Science diaries: a brief writing intervention to improve motivation to learn science

This study investigated the hypothesis that prompting students to self-assess their interest and understanding of science concepts and activities would increase their motivation in science classes. Students were randomly assigned to an experimental condition that wrote self-assessments of their competence and interest in science lessons or a control condition that wrote summaries of those same lessons. Writing activities were 10?min long and were given approximately once a week for eighteen weeks. Student motivation was assessed via self-report surveys for achievement goals and interest in science before and after the intervention. Students in the experimental condition showed higher endorsement of mastery goals and reported greater situational interest in science topics after the intervention compared to students who summarised the lessons. Increases in situational interest predicted higher individual interest in the domain. Results indicate an instructional practice requiring just 3?hours out of a semester of instruction was sufficient to achieve these effects on motivation in science classes.     

To tag or not to tag? How to support organizing and classifying bookmarks from the Web (¿Con etiquetas o sin etiquetas? Cómo asistir en la organización y clasificación de los marcadores de páginas Web) (¿Con etiquetas o sin etiquetas? Cómo asistir en la organización y clasificación de los marcadores de páginas Web)

ABSTRACT

When searching for information on the Internet, it can be stored in a bookmarking system. The ability to organize this information in such a system depends on one’s own prior knowledge to create an appropriate classification scheme. Providing a classification system for bookmarks might support people with low prior knowledge. Even though different bookmarking systems exist, hierarchical menus and tagging are being most widely used. In the current exploratory study with 95 ninth-grade students, a 2 × 2 between-subjects design was used to investigate the influence of providing classification support (or not) for either a tagging or a hierarchical system. Results showed that despite the low familiarity with tagging systems, using a hierarchical system is not necessarily a better approach than using a tagging system to organize previously found information. Rather, a tagging system seems to yield storage of fewer but higher-quality information sources. The most important conclusion is that, despite the low familiarity with tagging systems, using a hierarchical system was not beneficial over using a tagging system to organize previously found information.     

Political and educational springboard or straitjacket? Theorising post/human subjects in an age of vulnerability

Contemporary discourses of social justice in education, disability, mental health, social policy and feminist studies are refracted increasingly through concerns about psychological and structural vulnerabilities created by the crises of late capitalism. Focusing on developments in British social policy generally and educational research specifically, this paper uses the authors' contrasting perspectives on two discernible discourses of vulnerability emerging in these contexts. One elevates the recognition of collective vulnerability as a springboard for new conceptualisations of resistance that disrupt materialist narratives of the human subject as a coherent, unified and rational agent of history. A second discourse offers a materialist understanding that locates vulnerability as both driver and product of a ‘therapeutic culture’, arguing that a psycho-emotional focus for vulnerability offers a diminished and ineffective subjectivity that belies rhetorics of resistance. These contrasting perspectives generate and emerge simultaneously from new understandings of the human subject. The paper evaluates the implications of using vulnerability to frame expectations of human subjects for everyday educational practices and relationships. It concludes by suggesting empirical questions that need exploring.     

What's wrong? Understanding beginners' problems with Prolog

This paper reviews psychological research on programming and applies it to the problems of learning and teaching Prolog. We present a psychological model that explains how a certain class of errors in programs comes about. The model fits quite well with the results of a small sample of students and problems. The problems that underlie these and other errors seem to be (a) the complexity of the Prolog primitives (unification and backtracking) and (b) the misfit between students' naive solutions to a problem and the constructs that are available in Prolog (e.g. iterative solutions do not map easily to recursive programs). This suggests that learning Prolog could be helped by (1) coherent and detailed instruction about how Prolog works, (2) emphasis on finding recursive solutions that do not rely on primitives such as assignment and (3) instruction in programming techniques that allow students to implement procedural solutions.     

Research-based teacher education? Exploring the meaning potentials of Swedish teacher education

In this article, we explore the meaning potentials of teacher education in terms of the significance of a research-based approach and the different pedagogic identities that such an approach implies. The study’s aim is to examine the important factors for education to be considered research-based and to identify and analyse the research base of teacher education in Sweden. The results from the analysis of a large number of course documents and from a survey administered to teachers and students in four teacher education programmes indicate that the emerging potential meaning is that teacher education is generally a strongly framed professional education with a relatively weak and adapted research base. The analysis of the classification and framing of disciplinary content and pedagogy in the Swedish teacher education curriculum points at different pedagogic identities emerging from the different meaning potentials that are made available to the students. We argue that a thorough understanding of research-based teacher education needs to be grounded in both course content and its research base as well as other possible pedagogical aspects of research-based education; the education as a whole must be included in the concept of research-based education.     

Language proficiency and lateral position in the classroom

This paper not only makes a contribution to the mosaic of scientific knowledge of the brain and nervous system, but suggests implications of practical value. Observant, experienced teachers know empirically that some youngsters learn best, and perhaps only, when seated front-center, right before the teacher’s desk. Such children need to have the eye contact, or to be in quick arm’s reach, or to have distractions screened out. Drs. Bakker and Van Rijnsoever give evidence here that, for many children, taking in and remembering the message is dependent on their physical placement to catch most effectively the stream of sound. This is important to consider in the popular open classroom. Although many children can adapt readily to less-than-perfect physical learning conditions, for some we must “re-invent the wall,” not to climb, but to provide a place to call “home.” The theoretical re-inforcement presented in this paper proves that such boundaries can also provide source and direction for sound as part of some children’s currently needed sensory security and enhance the efficiency of their auditory intake. Editor     

Balancing varied assessment functions to attain systemic validity: Three is the magic number

Accountability-oriented reforms demand immediate and continual gains on achievement test, for all students, and without diminishing other outcomes or undermining instruction. This paper describes a framework for aligning classroom assessment and external testing with the aim of negotiating these seemingly contradictory goals. The framework varies the sensitivity to instruction and the representations of knowledge across approaches to assessment. Cycles of design- based studies successively refine relationships between a curriculum and the frame that each assessment provides. Doing so, we argue, leverages the unique formative and summative balance across assessments in order to scaffold learning and demonstrate the “consequential” validity of our strategy without compromising curricula, instruction, or the “evidential” validity that warrants their continued use.     

Education on population matters in Europe: results from a comparative survey among students in five European countries

In 1996–1997, within the framework of the European Observatory for Population Education and Information, a comparative survey was conducted among students in final classes of secondary education in several European countries. On the one hand, the survey attempted to assess the effects of education on population in terms of knowledge acquired; the issues addressed in the questionnaire pertained to knowledge of demographic facts and trends (such as the ageing of Western societies and immigration). On the other hand it tried to ascertain students' opinions on demographic trends. What are young people's views on intergenerational solidarity, how tolerant are they towards immigrants, what are their views on recent changes in family structures? This knowledge is important since it is young people's attitudes and future behaviour that will help to shape both the social tissue and the economic prosperity of the European and world population. In this article we present a comparative analysis of survey results obtained in five European countries. We examined the question whether knowledge acquired in the course of scolarisation influences opinions. The results evidence a significant relationship between knowledge of the migrants' issue and attitudes of tolerance towards migrants. By means of multivariate analyses, the impact of factors such as social origin, study orientation and gender on both students' knowledge and attitudes, are investigated. We conclude that adequate educational training on population issues can have a significant positive impact on attitudes of tolerance.     

To jump the wave or not: teachers’ perceptions of research evidence in education

This article presents a microanalysis of how a group of primary school teachers deals with research evidence in their work. Based on analysis of a group of Norwegian teachers’ interactions over issues of educational research and research-based knowledge, we find that teachers’ representations of educational research particularly center on the following issues: educational research being perceived as circular, ‘polyphonic’, and a matter of accommodation to their experience-based knowledge. These metaphors also shed light upon the dilemmas that arise when research evidence meets teachers’ more contextual knowledge. We conclude that teachers’ practice-based evidence may take new forms with an increased policy focus on research-based evidence, as well as bringing forth challenges for teacher work and professionalism.