The effects of ascending,descending, and fixed criteria on student performance and attitude in a mastery-oriented course

This study examined whether the criteria for mastering unit quizzes in a mastery-oriented course should increase, decrease, or remain fixed across units. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of three treatments, one in which mastery criteria on unit quizzes gradually increased, a second in which mastery criteria gradually decreased, and a third in which mastery criteria remained fixed. Results indicated that students in the fixed criterion condition proceeded through the course at the steadiest pace and performed better than the other students on the unit quizzes they mastered. In addition, the vast majority of subjects indicated that they preferred the fixed criterion condition. These results strengthen the notion that the level of performance expected of students in a mastery-oriented course should not vary across units.     

人是如何学习的--兼谈技术在学习中的作用

在去年春天的教育大会中,我参加了一次有关教学技术在转变学校的教与学中的潜力的讨论。其中有一个发言人讲述了发生在他14岁儿子身上的故事。儿子跟他一样,对教育技术的新鲜玩艺非常钟情,并总是希望拥有即将在市面上流行的最新和最先进的技术产品。有一天,儿子将一个电视机遥控     

Optimizing Web-Based Instruction: A Case Study Using Poultry Processing Unit Operations

ABSTRACT:  Food companies and supporting industries need inexpensive, revisable training methods for large numbers of hourly employees due to continuing improvements in Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) programs, new processing equipment, and high employee turnover. HACCP-based food safety programs have demonstrated their value by reducing the number and frequency of multimillion-dollar food recalls. The focus for the future must be proactive training of plant personnel to ensure continuous improvements in plant food safety and quality. In response to this need, we developed training modules focused on applying HACCP principles, quality aspects, and production information to individual poultry unit operations. Learning objectives were evaluated using discount usability testing techniques to optimize the delivery system and to ensure a satisfactory e-learning experience. Discount usability testing of this virtual orientation was successful in obtaining vast amounts of feedback. Usability issues with the training materials were identified. Expected completion times were not met by most participants, indicating that a change in the format of the course might be necessary, perhaps segmenting the modules into smaller sections to be reviewed independently of one another. Another suggestion by the evaluators was to include narration for the sections, which might in turn speed up the completion times. A navigation error was discovered by these users, as well as other critical errors in design. Other errors, such as font inconsistencies and page design changes, were also discovered by the participants.     

Making it happen: Possibilities and pitfalls of Cunningham's educational semiotic

In fundamental agreement with Cunningham's overall thesis, we attempt in this paper to articulate what an educational semiotic might look like on a practical level. For educational psychologists, it should mean an increased awareness of the limited, localized world views offered by current models of cognition and an increased attentiveness to alternate models. For teachers, an educational semiotic offers integration of cognition and affect and instructional strategies that depend upon and facilitate many ways of knowing. For an educational semiotic to be realized, however, there must be much greater attention paid to the roles of motivation and metacognition in semiotic pedagogy.     

“I never felt more uncomfortable in my life”: University students' discursive constructions of “the lesbian convention”

In this paper, we draw from the body of theories on the discursive construction of prejudice to examine the communicative strategies that university students employ to manage their talk about lesbian women who visited their campus during a women's music festival. We found that, although students used a number of strategies that communicate heterosexism subtly, the students relied more often on strategies that communicate heterosexism in blatant ways‐a finding that contradicts much of what has been written about the discursive construction of prejudice. We theorize that these findings are, in part, due to the methods we used to gather data: No researcher was present during the discussions. We conclude that this methodology may be useful for teaching students the powerful nature of discourse in the perpetuation of prejudice.     

Tasks and trajectories in learning to teach

University‐based teacher‐education programmes in the USA confront mounting pressure to demonstrate that graduates will have a significant and positive impact on student achievement. Such pressure has forced teacher educators to wrestle with the question of what constitutes compelling evidence that teacher candidates will indeed have such an impact. This paper presents the deliberations and resulting investigation of a team of university faculty members seeking to account for preservice elementary‐school teachers’ learning and development. It offers a preliminary articulation of a trajectory of learning, and a critique of the tasks and the programmatic experiences from which this trajectory is constructed.     

Measures of cognitive structure: Do they assess learning at the level of comprehension?

One purpose of this study was to determine whether cognitive structure, assessed by psychometric measures of concept interrelatedness, can be developed when the students initially do not know what concept relationships exist and what they mean. The second purpose was to apply those measures to a learning situation that has produced a nonspecific transfer effect, i.e., the facilitative effect of concrete examples on learning abstract passages, to attempt to explain this effect more completely. Five groups of 20 students each read two prose passages and took recall and structure assessment tests on the second passage. Results (1) indicated that the nonspecific facilitative transfer effect was replicated and (2) offered some support for the contention that the cognitive structure which proximity measures assess can be trained to correspond to content structure, but that related recall remains low. With resolution of some of the methodological issues surrounding these measures, however, clearer explanation of transfer effects and assessment of higher order learning may be facilitated.     

Play and learning for the special child

Marcy Guddemi teaches Early Childhood Education at the University of South Florida, College of Education, Tampa, FL.     

Teachers’ thoughts on e-readers in the elementary school classroom

Despite the popularity of e-readers and the enthusiasm of some for their use in secondary education, their utility in elementary education has not yet been systematically explored. Some advantages and disadvantages to teaching elementary literacy with e-readers are identified here. A convenience sample of ten teachers from a variety of different types of elementary schools and classrooms who were e-reader novices read a chapter of a grade-appropriate book on a Kindle and evaluated its use for their students. The teachers gave their opinions and ideas on how the devices could be implemented. Three specific technological affordances of an e-reader that carry pedagogical implications are discussed: the text-to-speech and dictionary functions, and the idea of unlimited access to books.