Bringing Dinosaur Science to the Junior Girl Scouts Through a College Service-Learning Project

Undergraduate students in an introductory-level geoscience course successfully designed and conducted a science badge day for the Junior Girl Scouts. With national concerns that girls turn away from science at a young age, a service-learning project was incorporated into a college course with the end result providing a group of girls a positive and fun science-learning experience. A number of science and technology badges exist for the Girl Scouts, yet not many of these badges have been completed because of a lack of confidence the troop leaders have in teaching science and a paucity of scheduled science events for the leaders to take their girls. Junior Girl Scout troops were invited to the Pennsylvania State University Delaware County campus to complete a series of hands-on dinosaur science activities that allowed them to earn the Science in Everyday Life badge. At the conclusion of the badge event, the girls reported a greater interest in science, a desire to learn more science, and a desire to complete additional science-related Girl Scout badges.     

Faculty reflect on course planning

Faculty members' beliefs about educational purpose and the nature of their academic fields strongly influence how they plan introductory courses. Interviews with 89 faculty members teaching in diverse colleges and representing eight fields also identified faculty attention to student preparation, available textbooks, and locally important factors, but little attention to alternative instructional strategies during course planning. Based on the findings, the authors have developed a tentative general model of course design and related questions to guide future study.     

Reviews

Marcus , Marie (1977). Diagnostic Teaching of the Language Arts. Ball , F. (1977). The Development of Reading Skills, A Book of Resources for Teachers. Hart , N. W. M., Walker , R. F. and Gray , B. (1977). The language of children: A key to literacy. Berg , Leila (1977). Reading and loving.     

Lessons Learned from PISA: A Systematic Review of Peer-Reviewed Articles on the Programme for International Student Assessment

International large-scale assessments are on the rise, with the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) seen by many as having strategic prominence in education policy debates. The present article reviews PISA-related English-language peer-reviewed articles from the programme’s first cycle in 2000 to its most current in 2015. Five literature bases were searched, and results were analysed with SPSS. Results map the frequency of publications according to journal, country, and scientific discipline. They also summarise major themes within three identified categories: secondary analysis, policy impact, and critiques. Findings indicated that studies based on the PISA dataset has led to progress in educational research while simultaneously pointing to the need for caution when using this research to inform educational policy.     

Incidental word learning in a hearing child of deaf adults

It is unclear how children develop the ability to learn words incidentally (i.e., without direct instruction or numerous exposures). This investigation examined the early achievement of this skill by longitudinally tracking the expressive vocabulary and incidental word-learning capacities of a hearing child of Deaf adults who was natively learning American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English. Despite receiving only 20% of language input in spoken English, the child's expressive vocabularies at 16 and 20 months of age, in each language, were similar to those of monolingual age-matched peers. At 16 months of age, the child showed signs of greater proficiency in the incidental learning of novel ASL signs than she did for spoken English words. At 20 months of age, the child was skilled at incidental word learning in both languages. These results support the methodology as it applies to examining theoretical models of incidental word learning. They also suggest that bilingual children can achieve typical vocabulary levels (even with minimal input in one of the languages) and that the development of incidental word learning follows a similar trajectory in ASL and spoken English.     

Risk attitude assessment using roulette and a supply chain simulation

Many topics that are taught in supply chain management (SCM) programs include elements of variability and risk. With quantitative tools in particular, it is assumed that the decision makers using the tools are risk neutral, which is typically not the case in real-life decision situations. The topic of an individual's attitude toward risk has received limited attention in SCM literature and is not a high-profile topic in SCM textbooks. The teaching exercise presented in this paper uses two games—roulette and a SCM simulation—to provide students with an assessment of their own attitude toward risk, and in doing so, facilitates a classroom discussion of risk and risk attitude. These games were developed by the authors and can be played either within Excel or a web application.     

How are feelings of difficulty and familiarity linked to learning behaviors and gains in a complex science learning task?

European Journal of Psychology of Education - The feelings of difficulty and familiarity (FOD and FOF) are two types of metacognitive experiences. Both may influence student engagement and the...     

Why learning environment matters? An analysis on how the learning environment influences the academic motivation,learning strategies and engagement of college students

Learning Environments Research - The current work focused on how the learning environment of college students influenced their academic motivation, choice of learning strategies, and level of...