Understanding teacher design practices for digital inquiry–based science learning: the case of Go-Lab

Designing and implementing online or digital learning material is a demanding task for teachers. This is even more the case when this material is used for more engaged forms of learning, such as inquiry learning. In this article, we give an informed account of Go-Lab, an ecosystem that supports teachers in creating Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs). These ILSs are built around STEM–related online laboratories. Within the Go-Lab ecosystem, teachers can combine these online laboratories with multimedia material and learning apps, which are small applications that support learners in their inquiry learning process. The Go-Lab ecosystem offers teachers ready–made structures, such as a standard inquiry cycle, alternative scenarios or complete ILSs that can be used as they are, but it also allows teachers to configure these structures to create personalized ILSs. For this article, we analyzed data on the design process and structure of 2414 ILSs that were (co)created by teachers and that our usage data suggest have been used in classrooms. Our data show that teachers prefer to start their design from empty templates instead of more domain–related elements, that the makeup of the design team (a single teacher, a group of collaborating teachers, or a mix of teachers and project members) influences key design process characteristics such as time spent designing the ILS and number of actions involved, that the characteristics of the resulting ILSs also depend on the type of design team and that ILSs that are openly shared (i.e., published in a public repository) have different characteristics than those that are kept private.

     

荷兰初等教育监测与评估系统

为了帮助学校控制教学质量,荷兰国家教育测量研究院(Cito)为初等教育阶段开发出一套监测与评估系统。该系统包括一系列连续的国家范围内的标准化考试,对学生受教育过程中的成绩进行纵向评估。本文介绍了该系统的主要内容、教育及心理测量依据以及提供的部分成绩报告,并重点讨论了荷兰学校如何利用这些报告改进和提高教学水平。     

Does teacher homework feedback matter to 6th graders’ school engagement?: a mixed methods study

Metacognition and Learning - The effectiveness of homework on improving student academic achievement depends on several factors; for example, feedback provided by the teacher (i.e. grading) and...     

Durable Research,Portable Findings: Rhetorical Methods in Case Study Research

ABSTRACT

Case studies have been a central methodology employed by scholars working in the rhetoric of science and technical communication. However, concerns have been raised about how cases are constructed and collected, and what they convey. The authors reflect on how rhetoricians of science and technical communication researchers can – and do – construct a variety of case-based mixed-methods studies in ways that may make our research more portable and durable without undercutting the important and central role of case-based analysis.     

Implications of the learning environment in a professional Master’s degree in business administration in Brazil

Learning Environments Research - This study focused on the implications of a learning environment in a professional Master’s degree in business administration in Brazil. The study was...     

Political conversations on Twitter in a disruptive scenario: The role of “party evangelists” during the 2015 Spanish general elections

During election campaigns, candidates, parties, and media share their relevance on Twitter with a group of especially active users, aligned with a particular party. This paper introduces the profile of “party evangelists,” and explores the activity and effects these users had on the general political conversation during the 2015 Spanish general election. On that occasion, the electoral expectations were uncertain for the two major parties (PP and PSOE) because of the rise of two emerging parties that were disrupting the political status quo (Podemos and Ciudadanos). This was an ideal situation to assess the differences between the evangelists of established and emerging parties. The paper evaluates two aspects of the political conversation based on a corpus of 8.9 million tweets: the retweeting effectiveness, and the sentiment analysis of the overall conversation. We found that one of the emerging party’s evangelists dominated message dissemination to a much greater extent.     

The many faces of mobility: Using bibliometric data to measure the movement of scientists

This paper presents a methodological framework for developing scientific mobility indicators based on bibliometric data. We identify nearly 16 million individual authors from publications covered in the Web of Science for the 2008–2015 period. Based on the information provided across individuals’ publication records, we propose a general classification for analyzing scientific mobility using institutional affiliation changes. We distinguish between migrants--authors who have ruptures with their country of origin--and travelers--authors who gain additional affiliations while maintaining affiliation with their country of origin. We find that 3.7% of researchers who have published at least one paper over the period are mobile. Travelers represent 72.7% of all mobile scholars, but migrants have higher scientific impact. We apply this classification at the country level, expanding the classification to incorporate the directionality of scientists’ mobility (i.e., incoming and outgoing). We provide a brief analysis to highlight the utility of the proposed taxonomy to study scholarly mobility and discuss the implications for science policy.     

Making the most of “external” group members in blended and online environments

Although the importance of boundary spanning in blended and online learning is widely acknowledged, most educational research has ignored whether and how students learn from others outside their assigned group. One potential approach for understanding cross-boundary knowledge sharing is Social Network Analysis (SNA). In this article, we apply four network metrics to unpack how students developed intra- and inter-group learning links, using two exemplary blended case studies in Spain and the UK. Our results indicate that SNA based upon questionnaires can provide researchers some useful indicators for a more fine-grained analysis how students develop these inter- and intra-group learning links, and which cross-boundary links are particularly important for learning performance. The mixed findings between the two case-studies suggest the relevance of pre-existing conditions and learning design. SNA metrics can provide useful information for qualitative follow-up methods, and future interventions using learning analytics approaches.     

Epistemological Foundations of School Science

Based on a synthesis of contributions from differentauthors, we present a theoreticalframework that provides some foundations for schoolscience, and we define someresearch problems. We start from what is already knownabout students' models andcognition in order to construct proposals of didacticalintervention. The cognitive modelof science, developed in the philosophy of science throughstudying scientists' activity,has allowed us to propose an analogous model for schoolscience in which experimentationand language play the key roles. We emphasise the relativeindependence of school scienceand scientists' science.     

Outcomes and satisfaction of two optional cadaveric dissection courses: A 3‐year prospective study

Teaching time dedicated to anatomy education has been reduced at many medical schools around the world, including Nova Medical School in Lisbon, Portugal. In order to minimize the effects of this reduction, the authors introduced two optional, semester‐long cadaveric dissection courses for the first two years of the medical school curriculum. These courses were named Regional Anatomy I (RAI) and Regional Anatomy II (RAII). In RAI, students focus on dissecting the thorax, abdomen, pelvis, and perineum. In RAII, the focus shifts to the head, neck, back, and upper and lower limbs. This study prospectively analyzes students' academic achievement and perceptions within the context of these two, newly‐introduced, cadaveric dissection courses. Students' satisfaction was assessed anonymously through a questionnaire that included items regarding students' perception of the usefulness of the courses for undergraduate teaching, as well as with regards to future professional activity. For each of the three academic years studied, the final score (1 to 20) in General Anatomy (GA), RAI, and RAII was on average 14.26 ± 1.89; 16.94 ± 1.02; 17.49 ± 1.01, respectively. The mean results were lower in GA than RAI or RAII (P < 0.001). Furthermore, students who undertook these courses ranked them highly with regards to consolidating their knowledge of anatomy, preparing for other undergraduate courses, and training for future clinical practice. These survey data, combined with data on participating students' academic achievement, lend strong support to the adoption of similar courses as complementary and compulsory disciplines in a modern medical curriculum. Anat Sci Educ 10: 127–136. © 2016 American Association of Anatomists.