How do people read the passages during a reading comprehension test? The effect of reading purpose on text processing behavior

In this study, we investigate the effect of reading purpose on students’ processing behavior during a reading comprehension test. In a repeated measures design, sixty undergraduates answered multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension questions in a condition with no overarching goal for reading and in an alternate condition where the same students were first provided with the goal of summarizing the text before answering MC questions. Results from eye tracking analysis showed that when students read and answered questions without an overarching goal, they spent much less time reading the passages before answering the questions, more time re-reading the texts while answering the questions, and more time on parts of the text that were not necessary to answer the questions. We conclude that providing examinees without an explicit goal for reading may inadvertently encourage a “search for the answer” reading process, rather than on building a coherent mental model of text content.     

A large-scale test of the relationship between procrastination and performance using learning analytics

Abstract

Many studies have found a relationship between students’ self-reported procrastination and their grades. Few studies have used learning analytic data as a behavioural measure of procrastination in order to predict performance, and there is no systematic research on how this relationship may differ across assessments or disciplines. In this study we analyse nine years’ worth of institutional electronic submission records, a total of 73,608 assignment submissions, to examine the relationship between submission time and grades across assignments, students, courses, and disciplines in higher education. A significant negative relationship was found overall, with students who submitted closer to the deadline obtaining lower grades, however the size of the relationship was negligible, accounting for less than 1% of the variance in grades. The relationship varied significantly depending on student, assignment, course and discipline.     

Equalising schooling,unequalising private supplementary tutoring: access and tracking through shadow education in China

The global expansion of mass schooling has greatly increased opportunities for low-income families, and governments have devoted much effort to equalising access and quality in education systems. Alongside regular schooling, the so-called shadow education system of private supplementary tutoring has grown rapidly across the world. The fact that rich families can purchase more and better quality shadow education undermines the achievements of increased equality of opportunities in formal schooling. Drawing on a mixed-methods study in Shanghai, China, the article shows how shadow education has offset school equalisation policies through differentiation of access and through sorting mechanisms. Shadow education occupies a space beyond strict government control in which privileged families and elite schools ignore and mediate the equalisation policies, seeking competitive advantages. Uneven access to shadow education and tracking within it shape, maintain, and exacerbate inequitable schooling experiences at individual and institutional levels.     

Learning by Doing: Teaching Decision Making through Building a Code of Ethics

Applying abstract ethical principles to the practical business of building a code of applied ethics for a technical communication department teaches students that they share certain unarticulated or even unconscious values that they can translate into ethical principles. Combining abstract theory with practical policy writing can teach technical communication students to become increasingly aware of ethical actions without restricting ethics solely to abstractions or rules.     

Stichwort: Professionelle Kompetenz von Lehrkräften

Ohne Zusammenfassung      

Possible role of confounded taste stimuli in conditioned taste aversions

In many publications, Sjödén, Archer, and their colleagues have studied conditioned taste aversions and found that in addition to taste, the bottle and/or spout containing a solution exerts strong control over the expression of an aversion. For example, Sjödén and Archer claim that this bottle stimulus will support a bottle-illness association even with long delays between the bottle and illness and after only a single conditioning trial. They have interpreted their results as indicating that contextual effects are important in taste-aversion learning. However, a confound in their procedure, stemming from the bottles they used, could explain their results in a simple way. Sjödén and Archer have emphasized that the bottle stimuli they used to distinguish between contexts consisted of one of two different sizes of drinking spouts, the larger of which made a clicking noise when licked. However, the larger spouts were always attached to plastic bottles and the smaller spouts were always attached to glass bottles. If discriminable tastes from the plastic bottles existed, then taste may have been inadvertently manipulated. Support for the likelihood of a plastic taste includes the seminal work on taste-aversion learning that stemmed from the serendipitous use of plastic bottles in the cage that rats were irradiated in and glass bottles in the home cages (see Garcia, McGowan, & Green, 1972). In these early demonstrations, rats learned to avoid the taste of water in the plastic bottles but not the taste of water in the glass bottles.     

The limited value of planning in education: Getting back to the basics isn't all about curriculum

In these times of tight budgets and political intoleance for taxation, public schools, particularly urban public schools, will continually have to look for ways in which to spend less while dealing with ever-increasing societal problems. While the ability of schools to improve the overal “product” with less resources is highly suspect, this article addresses one way in which spending less might actually improve school perfomance. The best planners in the best schools should be the administration, techers, students, parents, and the comminitu at large, and not outside esxperts hired to improve a school's “comprehensive” or “strategic” plan. By forcing the segments of the public that have the largest stake in the educational outcomes of schools to work together to plan for the future, schools will improve the efficacy of their staffs, their students, and allow parents the self-satisfaction of playing an important role in their children's education. An improtant side effect of such a method may be an increasing awareness by the public of the difficulties that schools face, and perhaps a better understanding of the important need for higher expenditures. His research interests include professionalism, collective bargaining, and educational reform. His articles have appeared inPeople and Education, and a recent article has been aceepted for publication in theJournal of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector.     

Pricing policy and the college choice process

Following the presentation of a marketing management paradigm for higher educational institutions, this paper discuses some aspects of the pricing policy process in colleges and universities. A statistical model of the college choice process is developed, and some empirical results related to the effects of price, among other factors, on the collegechoice decision-making behavior process of high school seniors are presented and interpreted. The two most important factors affecting the college choice process are seen to be college quality and price-related considerations. Marketing implications of these results are discussed.Presented at the Annual Forum of the Association For Institutional Research, Houston, Texas, May 1978.