Golden times of writing: the creative compliance of writing journals

This paper examines the history, rationale, uses and abuses of writing journals in primary classrooms. We argue that writing journals form part of a pedagogy derived from an understanding of how children can be motivated to express themselves, independently of teachers. Moreover, they demonstrate the power of welcoming children's home cultures into the classroom. However, we also wish to argue that the use of writing journals is part of the teaching profession's ‘creative compliance’ that can still contribute to the marginalisation of effective educational practice. We document how, in some schools in England, writing journals have been reduced to token gestures towards creativity and independence and in effect collude with and support what is increasingly becoming a pedagogical hegemony.     

Developing creativity and problem-solving skills of engineering students: a comparison of web- and pen-and-paper-based approaches

Problem-solving is a key engineering skill, yet is an area in which engineering graduates underperform. This paper investigates the potential of using web-based tools to teach students problem-solving techniques without the need to make use of class time. An idea generation experiment involving 90 students was designed. Students were surveyed about their study habits and reported they use electronic-based materials more than paper-based materials while studying, suggesting students may engage with web-based tools. Students then generated solutions to a problem task using either a paper-based template or an equivalent web interface. Students who used the web-based approach performed as well as students who used the paper-based approach, suggesting the technique can be successfully adopted and taught online. Web-based tools may therefore be adopted as supplementary material in a range of engineering courses as a way to increase students’ options for enhancing problem-solving skills.     

Playing with words: investigating the use of language play in the persuasive writing of 9–11-year-olds

There has been little research into how children use language play in writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated through their writing of a short advertisement. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design study of persuasive writing in the 9–11 age-range. The writing was analysed using qualitative methods derived from relevant linguistic literature. Extensive use of language play was evident, as well as stylistic differences between the sub-groups. The findings indicate how teaching and learning might be enhanced from more conscious use of children’s propensity for manipulating the forms, meanings and uses of language.     

Intellectual Humility and Morality as Consultee-Centered Consultation Epistemologies

ABSTRACT

Little research examines how epistemological constructs affect the consultation process in schools. We consider how the epistemological constructs of (a) intellectual humility and (b) moral foundations may moderate the effectiveness of consultee-centered consultation. We define the constructs and provide examples of their potential influences on consultee-centered consultation. Then we provide four areas of investigation for future research on the epistemologies of school-based consultation.     

A Practical Way of Structuring Teaching for Learning

Over recent years there has been a convergence of ideas about how students learn. This is useful information for developing teaching methods that make effective learning more likely. An attempt to put this into practice in an introductory education subject is described in detail. It involved making decisions about issues that are common to different approaches to teaching in higher education. These included the way activities were structured, how experiences were used, the sorts of choices students could exercise and how learning was distributed. It is argued that learning in higher education depends on the balance that is struck in terms of these and related decisions.     

Preparing university students to lead K-12 engineering outreach programmes: a design experiment

ABSTRACT

This paper describes an engineering outreach programme designed to increase the interest of under-represented youth in engineering and to disseminate pre-engineering design challenge materials to K-12 educators and volunteers. Given university students’ critical role as facilitators of the outreach programme, researchers conducted a two-year design experiment to examine the programme's effectiveness at preparing university students to lead pre-engineering activities. Pre- and post-surveys incorporated items from the Student Engagement sub-scale of the Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale. Surveys were analysed using paired-samples t-test. Interview and open-ended survey data were analysed using discourse analysis and the constant comparative method. As a result of participation in the programme, university students reported a gain in efficacy to lead pre-engineering activities. The paper discusses programme features that supported efficacy gains and concludes with a set of design principles for developing learning environments that effectively prepare university students to facilitate pre-engineering outreach programmes.     

Chinese adolescents' reasoning about democratic and authority-based decision making in peer,family, and school contexts

This study explored the judgments and reasoning of Chinese adolescents (13-18 years of age) from 3 regions of mainland China (N = 574) regarding procedures for making decisions involving children in peer, family, and school contexts. Participants evaluated 2 democratic decision-making procedures (majority rule and consensus) and decision making by adult authorities for 2 decisions embedded in each social context. Judgments and reasoning about decision-making procedures varied by social context and by the decision under consideration, and evaluations of procedures became more differentiated with increasing age. The findings reveal that concepts of rights, individual autonomy, and democratic norms (majority rule) are salient aspects of Chinese adolescents' social reasoning and are used to evaluate critically existing social practices.     

Translations of new public management: a decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices.     

Students' Understandings of Gravity in an Orbiting Space-Ship

We report on an investigation of students' ideas about gravity after a semester of instruction in physics at university. There are two aspects to the study which was concerned with students' answers to a carefully designed qualitative examination question on gravity. The first aspect is a classification of the answers and a comparative study of the ways the problem was tackled by two large groups of students who had different backgrounds in physics and were exposed to different teaching styles. The second aspect is to investigate how students link concepts to solve the problem. We used a phenomenographic analysis of student responses to extract patterns of reasoning and alternative conceptions behind the solutions. We found no differences between the classes of answers given by students in the two courses. Our analysis also identifies a hierarchy in the complexity of the hypothetical reasoning pathways, which we interpret as reflecting the ways in which students may link concepts and resolve conflicts as they solve the problem. The hypothetical reasoning pathways may help educators to develop instructional material or lecture room dialogue in order to tease out key issues. An unexpected finding is that there is a discrepancy between our conclusion that the two groups of answers are similar and the distribution of marks awarded by the examiner – which implies that the quality of the answers is different for the two groups.