Designing Assessments and Assessing Designs in Virtual Educational Environments

This study used innovative assessment practices to obtain and document broad learning outcomes for a 15-hour game-based curriculum in Quest Atlantis, a multi-user virtual environment that supports school-based participation in socio scientific inquiry in ecological sciences. Design-based methods were used to refine and align the enactment of virtual narrative and scientific investigations to a challenging problem solving assessment and indirectly to achievement test items that were independent of the curriculum. In study one, one-sixth grade teacher used the curriculum in two of his classes and obtained larger gains in understanding and achievement than his two other classes, which used an expository text to learn the same concepts and skills. Further treatment refinements were carried out, and two forms of virtual formative feedback were introduced. In study two, the same teacher used the curriculum in all four of his classes; the revised curriculum resulted in even larger gains in understanding and achievement. Gains averaged 1.1 SD and 0.4 SD, respectively, with greater gains shown for students who engaged more with formative feedback. Principles for assessing designs and designing assessments in virtual environments are presented.

Challenging the pervasiveness of hypermasculinity and heteronormativity in an all-boys’ school

There is a rich, albeit chequered, history around single-sex schooling providing an educational option for nurturing the particular educational interests and needs of boys. While all-boys’ schools continue to position themselves at the forefront of contemporary masculine endeavour, they are simultaneously forced to fend off accusations that they are proverbial hot beds for the reproduction of gendered hegemony. Whereas some boys’ schools appear content with their ‘masculine’ profile, others appear more eager to present themselves as projecting tolerant and inclusive environments wherein respectful gender relations are actively encouraged. Situated within a wider case study, this paper examines how one all-boys’ school sought to foster gender inclusivity through a strategic initiative to increase the number of female teaching staff and the appointment of a female deputy principal. The data presented here focus on qualitative research interviews undertaken with key members of staff around 5 years after the initiative was introduced to the school. Our interpretation of the data draws largely on selected works of Michel Foucault to explore the discourse-power relations that sustain enduring hypermasculine and heteronormative values within the school. This lens provides a framework to interrogate how gendered constructions of professional identity are framed within such a context, and the spaces that exist for them to be challenged.     

A Comparison of Source Code Plagiarism Detection Engines

Automated techniques for finding plagiarism in student source code submissions have been in use for over 20 years and there are many available engines and services. This paper reviews the literature on the major modern detection engines, providing a comparison of them based upon the metrics and techniques they deploy. Generally the most common and effective techniques are seen to involve tokenising student submissions then searching pairs of submissions for long common substrings, an example of what is defined to be a paired structural metric. Computing academics are recommended to use one of the two Web-based detection engines, MOSS and JPlag. It is shown that whilst detection is well established there are still places where further research would be useful, particularly where visual support of the investigation process is possible.     

Intelligent Design in the Public School Science Classroom

The ongoing battle to insert intelligent causes into the science classrooms has been met with political approval and scientific rejection. Administrators in the United States need to be aware of the law related to creationism and intelligent design in order to lead in local curricular battles. Although unlikely to appease the ID proponents, there is a purpose for ID in the classroom. ID can be used to illustrate the foundational epistemological structure of science, which requires natural explanations and empirical data as opposed to revelation, tradition, and authority.     

Supporting social awareness in collaborative e‐learning

In the last decade, we have seen the emergence of virtual learning environments. Initially, these environments were a little more than document repositories that tutor used unicast to the students. Informed in part by social constructivist theories of education, later environments included capabilities for tutor–student and student–student, synchronous and asynchronous communication. The initial research of this paper reports the typical low usage of these capabilities. The main research attempted to ameliorate this problem by the provision of tools to promote a sense of social awareness as self‐presence and copresence, and evaluation techniques to analyse e‐learners' interactions. Data was obtained from prepost questionnaires, log files and social network analysis which augmented the data provided by the tools embedded in Moodle. The results indicate the importance of social awareness in effective e‐learning; the quality of active participation can be increased by the use of associated tools. The e‐tutor's role is still pivotal to facilitate and to support such engagement towards collaborative learning. Implications for future research suggest that social awareness tools and evaluation techniques can create awareness cues in an interface with a potential impact on learning.     

Higher education professionals' perspectives on international student experiences of life and learning in Ireland: a qualitative study

Although numerous studies have explored international students' experiences, there is a dearth of research exploring the perspectives of professionals who have contact with international students. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by providing an analysis of higher educational professionals' (n=11) perspectives of international students' experiences and analysing the challenges which arise when working with international students. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff from a large Irish Higher Education Institution. Participants described a range of difficulties experienced by international students, including sociocultural and psychological difficulties, and outlined a number of challenges which exist when dealing with international students, most of which relate to cultural differences and lack of interest in internationalisation. The findings have important policy and practical implications for higher education service provision and point to the need to consider internationalisation as a process which can be enriching for international students, host students and staff members alike.     

Enhancing Inquiry, Understanding, and Achievement in an Astronomy Multimedia Learning Environment

As an example of design-based research, this study refined an assessment strategy for simultaneously enhancing inquiry-based learning and supporting achievement on conventional assessment measures. Astronomy Village ^® : Investigating the Universe? is a software program designed to engage secondary science students in authentic and inquiry-based learning over core topics in astronomy. The software was enhanced with a 20-hour curriculum and three levels of assessment to ensure successful inquiry experiences and high-stakes achievement. The first year implementation of Astronomy Village^® yielded significant gains on a curriculum-oriented exam but not a standards-oriented test, and provided useful design insights that were integrated into the second year implementations. Significant gains were obtained on the test during the second year as well. It is expected that many existing inquiry-oriented science curricula might be similarly enhanced, and is suggested that a large-scale effort to do so might have a lasting impact on science education.     

A Flock of Swallows: Athleticism in Elementary Schools, 1870–1914 – A Necessary Corrective

Athleticism in British public schools and grammar schools has been covered extensively, but not exhaustively. Much less attention has been paid to the extent to which it was a feature of elementary school life. Colm Kerrigan believes that it was widespread in elementary schools and he has further asserted that elementary school teachers and head teachers took little or no notice of pronouncements on Athleticism by guests of honour at presentation ceremonies. The evidence contradicts him as this essay shows. The paper contains a clarification of Athleticism in elementary schools, explains the process by which the ideology was diffused in these schools, and provides an assessment of both its pervasiveness and significance in elementary schools in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.     

Effects of the TutorBright tutoring programme on the reading and mathematics skills of children in foster care: a randomised controlled trial

ABSTRACT

We evaluated the effects of TutorBright tutoring on the reading and mathematics skills of children in family foster care, examined several potential moderators of the impact of tutoring, and explored possible ‘spill-over’ effects on the children’s executive functioning and behavioural difficulties and on their caregivers’ level of involvement in schoolwork in the home. The sample consisted of 70 children in care in Ontario, Canada. At the pre-test, the children were aged 5–16 years (M = 10.41, SD = 2.94) and enrolled in school grades 1–11 (M = 5.53, SD = 2.90). Thirty-four children were randomly assigned to tutoring and 36 to a waiting list control condition. Seven subtests from the Woodcock-Johnson III (WJ-III) achievement test served as outcome measures. The tutored children made statistically greater gains than those in the control group on the WJ-III subtests of Reading Fluency, Reading Comprehension, and Mathematics Calculation, but not on Word Reading, Spelling, Math Fluency, or Applied Math Problems. Age, executive functioning, caregiver controlling involvement in schoolwork, and self-reported post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms were found to moderate the effectiveness of tutoring. There were no spill-over effects of tutoring. The implications of the results for improving foster children’s reading and mathematics skills were discussed.