Wearable Technologies for Anxious Adolescents

Abstract

Nearly one in three adolescents in our country experience stress or anxiety to the extent that it negatively effects their ability to cope with daily life demands. However, educators are not well prepared to support students who have anxiety-related issues. One approach for supporting adolescents with anxiety-related issues involves the use of wearable technologies. These devices support self-regulation by providing real-time physiological marker information. Wearers can then become more mindful of their stress at that moment and implement positive stress or anxiety-reducing interventions. This article provides an overview of wearable technologies and related research and describes steps that support adolescents who have wearables for addressing their anxiety.     

Teaching about sustainability through inquiry-based science in Irish primary classrooms: the impact of a professional development programme on teacher self-efficacy,competence and pedagogy

Abstract

Research suggests that innovative and engaging professional development is instrumental in supporting teachers in developing their competence and confidence in teaching sustainability. An international initiative was developed to explore whether a competencies-oriented Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) professional development model was transferable across three different international contexts (Ireland, Germany and Mexico). This paper reports on the adaptation of this model within the Irish context, through the development of an innovative professional development programme for primary teachers. Through a mixed-methods approach which gathered data via pre- and post-programme surveys, teachers’ reflective journals and post-programme group interviews, the paper explores Irish primary school teachers’ experiences of, and attitudes towards, teaching sustainability through science education after participation in a professional development programme. The findings suggest that this programme, structured around the existing evidence for effective professional development in science education and ESD, positively influences teachers’ self-efficacy, supports teachers’ critical engagement with sustainability competencies and promotes the development of transformative pedagogies for sustainability through Inquiry-Based Science Education.     

A systematic review of controlled trials evaluating interventions in adult literacy and numeracy

This paper reports a systematic review of the quasi‐experimental literature in the field of adult literacy and numeracy, published between 1980 and 2002. We included 27 controlled trials (CTs) that evaluated strategies and pedagogies designed to increase adult literacy and numeracy: 18 CTs with no effect sizes (incomplete data) and 9 CTs with full data. These nine trials are examined in detail for this paper. Of these nine trials, six evaluated interventions in literacy and three evaluated interventions in literacy and numeracy. Three of the nine trials showed a positive effect for the interventions, five trials showed no difference and one trial showed a positive effect for the control treatment. The quality of the trials was variable, but many of them had some methodological problems. There was no evidence of publication bias in the review. There have been few attempts to expose common adult literacy or numeracy programmes to rigorous evaluation and therefore in terms of policy and practice it is difficult to make any recommendations as to the type of adult education that should be supported. In contrast, however, the review does provide a strong steer for the direction to be taken by educational researchers: because of the present inadequate evidence base rigorously designed randomised controlled trials and quasi‐experiments are required as a matter of urgency.     

断定、否定、承诺、资格与不相容性(以及一些推论)

在这篇短文里,我将比较Huw Price([7])和我本人([9])关于否定的对称性处理的两种不同方式,并与Robert Brandom关于承诺、资格和不相容性的分析进行对比.这两种方式都可以归为Brandom所谓的规范语用学,是一种关于意义的语义学反实在论:语汇的含义是由人们的受规则支配(即规范的)的语用实践(语用学)予以明确的.这样的处理不同于直觉主义者的语义学反实在论,因为它提供了一种方式,使得我们可以区分"A"和"A得以保证"的推理意义.尽管"证明"具有某种中心地位,但"实证"并不是意义的首要承载者.而这种区分植根于对人们语用实践的细致分析.一方面,根据Price以及我本人的看法,人们既做断定也做否定:另一方面,Brandom则区分了自上而下的承诺与自下而上的资格,以及据此而定义的不相容性概念.本文考察这些不同进路之间的各种关联,并讨论从这些考察中浮现出的一种关于证明的看法.     

A Research Preparatory Program for First-Year College Students: Student Selection and Preparation Lead to Persistence in Research

Undergraduate research experiences may increase persistence in STEM majors. We describe a research program that targets first-year students selected for their curiosity and attitudes towards science. We explain the implementation of the program over 3 years and present evaluation data using a group of matched controls. Participants and controls pursued STEM degrees at equivalent rates, but participants were significantly more involved in research. Initial laboratory interest and mentor pairing may have played a role in this finding. Female participants, particularly those with male laboratory mentors, engaged in more research than men.     

Countering post-truths through ecopedagogical literacies: Teaching to critically read ‘development’ and ‘sustainable development’

Abstract

A key aspect of teaching ‘development’ is understanding the conundrums and tensions between balance and imbalance with constructs of global (all humans, all societies, all populations) and planetary (all of Earth, including humans) spheres. This article deconstructs some key tenets of populist post-truth frameworks (termed as post-truthism in this article) as affecting how development and sustainability is taught within ecopedagogies and argues for structural grounding of ecopedagogical literacy within pedagogies as increasingly imperative. Rooted in critical theories and popular education movements in Latin America, through reinvention of Freirean Pedagogy, the literacy’s root word ecopedagogy is transformative teaching in which educators dialectically problem-pose the politics of socio-environmental connections through local, global, and planetary lenses. Without deepened and widened readings of development and sustainability viewed within both global and planetary spheres, in conjunction with development’s effects upon local societies and ecological systems, developmental actions are unsustainable and defies the definition of development. Discussed will be the ecopedagogical tenets, including emergent ecopedagogical literacies, of critical socio-historical analysis, local and diverse epistemologies, deconstruction of pedagogies on the environment, and problem-posing one’s and others’ livelihood to counter post-truthism.     

Teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of commercialisation in Australian public schools

This paper explores teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of commercialisation in Australian public schools, reporting on findings from an open-ended survey question from an exploratory study that sought to investigate teacher and school leader perceptions and experiences of commercialisation. Commercialisation, for the purposes of this paper, is understood as the creation, marketing and sale of education goods and services to schools by for-profit providers and often includes (but is not limited to) the provision of curriculum content, assessment services, data infrastructures, digital learning, remedial instruction, professional development and school administration support. Our account highlights that commercialisation is prevalent in the day-to-day practice of Australian public schools. The perceptions of teachers and leaders suggest that commercialisation is complex, with both affordances and challenges. Respondents acknowledged that aspects of commercialisation are necessary for successfully running schools and classrooms in the 21st century, but also noted that there is a fine line beyond which these seemingly innocuous services become perilous. Concerns focused on how particular services are leading to the deprofessionalisation of teachers as they have less autonomy over what to teach and how to teach it. Moreover, teachers and school leaders reported being perturbed by the idea that commercial providers and services might work to replace teachers in the future. Drawing on these data we argue that growing commercialisation in Australian public schools clearly requires an ethical debate that schools, education professionals, policy makers and interested publics are yet to have.     

The politics of teaching time in disciplinary and control societies

Abstract

This article argues that education reform agendas which use policy levers, standardised testing and new regulatory authorities to steer teachers’ work at a distance are creating a new temporal politics. Evidence from interviews with teachers and principals in Australian schools suggests that these reforms are impacting on individual experiences of the rhythms of their day-to-day work. First, there is a disquieting perception of an acceleration of their working life. Second, and related, many teachers and principals spoke of feeling ‘out of time’, or out of rhythm, with the new expectations of their work. Using Deleuze’s control societies, we posit that this arrhythmia exemplifies the experience of the classroom being ‘opened up’ for the purposes of comparison. This breakdown of the enclosed classroom is affected through the datafication of teaching.