A Study of Student Consultants’ Comfort Levels With Research-Related Tasks

Student consulting is a form of problem-based learning through which students work on strategic issues for organizations. To explore how students perceive their research-related tasks, 15 student consultants were asked to evaluate their comfort levels with seven tasks—adapted from the Association of College and Research Libraries' Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education—in three contexts: class assignments, consulting projects, and future workplaces. The comfort levels revealed by the students have implications for a variety of instructional settings and offer many directions for future studies.     

Integrating an Informationist Into Graduate Education: Case Study With Preliminary Results

An informationist taught, consulted, and mentored graduate students enrolled in a graduate research project course in Health Informatics. An observational cohort study was conducted to determine the effect of an early (first term) and continued (subsequent term) exposure of course-integrated instruction, individual consultations, information resource mentoring, and educational collaboration partnership on the development of information literacy, research skills, and integrative competencies in graduate students. Student progress was assessed by survey, class performance, and faculty feedback. The course-integrated lectures, consultations, mentoring, and educational partnership between the informationist and academic advisors increased the students’ course performance, information literacy, and research skills in graduate students.     

Health Sciences Librarians' Research on Medical Students' Use of Information for Their Studies at The Medical School,University of Queensland,Australia

This study reports the findings of research undertaken by health sciences librarians at the University of Queensland Library into how medical students use information for their studies, particularly resources and services provided by the Library. The methods utilized were an online survey and focus groups. Results indicated that students favor print resources over electronic, value accessing resources on a one-stop basis, and prefer training to be delivered flexibly. The implication of these results for future resource selection, service provision, and instructional design and delivery is discussed.     

‘Just Be Quiet and Listen to Exactly What He's Saying': Conceptualising power relations in inquiry-oriented classrooms

Interest in inquiry-based science education (IBSE) often pays little heed to the complex power relations that exist within classrooms. A common obstacle to inquiry is that it strongly diverges from current classroom culture and hence, is outside the sphere of teachers' and students' experiences. Teachers and students bring expectations to the classroom that are entrenched in traditional practices and influenced by dynamics of power that exist within all teacher–student relationships. This study, which emerged during a wider study of the use of a Virtual Chemistry Lab in supporting IBSE, explores how classroom discourse constructs and maintains power relations that either stifle or facilitate inquiry-based approaches in two science lessons. Research methods included teacher interviews, student focus groups, video-recorded lessons, and student self-assessments. Findings indicate distinctive features of power inside the classroom that impact on inquiry-based instruction, such as predominant teacher monitoring on task completion over task understanding, lack of student engagement in ownership of scientific ideas, and prevailing norms of what effective teacher questioning is. We discuss implications for IBSE change efforts, highlighting that well-established power relations currently represent an important limiting factor in the capacity of teachers' IBSE implementation.     

Essential Criteria to Characterize Constructivist Teaching: Derived from a review of the literature and applied to five constructivist‐teaching method articles

Constructivism is an important theory of learning that is used to guide the development of new teaching methods, particularly in science education. However, because it is a theory of learning and not of teaching, constructivism is often either misused or misunderstood. Here we describe the four essential features of constructivism: eliciting prior knowledge, creating cognitive dissonance, application of new knowledge with feedback, and reflection on learning. We then use the criteria we developed to evaluate five representative published articles that claim to describe and test constructivist teaching methods. Of these five articles, we demonstrate that three do not adhere to the constructivist criteria, whereas two provide strong examples of how constructivism can be employed as a teaching method. We suggest that application of the four essential criteria will be a useful tool for all professional educators who plan to implement or evaluate constructivist teaching methods.     

Teaching Nature of Scientific Inquiry in Chemistry: How do German chemistry teachers use labwork to teach NOSI?

Learning about scientific inquiry (SI) is an important aspect of scientific literacy and there is a solid international consensus of what should be learned about it. Learning about SI comprises both the doing of science (process) and knowledge about the nature of scientific inquiry (NOSI). German reform documents promote inquiry generally but do not equally address these two sides of inquiry. This study explores how teachers incorporate learning about SI into laboratory work in the Chemistry classroom. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 secondary school Chemistry teachers (8 of them holding a Ph.D. in Chemistry) from Germany. The results indicate that teaching NOSI is not a primary goal for teachers. Still, some aspects of NOSI seem to be more easily incorporated in the Chemistry classroom, for example, critical testing and hypothesis and prediction. Teachers state 2 main criteria to identify suitable chemical laboratory work for teaching NOSI: adaptable parameters and low level of required content knowledge. Surprisingly, differences can be found between Ph.D. and non-Ph.D. teachers’ views on teaching inquiry. The findings of this study can be used to (a) select opportunities for targeted research on teaching NOSI in the Chemistry classroom, (b) inform curriculum material development and (c) give impetus to science teacher education and professional development.     

对接工作岗位的高职助产专业技能抽查标准开发

标准开发是集集体智慧、团队经验、政策支持于一体的提炼过程。为完善助产专业学生技能抽测方法,检查高职院校助产专业技能教学水平,联合相关高职院校,对接助产工作岗位,通过市场调研、专家论证、预试与调整等过程,开发出一套由“助产核心技能＋护理基本技能”组成的9个技能组合模块且适合于高职助产专业的技能抽查的标准与题库,为培养规范化助产专业人员服务。     

Students’ use of evaluative constructivism: comparative degrees of intentional learning

Evaluative constructivism is used to describe how students derived learning intentions and made choices about what they would do during a unit of work in a final-year high school biology class, as they conducted an inquiry into the social and ethical issues associated with cancer. The context of the study, theoretical background and overview of students’ awareness of their learning strengths and needs are related to the level of achievement in the essays they wrote. The case studies illustrate the diversity in the extent of knowledge and use of learning strategies and the implications this has for the level of support teachers can provide to enable students to be more self-directed. The concepts outlined here have very wide application to multiple learning contexts.     

Investigating the emerging generic features of the blog writing task across three discrete learner groups at a higher education institution

Increasingly universities have supported several innovative flexible learning projects over the past few years, and there exists a small but enthusiastic group of staff who have demonstrated that something is possible. Our task is to suggest additional strategies that can realize some of the strategic goals set for flexible learning over the next few years. This paper is based upon the assumption that a strategic direction has already been chosen and suggests some strategies to ensure practical and realistic outcomes.

Création d'une communauté virtuelle de troisième cycle universitaire: apprentissage de conduites d'évaluation.

Durant plusieurs années un nombre croissant d'universités ont soutenu de nombreux projets innovants d'apprentissage flexible et il existe des groupes restreints mais enthousiastes d'enseignants qui ont démontré que l'on peut faire quelque chose. Notre tâche est de suggérer des stratégies complémentaires qui permettent d'atteindre certains des objectifs fixés pour les apprentissages flexibles dans les prochaines années. Cet article est fondé sur l'hypothèse qu'une direction stratégique a déjà été choisie et suggéré certaines stratégies pour obtenir des résultats pratiques et réalistes.

Erstellen einer virtuellen Gemeinschaft für Absolventen: Lernantrieb durch Einstufung

In zunehmendem Maße haben Universitäten in den letzten Jahren verschiedene innovative Projekte für Flexibles Lernen unterstützt. Es gibt eine kleine aber begeisterte Gruppe von Mitarbeitern, die gezeigt hat, daß auf diesem Gebiet durchaus etwas möglich ist. Unsere Aufgabe ist, zusätzliche Strategien vorzuschlagen, die einige der strategischen Ziele, die für Flexibles Lernen gesetzt sind, in den nächsten Jahren erreichen helfen. Dieses Papier geht von der Annahme aus, daß es schon eine strategische Richtung gibt und schlägt einige Taktiken vor, um praktikable und realistische Resultate sicherzustellen.     

A survey of video game players in a public,urban research university

A survey was conducted in a public, research university located in a large and diverse metropolitan area in the southeastern part of the USA. The purpose of the survey was to determine both the positive and negative personal, educational, social, and work related consequences of playing video games. Nearly two‐thirds of the 203 participants in this study were of Hispanic heritage. A majority of the sample of participants was derived using a school intercept, as opposed to mall intercept, strategy. The remaining participants were obtained using snowball, and convenience sampling techniques. Statistically significant differences between males and females were found in the areas of communication, decision making in daily lives, leadership skills, collaborating, functioning in a team, and giving directions to others. These differences were favorable to males.