Card Games and Chemistry Teaching Organometallic Reactions Through Card Games

We present a card game suitable for classroom use to provide an interactive and lively experience while studying organometallic reactions, synthesis and catalysis. It is based on a deck of playing cards, and we call it CARS (Catalysis and Reaction Sequences). The object is to arrange a set of random cards served to the player in a correct sequence. The correct sequence is based on the sequence of steps found in the catalytic cycle of a set of reactions. The game is similar to the popular multiplayer card game rummy. We illustrate the game with a set of cards based on the C—C bond forming reactions, but it can be modified by the teacher to suit the topics being taught and could even be converted to a web-based version or a stand-alone study tool operating on a computer.     

Oral health beliefs and behavior among young adults in Appalachian Kentucky

We used communication infrastructure theory to investigate oral health beliefs and behavior among young adults in Appalachian Kentucky. We conducted 7 focus groups with 67 participants who reported poor oral health behavior, but this was not necessarily the result of poor oral health knowledge. Participants identified several sociocultural factors affecting their oral health, including lack of oral health prioritization among older generations, and risky health behaviors that competed with good oral health. These sociocultural factors create a context in which standard oral health recommendations are commonly seen as excessive. Participants described various responses to the poor oral health in the region, including fatalism and a distrust of dentists, and that oral healthcare professionals may be using potentially problematic communication tactics. Practical implications for designing effective oral health promotion campaigns in the region and theoretical implications for developing social-contextual frameworks of oral health promotion are discussed.     

Beyond educational semiotics: A response to Cunningham

The case is made that the theoretical propositions and instructional recommendations that Cunningham attributes to semiotics are shared with other perspectives. However, the theoretical and instructional positions Cunningham favors must be evaluated more completely if they are to be acceptable to the educational psychology community, which is generally more positivist in its orientation than the semiotics community. Nonetheless, we emphasize that the methodological approaches favored by Cunningham have the potential for permitting rapid progress in understanding and evaluating the instructional beliefs and practices consistent with semiotic analyses.     

Ministry of Labour female training programmes between the wars: 1919-39

British Somaliland, a protectorate from which Christian missionaries were excluded, opened its first government‐run school in 1938. The intention of the new director of education, Randall Ellison, was to use written Somali in preference to Arabic. This drew intense criticism from local religious leaders, and had to be abandoned. Accused of being a missionary in disguise, Ellison’s work led to a riot in the town of Burao in 1939 in which three people were killed. Although the school at Berbera functioned for just two terms, the opposition it aroused forms a link in an anti‐Western chain of events that stretches from the 1899–1920 revolt of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abdille Hassan up to the Al‐Qaeda‐linked killing of two British teachers in 2003. This paper is based on Ellison’s letters to his family and on official and other sources.     

The Evolution of Smokey Bear: Environmental Education About Wildfire for Youth

Many environmental education programs in the United States educate youth about the prevention of wildfire and its role in ecosystems. We reviewed 50 wildfire education programs for youth (WEY) in the U.S. through an Internet search and interviews with program providers. We investigated whether they reflect current wildfire science, environmental education (EE) instructional strategies, and place-based education (PBE) approaches. We found that while one-third of the programs focus exclusively on wildfire prevention, suppression, and safety topics, one-third focuses on fire ecology, management, and science, and one-third includes all these topics, mirroring evolving scientific approaches to wildfire. Also, while state and federal agencies design and disseminate much of the curricula used, 60% of WEY programs incorporate local social and ecological contexts, revealing the close relationship between WEY and PBE.     

Higher Educational Cost-Sharing,Dual-Track Tuition Fees,and Higher Educational Access: The East African Experience

Three universal demands characterize higher education globally: the demand for higher quality, for increased access, and for greater equity. In East Africa, where resources are highly constrained, no nation has been able to meet these demands on the basis of public expenditures alone. Instead countries have had to increase resources from nonpublic sources, including tuition fees. In countries with strong resistance to tuition fees and where the difficulty of taxation is combined with a daunting queue of competing public sector needs, a dual-track tuition policy is especially popular whereby the most capable applicants are financed from public resources and other qualified students are allowed admission on a fee-paying basis. This article studies dual-track policies in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. We find that although rewarding ability, the dual-track policies did little to offer opportunities for the poor.     

What Account of Science Shall We Give? A Case Study of Scientists Teaching First-year University Subjects

This article presents a case study of four academic scientists. These academics teach in the first year of a Bachelor of Science degree at a large research-focused Australian university that has demanded and supported a greater focus on undergraduate learning. Taken as a whole, the accounts of science that the first-year academics in this case study gave, and which they are presenting to their students, challenge the images of science and scientists typically presented in school science curricula. Using Roberts' heuristic of Vision 1 and Vision 2 for the broad purposes of learning science, we consider various accounts given of science by these academic scientists and consider how science might appear to a student who takes all four of their subjects.     

Bringing action research to the curriculum development process

As new communication technologies enter the classroom, teachers must attend to how digital platforms impact the interpersonal practices of teaching and learning. In this article, I study email exchanges with three of my students – Jorge, Adriana, and Jason – over the course of one year in an 11th-grade English class at River High School, a struggling American school subject to intervention for failing to meet the federal No Child Left Behind requirements. I ask several questions: what role does email play in my relationships with students; what does email reveal about the ideological content of my communication with students; and how could I use email transformatively? When I studied these email exchanges, I found that while email has the potential to transform literacy instruction, it can also perpetuate a poor student/teacher relationship and reproduce neoliberal narratives that narrowly imagine students as test-takers, workers, and consumers.     

An analysis of prospective teachers’ knowledge for constructing concept maps

Background: Literature contends that a teacher’s knowledge of concept map-based tasks influence how their students perceive the task and execute the creation of acceptable concept maps. Teachers who are skilled concept mappers are able to (1) understand and apply the operational terms to construct a hierarchical/non-hierarchical concept map; (2) identify the legitimacy of the constructed concept map by verifying its graphical structure and its educational utility; and (3) determine the inherent ‘good’ and ‘poor’ qualities of the resulting graphical structure to reiterate the ‘good’ qualities and to coach and provide feedback to alleviate ‘poor’ qualities.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of prospective teachers’ knowledge underpinning the technique used to construct concept maps and thus, explicate their facility to construct concept maps.

Sample, Design and Methods: Data consisted of 200 concept maps constructed by prospective teachers in an elementary science methods course.

Results: Analysis revealed that the prospective teachers had predominantly constructed either hierarchical and/or non-hierarchical concept maps. It is likely that their maps reflect the teaching that they themselves would have experienced in their science classrooms during their own education. Additionally, most of these concepts maps only contained the root concept and subordinate concepts and lacked directional linking lines, linking phrases, labelled lines and propositions.

Conclusions: We argue that teacher educators need to assess their prospective teachers’ understanding of concept mapping in relation to the legitimacy (the nature and quality) of the end-products (graphical structures) of such practices. Prospective teachers also need to understand the educational utility of concept mapping in terms of how these end-products impact and/or effectuate learning.