Language delays, reading delays, and learning difficulties: interactive elements requiring multidimensional programming

Researchers have hypothesized four levels of instructional dialogue and claimed that teachers can improve children's language development by incorporating these dialogue levels in their classrooms. It has also been hypothesized that enhancing children's early language development enhances children's later reading development. This quasi-experimental research study investigated both of these hypotheses using a collaborative service delivery model for Grade 1 children with language difficulties from a socially and economically disadvantaged urban community in Australia. Comparing the end-of-year reading achievement scores for the 57 children who received the language intervention with those of the 59 children in the comparison group, the findings from this research are supportive of both hypotheses. The interrelationships between learning difficulties, reading difficulties, and language difficulties are discussed along with children's development in vocabulary, use of memory strategies and verbal reasoning, and the need for multidimensional programming.     

Motivation,Confidence, and Control; Unraveling Active Learning for Nutrition and Food Undergraduates

Abstract: Nutrition and food students at Sheffield Hallam University completed an “active learning” assessment as part of a final year module, Applied Nutrition 2. The purpose of the “active learning” assessment was to encourage and enhance learner autonomy. The assessment consisted of 5 main stages: a briefing, thought shower, oral business proposal presentation, a feedback stage, and Nutrition Fair. To assess learner autonomy, levels of motivation, confidence, and control were quantitatively and qualitatively monitored throughout the learning journey. The results showed that levels of confidence, motivation, and control increased following each stage and significantly across the learning journey. However, there were significant gender differences in terms of achievement of marks and in levels of motivation at various stages. On average, females achieved higher marks in certain assessments and they demonstrated higher levels of motivation after the initial briefing. Further, significant differences were also reported between different degree routes in terms of achievement of marks and levels of confidence, motivation, and control. “Active learning” has been shown to foster improved levels of confidence, motivation, and control in a cohort of nutrition and food students, contributing to overall learner autonomy. Graduates able to demonstrate such qualities will undoubtedly be welcomed by employers in the relevant sectors.     

Carnivals, the Carnivalesque, The Magic Puddin', and David Almond's Wild Girl, Wild Boy: Toward a Theorizing of Children's Plays

This article seeks to extend current children's literature criticism into children's plays and children's theatre. The article uses Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding as a prose introduction to an idea of a theatrical carnivalesque. Building on the practical experience of being involved in a large program of original drama for children, written and produced within the university context, it develops a theory of plays-as-the-performance-of-texts, relating this to the current debate on performance and performativity. It adopts the idea of performativity as performative belonging and identifies some distinguishing characteristics of children's plays. Applying some of these ideas to David Almond's Wild Girl, Wild Boy, it notes the idea of moral psychic reorganisation as part of the essence of carnival.     

Item feature effects in evolution assessment

Despite concerted efforts by science educators to understand patterns of evolutionary reasoning in science students and teachers, the vast majority of evolution education studies have failed to carefully consider or control for item feature effects in knowledge measurement. Our study explores whether robust contextualization patterns emerge within particular evolutionary reasoning contexts, and the implications of these patterns for instruction, assessment, and models of cognition. We test four hypotheses regarding item feature effects on undergraduate biology majors' evolutionary reasoning using a sample of 1,200 open response explanations of evolutionary change across items differing in context and scale but standardized by taxon and trait. Evolutionary explanations were atomized into a series of scientific and naïve biological elements and tallied among prompts and their features. We documented clear, significant, and predictable item feature effects on evolutionary explanations. Tasks involving evolutionary trait loss elicited a significantly greater number of naïve biological elements than evolutionary trait gain tasks in all contexts, including: within species comparisons, between species comparisons, animal prompts, and plant prompts. Tasks involving between species evolutionary comparisons, regardless of gain or loss, animal or plant, always produced significantly more naïve biological explanatory elements than within species comparisons. For items prompting explanation of trait gain, the use of the core concepts of natural selection were not influenced by the hierarchical level of the task (within or between species). Explanations of trait gain were also the least sensitive to scale and context. Core concepts of natural selection were always deployed less frequently in cases of evolutionary trait loss (within and between species, in animals and plants). We discuss a series of implications of these findings for curriculum, instruction, and assessment. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 237–256, 2011     

An evaluation of a project-based learning initiative in engineering education

Project-based learning (PBL) is a well-known methodology for engineering design education due to a number of benefits it is claimed to offer. This paper presents the initial offering of a first-year engineering PBL unit at Griffith University in Australia. An evaluation of student perceptions of the unit revealed that students generally enjoyed the experience, with the oral presentation aspect receiving the lowest satisfaction rating. There was no significant difference in the ratings between any demographic grouping, suggesting that all students were able to participate in, and experience, the unit in essentially the same way. The best aspects of the unit and those aspects needing improvement were similar to the findings of other investigations documented in the literature. It is proposed that future offerings of the unit will reduce the number of design projects from three to two per semester and will attempt more sophisticated individualisation of marks for group work activities.     

A Tale of Two Groups: Differences Between Minority Students and Non-Minority Students in their Predispositions to and Engagement with Diverse Peers at a Predominantly White Institution

Using a revised version of the Transition to College Model (Locks et al. 2008, Rev High Educ 31(3), 257–285), this study examined the extent to which minority students and non-minority students differ in their predispositions to engage in campus-based diversity activities as well as in their engagement with ethnically diverse college peers at a predominantly White college. Findings indicate that engagement with diverse peers is a learned behavior; one that was shaped long before a student stepped into college. The importance of past interactions with diverse peers extends beyond freshman year predispositions to engage; students who interacted with diverse students prior to college were also more prone to report engagement with diverse peers at the end of their sophomore year. Notably, freshmen minority students were more predisposed to engage diverse peers next to their White peers; these ethnic-based differences, however, dissipated by the end of the sophomore year of college.     

The Role of Ethics,Culture, and Artistry in Scientific Illustration

This article is a case-based theoretical exercise designed to investigate the role that ethics, culture, and artistry play in scientific illustration. In this article, the author theorizes a visual model of cultural interplay and scientific illustration in the creation of scientific knowledge and argues that scientific illustrations work as epistemological devices because they are culturally mediated constructions imbued with personal, organizational, and disciplinary trust, and shaped by the embedded cultural worldviews.     

Notions of Cause: Russell's thesis revisited

We discuss Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevanceof the idea of causation to science and its elimination frommetaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism.We show how Russell's application raises issues now receivingmuch attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism,in particular, problems related to the relationship betweenfolk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, andto the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. Inshowing how to recover an approximation to Russell's conclusionwhile explaining scientists' continuing appeal to causal ideas(without violating naturalism by philosophically correctingscientists) we illustrate a general naturalist strategy forhandling problems around the unification of sciences that assumedifferent levels of naïveté with respect to folkconceptual frameworks. We do this despite rejecting one of thepremises of Russell's argument, a version of reductionism thatwas scientifically plausible in 1913 but is not so now.

1 Russell'sNaturalistic Rejection of Causation

2 Psychology, Folk Notionsand Intuitions

3 Causes in Science

4 Letting Science HoldTrumps

     

The soil sciences in India: Policy lessons for agricultural innovation

There is increasing demand for institutional reform in the agricultural sciences. This paper presents lessons from the content and directions in soil science research in India, to make a case for institutional reform in the agricultural sciences. It demonstrates how existing institutional and organizational contexts shape the research content of the soil sciences and its sub-disciplines. These contexts also shape the capacity of the soil sciences to understand and partner with other components of the wider natural resource management (NRM) innovation systems. The professional association has received little attention in the innovation systems literature, even within the nuanced, context specific and historically sensitive accounts of innovation. As a professional association, the Indian Society of Soil Sciences (ISSS) plays a limited role currently, with little engagement with the key professional and social issues that confront the soil sciences. The ISSS is presented here as a potential actor in the NRM innovation systems. The paper argues that with the involvement of the ISSS, the existing discipline-based, commodity oriented, linear and instrumentalist problem solving approach in the soil sciences can be reformed to a learning and partnership based innovation systems approach, enabling professional excellence, field level technology utilization, along with substantial policy and donor support.