The Emotionally Affected University Student: support from the university community

The study measured the general attitudes towards disability of academics, administrative staff, and students in a small rural University. Respondents were also asked to comment on the nature of support that might be provided for a student with an emotional disability. There were some significant differences in level and nature of support for students with an emotional disability among academics, administrative staff, and students. These differences were related to the levels of comfort with, and sympathy felt towards, students with an emotional disability. However, overall the results suggest that university students with expressed emotional difficulties are liable to be relatively negatively regarded and are not liable to receive much concrete assistance for the difficulties they face. It is proposed that the data supports the notion that academics, of all the groups measured, are best placed to decide types of support for students with an emotional disability on a case by case basis.     

Evaluating metacognitive scaffolding in Guided Invention Activities

Invention and Productive Failure activities ask students to generate methods that capture the important properties of some given data (e.g., uncertainty) before being taught the expert solution. Invention and Productive Failure activities are a class of scientific inquiry activities in that students create, implement, and evaluate mathematical models based on data. Yet, lacking sufficient inquiry skills, students often do not actualize the full potential of these activities. We identified key invention strategies in which students often fail to engage: exploratory analysis, peer interaction, self-explanation, and evaluation. A classroom study with 134 students evaluated the effect of supporting these skills on the quality and outcomes of the invention process. Students in the Unguided Invention condition received conventional Invention Activities; students in the Guided Invention condition received complementary metacognitive scaffolding. Students were asked to invent methods for calculating uncertainties in best-fitting lines. Guided Invention students invented methods that included more conceptual features and ranked the given datasets more accurately, although the quality of their mathematical expressions was not improved. At the process level, Guided Invention students revised their methods more frequently and had more and better instances of unprompted self-explanations even on components of the activity that were not supported by the metacognitive scaffolding. Classroom observations are used to demonstrate the effect of the scaffolding on students’ learning behaviours. These results suggest that process guidance in the form of metacognitive scaffolding augments the inherent benefits of Invention Activities and can lead to gains at both domain and inquiry levels.     

What are the major impact factors on research performance of young doctorate holders in science in China: a USTC survey

Doctoral graduate research performance (DRP) is recognized as one of the most critical indices for evaluation of the success of doctoral education. Doctoral graduates with high research performance directly reflect a higher ability in academic research and academic achievement. Consequently, identifying which factors influence DRP is potentially of great value. This topic is also challenging because of difficulties in identifying the impact factors on research performance and the feasibility of the relative data collection. This paper first examines the relationships between the indicators and DRP. After a review of previous literature, the focus is on the doctoral graduates’ individual factors, advisor factors and learning performance. Data is collected from graduated doctors from the Science Schools of University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Contrary to expectations, our findings indicate that, based on the Chinese context, learning performance does not appear to be strongly associated with research performance. Individual factors (status of academic origin) do have significant effect on DRP. The advisor factors (including academic status, academic experience and allocation of energy) show a relatively strong association with DRP, in terms of both the number of publications and the impact factor of Science Citation Index (SCI) cited journals.     

The Impact of a Professional Development Program on Teachers' Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching,Instruction, and Student Achievement

In this paper, we describe findings from a three-year evaluation of a well-developed mathematics professional development program that is commercially available on a wide scale. The professional development is designed to improve teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching and to enable them to elicit more student thinking and reasoning during mathematics lessons. Specifically, it focused on helping teachers (a) learn more mathematics, (b) understand how children learn math, (c) use formative assessment to develop insight into what specific students know and do not know, and (d) develop effective classroom instructional strategies that enable student problem solving. Participants included 105 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers teaching in 19 low-income schools within a single district. Teachers were randomly assigned within schools either to a “business as usual” control group or to receive the professional development. The training consisted of a week-long summer institute and four to six in-service days during the school year. The training was run by full-time trained associates. We find some limited evidence of positive impacts on teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching, but no effects on instructional practice or student outcomes.     

Using Spacing to Enhance Diverse Forms of Learning: Review of Recent Research and Implications for Instruction

Every day, students and instructors are faced with the decision of when to study information. The timing of study, and how it affects memory retention, has been explored for many years in research on human learning. This research has shown that performance on final tests of learning is improved if multiple study sessions are separated—i.e., “spaced” apart—in time rather than massed in immediate succession. In this article, we review research findings of the types of learning that benefit from spaced study, demonstrations of these benefits in educational settings, and recent research on the time intervals during which spaced study should occur in order to maximize memory retention. We conclude with a list of recommendations on how spacing might be incorporated into everyday instruction.