Understanding voices from the margins: social injustice and agency in first-year students’ literacy narratives

Abstract

This article analyses literacy narratives of first-year students at a South African university. It uses excerpts from the literacy narratives to explain how this writing genre serves as an outlet for reconstructing experiences of social injustice and agency. The article discusses how students’ experiences of social injustice and their sense of agency intersect to influence their literacy development from primary school to university. The article contends that, although literacy narratives give lecturers access to students’ pre-university learning experiences and their discomforts with university literacy expectations, they also capture aspects of societal injustices and their responses to these injustices.     

自学考试转型与学分银行制度的本土探索

随着《教育规划纲要》的颁布实施,学分银行制度的研究和探索受到越来越多的社会关注。本文首先结合国际经验对学分银行的概念及内涵进行了阐述,接着重点分析了自学考试制度在学习成果国家认证方面的本土实践探索,最后对建设我国继续教育学分银行提出了几点意见和建议。     

信息意识概念的新构想与实证

信息意识是信息素养的重要组成部分,影响着信息主体的信息需求表达和信息行为,决定了信息的利用效果。当前关于信息意识的概念模糊,未能体现意识的流动性,使得该领域的研究和实践表层化、单一化,难以有效指导教学实施过程。明确信息意识概念有助于为相关研究提供一种可操作性的定义和交流理解的框架,为信息技术教学实践提供切实可行的指导思想。在心理学意识概念的基础上,结合信息素养的过程结构和目标结构思想,将信息意识界定为信息主体在信息认知活动中产生的感受及感受积累后形成的对信息活动的觉知能力,由信息行为觉知、信息情感、信息观点三要素和信息需求、信息应用、信息交流三阶段组成。探索性因素分析和验证性因素分析验证了该概念模型的合理性。     

The American Kinesiology Association Undergraduate Core Curriculum©

This article describes the elements of the undergraduate core in kinesiology that have been established by the American Kinesiology Association. The American Kinesiology Association also describes a set of ten student-learning outcomes that emanate from the four core content elements. This information has been developed by the American Kinesiology Association to provide guidance regarding the development of locally appropriate curricula and learning outcomes for American Kinesiology Association member institutions. The American Kinesiology Association Core Curriculum is considered to be in the public domain and the American Kinesiology Association reserves the right to reproduce the document in a number of venues and formats. The American Kinesiology Association believes that increased communication relative to this topic will lead to enhanced communication across kinesiology programs which will in turn will lead to an informed sharing of ideas and perspectives. This will result in enhanced curricula in American Kinesiology Association departments across the nation and beyond.     

Engaging with holistic curriculum outcomes: deconstructing ‘working theories’

International debates persist about what constitutes desirable outcomes from early childhood education experiences. The New Zealand early childhood curriculum brings together academic and social-pedagogic outcomes as interdependent holistic constructs named ‘dispositions’ and ‘working theories’. These constructs are complex notions that require interpretation by researchers and teachers in order to be recognised as outcomes by those with a vested interest in children's education: parents and policy-makers. This paper engages with the construct of working theories. It explains its genesis and outlines research activity thus far. The paper draws on findings from a two-year qualitative research project exploring children's interests, inquiries and working theories. The paper analyses two vignettes of working theories into mutually constitutive components of knowledge, skills and strategies, and attitudes and expectations. It argues that deconstructing working theories into elements able to be recognised by those outside early childhood education provides a way to demystify these innovative outcomes. Such scrutiny may assist parents and policy-makers to understand ways that the learning they value is present in the early years. Further, holistic outcomes are responsive to research and scholarship on appropriate pedagogy that encourages children to develop identities as learners, identities critical to living in the twenty-first century.     

Assessment of learning outcomes in Finnish vocational education and training

This article provides an outline and critical review of assessment, an evaluation of learning outcomes, in vocational education and training (VET) in Finland. Assessment of VET is formative, development-orientated and criteria-based. There are no national tests and information from vocational skills demonstrations is used instead. Assessment targets are individual and communal learning focusing on processes instead of reports. Interactive, multifaceted assessments and qualitative methods promote learning and are based on trust – not control. The developmental assessment of learning outcomes started as an experiment in 2002 and as a permanent system in 2007. The whole process has been included and still includes also many challenges of methods, which this article tries to open.     

An analysis of the effectiveness of feedback to students on assessed work

This paper presents the views of students, from a range of schools and disciplines, on the effectiveness of current assessment feedback practices at Flinders University. We also report on a workshop on feedback with teachers. Overall, individual written comments were found to be the most useful form of feedback. However, there was significant variation with the level of satisfaction with feedback and the relative usefulness of different forms of feedback across the different schools and disciplines. This research suggests both the need to improve the effectiveness of such feedback and to tailor the forms of feedback offered to students according to the distinctive teaching and learning environments in different schools and disciplines. To that end, innovation and further research on feedback are justified, and some suggestions are offered.     

Return journey: ‘snakes in the swamp’

In 1985 Falmer Press published my first book, a classroom ethnography entitled Initial Encounters in a Secondary School, which helped establish me as an academic. However, it has long concerned me that the decade-long Victoria Road Lower School Project (as it came to be called) contained two resounding ‘silences’:

• Silence 1 concerned the changing autobiographical, authorial ‘selves’ that lay behind it.

• Silence 2 concerned the unknown impact ‘Initial Encounters’ had upon Lower School and the subsequent careers of the teachers who had featured in it. To investigate this last year I managed to trace and interview some 60% of the staff (15 in total) who had featured in the original study.

‘Return Journey’ is best regarded as an experiment in ‘retrospective ethnography’, raising issues relating to both the autobiographical self and the ethics of ethnography, neither of which were accorded much significance in the late 1970s at the time of the initial research.     

Cooperative Learning and Literacy: A Meta-Analytic Review

Abstract

We conducted a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of cooperative and collaborative learning to support enhanced literacy outcomes. Interventions considered were provided in regular education settings (i.e., not pull-out instruction) with students from Grades 2 through 12. Reviewing more than 30 years of literacy research, we located 18 intervention studies with 29 study cohorts. Included studies primarily used standardized assessments to report on students’ reading, vocabulary, or comprehension achievement, which we analyzed separately. Overall, students had significantly higher literacy achievement scores when instructional interventions utilized cooperative and collaborative activity structures. The overall weighted mean effect sizes ranged from 0.16 to 0.22 (p < .01) with more than 94% of the point estimates being positive. Because cooperative or collaborative learning was always one of multiple intervention components, it was impossible to estimate the unique, added effects of cooperative/collaborative learning. Although the small number of eligible studies precludes any claims about the effectiveness of specific forms of grouping and the circumstances under which programs have more impact, our findings suggest that cooperative and collaborative grouping was a core component of effective literacy interventions, particularly at the elementary level.     

Examining the invisible loop: Tutors in large scale teacher development programmes

Abstract

The recent curriculum changes in the South African education system have necessitated the development of large scale in-service training programmes for teachers. For some teacher training providers this has resulted in utilizing the services of tutors or facilitators from the various regions to deliver the programme. This article examines the role of the part-time tutors in one such programme (designed to upgrade and retrain Mathematical Literacy (ML) teachers in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN)). The purpose of this qualitative case study was to elicit the tutors' perceptions of the learning offer in the various modules and their reflections about the ways in which their participation in the programme enhanced their professional development. The sample comprised 10 out of a total of 25 tutors. Data was generated from the tutors' detailed reflections as documented in response to questions in an open form questionnaire. The participants reported on specific areas of growth in their professional development, including a deepening of their mathematics content knowledge and pedagogic content knowledge. They were also able to provide detailed recommendations for improving the learning offer. The article concludes by calling for increased involvement by tutors in the development and implementation of these large scale teacher development programmes.