The Role of Counseling Services for Students in Academic Jeopardy: A Preliminary Study

This study examined the impact of an academic counseling approach implemented by counseling center staff for students in academic jeopardy. Participants were 414 undergraduate students placed on academic warning and probation. Students who participated in counseling demonstrated significantly greater increases in grade point average than did students who had not received counseling.     

The Use of the Microgenetic Method with Children with Disabilities: Discovering Competence

In this paper, we advocate the use of the microgenetic method, a methodology that combines dense sampling of observations across time and extensive trial-by-trial analysis, to examine strategy change in children with disabilities. This methodology has revealed new information about normally achieving children's cognition, such as large individual variability in strategy use among children of the same age and more gradual patterns of strategy change than previously assumed. In this paper, we review data from three different microgenetic studies in the domains of memory, arithmetic, and reading with children with or at risk for mental retardation and normally achieving children. Our review indicates that there are similar sequences of strategy change, similar rates of strategy change, and similar frequency of strategy discovery and use in children with and without mental retardation (compared to mental age peers). Implications are discussed for the use of this methodology to design instructional techniques for children with disabilities.     

What do students gain from games? Dice games vs word problems

Learning the fundamentals of probability and random variables can be a struggle for many students. Games by their nature require active participation and reward mastery, lending naturally to the framework of active learning. In this study, we designed and evaluated the efficacy of a lab activity using a game where strategy hinges on sums of dice to teach about linear combinations of independent random variables. We found that both activities lead to improved understandings of course concepts, but the dice game provided increased student engagement and interest.     

Using an interactive platform to recognize the intersection of social and spatial inequalities

With the creation of interactive tasks that allow students to explore spatial ways of knowing in conjunction with their other ways of knowing the world, we create a space where students can make sense of information as they organize these new ideas into their already existing schema. Through the use of a Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) and data from Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMA), students can explore the communities in which they live and work, critically examining opportunities and challenges within a defined space.     

Reflections on the First International iPED Conference,Coventry TechnoCentre,UK, 10–11 September 2006

Through reflection on the First International iPED Conference 2006, and its overarching theme of ‘Pedagogical Research and Academic Identities’, this paper considers the achievement of the wider aims of the conference, which were to facilitate dialogue between researchers in order to explore the conference themes collaboratively, and to provide networking opportunities which would enable participants to build alliances. The abstracts for all papers mentioned are available via the conference website www.coventry.ac.uk/iped2006.