Reconsidering the technologies of intellectual inquiry in curriculum design

This paper reports on the design and delivery of classroom pedagogies and students’ engagement with it in two different UK universities. Under the banner of curriculum design and Bourdieu's curriculum principles, the study set out to create modules that provided students with an interdisciplinary perspective on how the web is changing the way citizens live, interact and learn. Focusing on the idea that the web is becoming a tool of intellectual inquiry and an instrument of reproduction of knowledge inequality, the goal of this research was to transform knowledge practices by encouraging a learning habitus that relies on knowing how to learn rather than becoming ‘knowledgeable.’

The paper concludes that the Bourdieuian perspective on curriculum design still holds currency in the digital age, given that it shares an epistemology of practice similar to that advocated by a digital participatory culture. We also offer a critique to our approach, using Bourdieu's logic of practice to examine how education as a field displays (hidden) rules that students embody as their learning habitus. As students’ learning practices become doxified through their educational trajectories, learners find it difficult to engage with a curriculum that aims to diversify pedagogical structures and reflect a changing society.     

Student estrangement in higher education: identity formation and the struggle against stigma

Abstract

While investigation on family estrangement is growing within academic circles, research regarding the interconnection between experiences of estrangement and higher education (HE) is still limited. Sociological understandings of these issues are even scarcer, with policy interventions and practical guidance forming early interventions in HE. Set within the context of Scotland, this paper explores the experiences of HE students who are estranged from their family, and interrogates the ways students develop a sense of identity in the context of their academic lives. The paper applies Goffman’s work on stigma and identity management in relation to Bourdieu’s concept of capitals to cast a critical eye on the identity formation of estranged students. In doing so, we challenge normative assumptions of what it means to be a university student in contemporary society and urge institutions and policy makers to rethink the complexity of students’ academic lives in more inclusive ways.     

The link between executive functions and literacy: introduction

This special issue was born within the M2S Project (Mindfulness to students’ success: Relating executive functions and writing through a mindfulness app to promote children’s cognitive, social, and health-related outcomes) to call researchers and practitioners’ attention to the role that executive functions play on the acquisition and development of literacy skills, a neglected topic in the field. The selected papers include various methods and techniques to examine the relationships between literacy and executive functions across languages/cultures and different age groups, with and without disabilities.

     

Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors of Children with Writing Disabilities

Students with specific learning disabilities (SLDs) are more likely to exhibit internalizing and externalizing behaviors than typically developing peers. Virtually none of the literature, however, reports on the behaviors of students at-risk for writing disabilities (AR-WD). We compared the behaviors of writers who are AR-WD and typically developing writers (TDW) from first through fourth grade (N = 138). We found that students who are AR-WD were only significantly different from TDW on Externalizing and Total Behaviors at Grade 2. These findings illustrate the benefits of studying behavior across different forms of SLD, as it appears that students ARWD do not consistently manifest significant behaviors, although interventions that simultaneously target writing and behavior may be warranted and mutually beneficial.     

Students’ and teachers’ perspectives about quality of engineering education in Portugal

Quality in higher education is a subject of increasing importance. This idea can be supported by looking at different sources, namely, the scientific literature, national and transnational governments’ policies, such as those emerging from the Bologna Process. Also, the internationalisation of higher education and, within it, students’ and staff mobility among institutions, has brought to the agenda the quality issue, particularly with regard to the teaching and learning process. Several authors argue that the meaning of quality depends on who defines it. This article focuses on a study that looks at how teachers and students in higher education institutions, in Portugal and in the domain of Engineering, see the quality issue. Data was collected through interviews to teachers (six) and students (38) in two different Portuguese institutions. The results indicate that, although teachers and students refer to the same dimensions that influence quality, they have different perspectives about their importance. From the point of view of the authors, this discrepancy requires some pedagogical actions in the context where the study was developed and, also, further research to see if the same tendency exists in different settings.     

Improving the acquisition and retention of science material by fifth grade students through the use of imagery interventions

This study examined the effect of imagery interventions for the presentation of novel science vocabulary to fifth grade learners. Eighty-nine students from two schools in Long Island participated in this study and were randomly assigned to four different instructional interventions: a Picture Presentation method, in which a word was paired with a picture; an Image Creation??No Picture method, in which the participants were told to create an image of the word and draw it on paper; an Image Creation??Picture method, in which the students were presented with the picture and then told to draw it; and a Word Only method, which involved the simple verbal presentation of the word. Results demonstrated that students in the imagery intervention groups (Picture Presentation, Image Creation??No Picture, and Image Creation??Picture) scored higher on the outcome measures at both immediate and delayed recall. It was also shown that the deeper the students processed the ??to be learned?? vocabulary words, the higher they scored on the outcome measures. Based on the mean outcome measure scores at both time points, students in the Image Creation??Picture intervention scored the highest, followed by the students in the Image Creation??No Picture intervention, those in the Picture Presentation intervention, and finally the Word Only intervention students. Such a study has implications as to the most effective way to integrate science and literacy and successfully present novel concepts in the classroom.     

School innovation in district context: Comparing traditional public schools and charter schools

Market reforms in education are part of the educational policy landscape in many countries. Central to arguments for market reforms is the idea that competition and choice will spur changes in schools to be more innovative, which in turn will lead to better student outcomes. We define innovation in terms of a practice's relative prevalence in a local district context. A charter school is innovative in its use of a practice if the traditional public schools in its local school district are not using that practice. We explore factors based on arguments for charter schools that may affect a charter schools’ propensity toward innovation to explain variation in levels of innovation across charter schools. We find that, on the whole, charter schools do not fulfill their promise of innovation. Teacher tenure is the most notable exception. Parental involvement is the only characteristic of charter schools that significantly predicts variation in levels of organizational innovativeness.     

The Validity Generalization Model: An Approach to the Analysis of Validity Studies in Physical Education

Abstract

Validity generalization is a method of establishing the generalizability of the validity of a test by examining the results of all previous validity studies of the test of interest. In this paper, the validity generalization model was described and modified for application to concurrent validity studies of motor behavior. An example was provided using a small data set from selected studies of field tests of cardiorespiratory function. The model is recommended as an approach to clarifying the relationship between a test and a criterion measure in physical education and exercise science.     

Three-feature model to reproduce the topology of citation networks and the effects from authors’ visibility on their h-index

Various factors are believed to govern the selection of references in citation networks, but a precise, quantitative determination of their importance has remained elusive. In this paper, we show that three factors can account for the referencing pattern of citation networks for two topics, namely “graphenes” and “complex networks”, thus allowing one to reproduce the topological features of the networks built with papers being the nodes and the edges established by citations. The most relevant factor was content similarity, while the other two – in-degree (i.e. citation counts) and age of publication – had varying importance depending on the topic studied. This dependence indicates that additional factors could play a role. Indeed, by intuition one should expect the reputation (or visibility) of authors and/or institutions to affect the referencing pattern, and this is only indirectly considered via the in-degree that should correlate with such reputation. Because information on reputation is not readily available, we simulated its effect on artificial citation networks considering two communities with distinct fitness (visibility) parameters. One community was assumed to have twice the fitness value of the other, which amounts to a double probability for a paper being cited. While the h-index for authors in the community with larger fitness evolved with time with slightly higher values than for the control network (no fitness considered), a drastic effect was noted for the community with smaller fitness.     

Constitutive Pluralism of Chemistry: Thought Planning, Curriculum, Epistemological and Didactic Orientations

Maybe the most difficult aspect of thinking about chemistry arises from the fact that chemistry isn’t an homogeneous subject. As a central science, it draws on a range of philosophical perspectives which in turn can result in different cognitive, learning and teaching styles in chemical education. This idea, apparently non-controversial, needs to be validated by more research. Without assuming this constitutive pluralism, describing it, and determining it, it becomes difficult to think of curricular goals and content. Thus, if we intend to improve the teaching of chemistry it is necessary, first, to assume explicitly this constitutive pluralism, then to map it in order to find the guiding principles: first for the mind (thought process), then for the curriculum and finally for the teaching, in such a way that it is as close as possible to the chemical way of operating and thinking. This is the aim of this paper. It reports the authors’ experiences in drafting structural ideas and planning for the subject “didactic of chemistry” based on the philosophy of chemistry at the University of Porto in Portugal.