Visual representations of academic misconduct: Enhancing information literacy skills

Courses: This unit activity is suited for courses with research and source citation components, such as the Basic Communication; Interpersonal, and Organizational Communication courses.

Objectives: Students will (a) visually interpret and analyze instances of plagiarism; (b) revise their work to use proper citations and reduce instances of plagiarism; and (c) understand source citation as a form of academic honesty.     

Communicating openness in deliberation

Normative and practical accounts of deliberative democracy cite open-mindedness as a key feature of good deliberation. Yet scholars have often focused on attitude change or self-report measures to empirically demonstrate openness. This paper draws on grounded practical theory to understand openness as a discursive stance in public deliberation. Openness is used to address four practical problems encountered in deliberation: disagreement, opinion formation, dysfunctional community problem-solving, and deliberative sense making. Indicating openness and expressing attitude change are different discursive practices. Expecting participants to refrain from forming opinions before deliberation may be naïve. Instead, participants’ eagerness to make sense of deliberation by invoking shared understanding and openness should be used to develop meta-consensus.     

LEARNING POTENTIAL ASSESSMENT AND ADAPTATION TO THE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT: THE USEFULNESS OF THE ACFS FOR ASSESSING IMMIGRANT PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

The objective of this study was to test the usefulness of dynamic assessment for determining cognitive abilities such as classification, auditory and visual memory, pattern sequences, perspective taking, verbal planning, learning potential, and metacognition in immigrant preschool children with and without competence in the dominant language (Spanish). One hundred seventy‐six preschool‐children were distributed in three groups according to the cultural background of their parents (native Spanish/Spanish‐speaking immigrants/non‐Spanish speaking immigrants). The children were assessed by means of the K‐BIT, the Application of Cognitive Functions Scale (ACFS), and metacognition, language competence and academic performance estimates. The results show that although there are initial differences in execution between the two groups (Spanish/immigrants), there are no differences with regard to learning potential. The study also demonstrates the importance of behavioral, attitudinal, and metacognitive variables in children's test execution and academic performance.     

Video games vs. reading and school/cognitive performances: a study on 27000 middle school teenagers

Video games are a very common leisure activity among teenagers and the aim of this study is to analyse their relations with cognitive and school performances. This study is part of a broad survey, conducted on 27,000 French teenagers (14.5?years old) in middle school (9th grade). The survey contained both a questionnaire on leisure activities practised by teenagers and school/cognitive tests: Comprehension tests, Math, School Knowledge, and Reasoning. The activity frequency (‘never’ to ‘every day or almost’) is studied on five kinds of video games (i.e. action/fighting) vs. seven reading activities (i.e. crime/thriller/fantasy). Results show that there are no correlations or very slight ones between Video Games and cognitive/school tests. Reading activities have potentially important associations with cognition and especially school tests. To conclude, video games are primarily recreational activities and the cognitive stimulation they produce is very different from the one involved in specialised academic subjects     

Designing learning environments to teach interactive Quantum Physics

This study aims at describing and analysing systematically an interactive learning environment designed to teach Quantum Physics, a second-year physics course. The instructional design of Quantum Physics is a combination of interactive lectures (using audience response systems), tutorials and self-study in unit blocks, carried out with small groups. Individual formative feedback was introduced as a rapid assessment tool to provide an overview on progress and identify gaps by means of questioning students at three levels: conceptual; prior knowledge; homework exercises. The setup of Quantum Physics has been developed as a result of several loops of adjustments and improvements from a traditional-like type of teaching to an interactive classroom. Results of this particular instructional arrangement indicate significant gains in students’ achievements in comparison with the traditional structure of this course, after recent optimisation steps such as the implementation of an individual feedback system.     

Principled Improvement in Science: Forces and proportional relations in early secondary-school teaching

In response to continuing concerns about student attainment and participation in science and mathematics, the epiSTEMe project took a novel approach to pedagogy in these two disciplines. Using principles identified as effective in the research literature (and combining these in a fashion not previously attempted), the project developed topic modules for early secondary-school teaching in the UK, arranged for their implementation in classrooms, and evaluated the results. This paper reports the development, implementation, and evaluation of one of the epiSTEMe science modules. Entitled Forces and Proportional Relations, the module covers standard curricular material in the domain of forces, while paying particular attention to the proportional nature of many key constructs. It was developed in collaboration with a small group of teachers; implemented subsequently in 16 classrooms, in all cases involving students from the first year of secondary school; and evaluated through comparison with first-year students in 13 control classrooms who were studying the topic using established methods. Evaluation addressed topic mastery and opinions about the topic and the manner in which it was taught. While further research is required before definite conclusions are warranted, results relating to topic mastery provide grounds for optimism about the epiSTEMe approach. Furthermore, student opinions about the module were positive.     

Demystifying the demand relationship between online and print products under one newspaper brand: the case of Taiwan and the emergence of a universal pattern

This study uncovers a universal pattern regarding the oft-misunderstood demand relationship between online and print products under one newspaper brand. Growing from the portfolio management perspective and building on previous research conducted in the US and Hong Kong, this study examines the newspaper market in Taiwan. Secondary analysis of survey data collected from 7706 Web users confirmed that: (1) the print edition attains a much higher penetration relative to its online counterpart, suggesting that more people would rather consume the print edition over free Web offerings; and (2) compared with the general public, readers of the online edition were more, not less, likely to read the same newspaper's print edition. Such counter-intuitive findings carry important theoretical and managerial implications regarding the management of multiple product offerings under one newspaper brand.     

Variation in the effectiveness of instructional interactions across preschool classroom settings and learning activities

This exploratory study examined the extent to which the effectiveness of instructional interactions varies among classroom social settings (i.e., large group, free choice, meals, and routines), learning activities (i.e., shared reading, literacy, math, science, social studies, and esthetics), or their combination. Participants were 314 preschool teachers primarily serving children from low-income backgrounds. Instructional interactions were measured in multiple cycles across one day of classroom observation as teachers engaged in a variety of settings and learning activities. Linear mixed models indicated that the effectiveness of teachers’ instructional interactions was generally higher in the large group setting than in free choice, meals, and routine settings. When considering settings and learning activities in combination, teachers displayed the most effective global instructional interactions when leading science activities in large group or free choice settings, and the most effective literacy-focused interactions during large group literacy activities.