Do What Darwin Did

Science & Education - We argue that teleological thinking plays a central role in biology and, more specifically, in theory of natural selection, and, therefore, the didactic goal cannot be its...     

From Students to Consumers: reflections on the marketisation of Portuguese higher education

A progressive attempt to replace traditional public administration values and concepts by others that are closer to private management can be observed in the replacement of the service user concept by that of consumer or client. This redefinition's more implicit or explicit intent is to increase consumers'/clients' status, their capacity to choose and make rational choices in the market, and, ultimately, to ensure that organisations fulfil their needs. Influenced by this tendency, higher education institutions (HEIs) also started to see students as clients or consumers and to influence their choices by trying to define HE demand. This is evident in the shift in their external communication strategies: ‘institutional information’, based on HEIs' prestige, is being progressively replaced by ‘marketed information’, based on economic consumer logic. In trying to understand how students are perceived by Portuguese HEIs, we undertook qualitative research based on the content analysis of undergraduate degrees' announcements in newspapers. Major findings evidence that their content: (1) can be classified in a continuum bounded by two poles: the use of ‘institutional information’ and the use of ‘marketed information’; (2) show the presence of a social representation of students as clients or consumers; (3) seems related to HEIs' nature (public vs. private), positioning in the HE system (universities and polytechnics) and ‘symbolic capital’ (traditional vs. new institutions).     

Using TPACK as a framework to study the influence of college faculty’s beliefs on online teaching

The purpose of this multiple case study was to understand how the beliefs of college of education faculty members about their students and teaching online influenced their online teaching. The study focused specifically on beliefs regarding student digital literacy and preparedness. The study used the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework as a lens for looking at online teaching. Results indicate that participants’ beliefs about students did in fact influence their online teaching in a variety of ways and with differing teaching outcomes. The results of this study have implications for those who teach online as well as those who support them.     

Integrated or inclusive education versus interactive education: the need for a new model

ABSTRACT

In an attempt to stimulate informed and critical debate, the nature and pedagogical implications of ‘integrated education’ and the more recently proposed ‘inclusive education’ are examined, and an alternative model, described as ‘interactional education’, is proposed and evaluated. Because of the political and economic implications of these three approaches, it is suggested that the appropriate forum for discussion is one which is Pan‐European.     

Using automated analysis to assess middle school students' competence with scientific argumentation

Argumentation is fundamental to science education, both as a prominent feature of scientific reasoning and as an effective mode of learning—a perspective reflected in contemporary frameworks and standards. The successful implementation of argumentation in school science, however, requires a paradigm shift in science assessment from the measurement of knowledge and understanding to the measurement of performance and knowledge in use. Performance tasks requiring argumentation must capture the many ways students can construct and evaluate arguments in science, yet such tasks are both expensive and resource-intensive to score. In this study we explore how machine learning text classification techniques can be applied to develop efficient, valid, and accurate constructed-response measures of students' competency with written scientific argumentation that are aligned with a validated argumentation learning progression. Data come from 933 middle school students in the San Francisco Bay Area and are based on three sets of argumentation items in three different science contexts. The findings demonstrate that we have been able to develop computer scoring models that can achieve substantial to almost perfect agreement between human-assigned and computer-predicted scores. Model performance was slightly weaker for harder items targeting higher levels of the learning progression, largely due to the linguistic complexity of these responses and the sparsity of higher-level responses in the training data set. Comparing the efficacy of different scoring approaches revealed that breaking down students' arguments into multiple components (e.g., the presence of an accurate claim or providing sufficient evidence), developing computer models for each component, and combining scores from these analytic components into a holistic score produced better results than holistic scoring approaches. However, this analytical approach was found to be differentially biased when scoring responses from English learners (EL) students as compared to responses from non-EL students on some items. Differences in the severity between human and computer scores for EL between these approaches are explored, and potential sources of bias in automated scoring are discussed.     

Comparison of starts and turns of national and regional level swimmers by individualized-distance measurements

The aim of this study was to compare the race characteristics of the start and turn segments of national and regional level swimmers. In the study, 100 and 200-m events were analysed during the finals session of the Open Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) tournament. The “individualized-distance” method with two-dimensional direct linear transformation algorithm was used to perform race analyses. National level swimmers obtained faster velocities in all race segments and stroke comparisons, although significant inter-level differences in start velocity were only obtained in half (8 out of 16) of the analysed events. Higher level swimmers also travelled for longer start and turn distances but only in the race segments where the gain of speed was high. This was observed in the turn segments, in the backstroke and butterfly strokes and during the 200-m breaststroke event, but not in any of the freestyle events. Time improvements due to the appropriate extension of the underwater subsections appeared to be critical for the end race result and should be carefully evaluated by the “individualized-distance” method.