence which, preoccupied with market forces and technological development, goes beyond appropriate technical excellence to technicist excess. This generates a climate inimical to ethical quality and conflicts with academic work. Academic development units have a special role in regard to academic quality, but tend to be conceived of in a technicist way. A resultant managerialist‐technicist approach to their task is incompatible with ethical and epistemological virtues necessary to sound academic work and its development.     

On the Future of Awful Thoughts in Teacher Education

This article explores the idea that the future of a profession resides in the questions it might ask of itself and how such questions affect its thinking. We consider how current conditions in teacher education-its crisis-driven orientation, its manic pace, its focus on control and stable knowledge-foreclose the capacity to think creatively from the having of awful thoughts. Drawing an example from literature we ask, what can it mean, to the lives we already live, to encounter human relations at the most difficult moments and in their most generous and ethical attempts? From this question, we raise themes that might allow us to rethink teacher education: affiliation, commitment, trauma, destruction and community.     

Beginning Conversations: Future Teachers' Perspectives on Gender

This paper begins with the observation that, for a variety of social, political, and economic reasons, many universities are beginning to rethink the nature of their relations with local communities and asks about the place of Faculties of Education in such processes of reconsideration. It describes recent initiatives at York University as examples of what might be possible.     

Creation of an integrated environment to supply e-learning platforms with Office Automation features

Over the last years great efforts have been made within the University environment to implement e-learning technologies in the standard educational practice. These learning technologies distribute online educational multimedia contents through technological platforms. Even though specific e-learning tools for technical disciplines were already available on the Internet, in our opinion more general tools, typically involving calculations, plots or diagrams, through the use of spreadsheets or graphical applications, were still needed to provide a more flexible and multi-purpose integrated environment. Therefore, we developed an integrated system to supply e-learning platforms with almost the same functionalities offered by standalone Office Automation applications. Modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment (MOODLE) and OpenOffice.org were selected to deal with any problem originating from the software and to smooth over the users' learning curve. Furthermore, MOODLE is a modular platform and offers an extensive application programming interface for coding in a simple and effective manner. The implementation of the work required the employment of Java and Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible Markup Language technologies and included the creation of a Java Applet to be embedded in the web pages of the new MOODLE modules. Students could thus be offered a single working environment for handling “traditional” material and performing practical activities. The students' feedback on this new integrated system was very positive and proved the effectiveness of our work.     

Designing the Internet of Things for learning environmentally responsible behaviour

We present two designs in the area of the Internet of Things, utilizing the ontology-driven Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications (SOFIA) Interoperability Platform (IOP). The IOP connects domestic objects in the physical world to the information world, allowing for coaching the behaviour of, or raising awareness in, domestic energy consumption. The concept and architecture of the SOFIA IOP is introduced, in which the domestic objects are knowledge processors connected to a semantic information broker. This broker, using a blackboard design pattern, ontologies, and semantic web technologies, enables interoperability among both digital and physical entities. The two designs based on the SOFIA IOP are presented as examples for coaching with and learning from the Internet of Things. Although both designs are in the area of domestic energy consumption, they can be seen as good starting points towards broader areas of ubiquitous learning enabled by the Internet of Things.