Reconstructing Classroom Facts: Transforming Lower Track Science Classrooms

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Competence vs. Performance and recent approaches to cognitive assessment

The importance of accurate cognitive assessment and its relationship to effective instructional programming are discussed. Traditional methods of test administration are less than optimally sensitive to the cognitive abilities and processes under investigation. A disparity between competence and performance can occur across a variety of populations due to task and situational demands, as well as to motivational and personality factors. Recent approaches aimed at lessening the gap between competence and performance are discussed, along with their strengths and weaknesses.     

Using New Technology to Improve Assessment

What are the areas of testing that will be most affected by new technology" Who is doing work on the cutting edge of these areas" What will be the ultimate effect of these innovations"     

Perceptions of childhood caretakers and borderline personality symptomatology

Previous studies indicate that individuals with borderline personality disorder come from families marked by high levels of psychopathology as well as dysfunctional parenting styles—themes that tend to engender negative attitudes toward parents. However, we are not aware of any studies that have examined perceptions of parenting quality and borderline personality symptoms in a clinical but non-psychiatric population—the purpose of the present study. Using a cross-sectional self-report survey methodology in a sample of internal medicine outpatients, we examined participants’ perceptions of the quality of parental caretaking using a one-item assessment, and examined borderline personality symptomatology using two measures. Ratings of the quality of parental care were statistically significantly inversely correlated with scores on both measures of borderline personality symptomatology. After controlling for the number of caretakers during childhood, the observed statistical relationships remained statistically significant. In this primary care sample, participants with borderline personality symptomatology perceived parents more negatively than those without such symptomatology.     

Group communication and problem‐solving effectiveness I: A critical review of inconsistent findings

A review of the existing research literature indicates that, for the most part, researchers have generally failed to identify consistent and meaningful relationships between group interaction and group performance. This has led to a growing concern among small group scholars that unless a suitable explanation can be advanced to account for such failure, it may be necessary to re‐examine the widely held assumption that group interaction plays an important role in effective group performance. This paper attempts to explain why previous research has failed to identify consistent and meaningful relationships between group interaction behaviors and group performance outcomes. In addition, it offers an alternative approach to investigating the possible relationships between group interaction and group performance.     

Teaching the teacher: exploring STEM graduate students’ nature of science conceptions in a teaching methods course

ABSTRACT

Graduate students regularly teach undergraduate STEM courses and can positively impact students’ understanding of science. Yet little research examines graduate students’ knowledge about nature of science (NOS) or instructional strategies for teaching graduate students about NOS. This exploratory study sought to understand how a 1-credit Teaching in Higher Education course that utilised an explicit, reflective, and mixed-context approach to NOS instruction impacted STEM graduate students’ NOS conceptions and teaching intentions. Participants included 13 graduate students. Data sources included the Views of Nature of Science (VNOS-Form C) questionnaire administered pre- and post-instruction, semi-structured interviews with a subset of participants, and a NOS-related course project. Prior to instruction participants held many alternative NOS conceptions. Post-instruction, participants’ NOS conceptions improved substantially, particularly in their understandings of theories and laws and the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. All 12 participants planning to teach NOS intended to use explicit instructional approaches. A majority of participants also integrated novel ideas to their intended NOS instruction. These results suggest that a teaching methods course for graduate students with embedded NOS instruction can address alternative NOS conceptions and facilitate intended use of effective NOS instruction. Future research understanding graduate students' NOS understandings and actual NOS instruction is warranted.     

Making learning last: teachers’ long-term retention of improved nature of science conceptions and instructional rationales

ABSTRACT

Despite successful attempts to improve learners’ nature of science (NOS) conceptions through explicit, reflective approaches, retention of improved conceptions is rarely addressed in research. The issue of context for NOS instruction has implications for this retention. Whether to contextualise has been the question occupying science educators’ attention. We think this question is misplaced. Instead, we build upon recent research addressing a context continuum – drawing on the strengths of both contextualised and noncontextualised NOS instruction – to improve retention. Although there are many different potential contexts for NOS instruction, this investigation focuses on science content as context. The present investigation focused on long-term retention of improved NOS conceptions and rationales for NOS instruction. Participants were all 25 teachers who completed a professional development programme (PDP) utilising a mixed contextualisation approach to NOS instruction. We classified teachers’ NOS conceptions into three levels of understanding using the Views of the Nature of Science Form-C responses and interviews three times over the year: pre-, post-, and 10-month delayed post-PDP. Results indicated that initially participants held many alternative NOS conceptions. Post-instruction, responses were substantially improved across all NOS concepts. Furthermore, nearly all of the participants’ conceptions were retained across the academic year following the PDP. Participants offered varied rationales for NOS instruction including its potential to improve students’ scientific literacy, perceptions of the relevance of science, improve positive risk-taking, and increase tolerance for differences. These results contrast favourably with previous reports of the retention of improvements in NOS conceptions over time.     

Gauging e-government: A report on implementing services among American cities

Municipalities face a dilemma as they pursue technologically enabled modes of providing traditional services. The planning stages of e-government amount to triage: which specific municipal functions and services can a municipality afford to implement (or which services can they afford not to implement) given the costs of technology and technological capability? Little in the way of defining the leading edge of innovation among cities exists. To date, the literature on e-government “best practices” tends to stress creating standards for evaluating web-enabled services rather than for benchmarking the actual status of e-government implementation. In other words, a well-developed literature is emerging around standards by which municipal websites can be evaluated such as navigability and content standards. These standards do not give us insight, however, into the specific functions and services as they emerge on municipality websites. As a means toward addressing this lacuna, the authors created a rubric for benchmarking implementation among cities nationwide using a broad range of functional dimensions and assigning municipalities “e-scores.” In this paper, the authors describe these efforts, their approach and their findings.