Getting in,getting on,going further: Exploring the role of employers in the degree apprentice to graduate transition

Transitions from education into work, or as part of career change and development, are increasingly central to policy debate and academic inquiry. However, the role that employers play in shaping transition is often overlooked. In this paper, we examine this issue through the experiences of a graduating cohort of ‘degree apprentices’. We present original analysis of new empirical data from what we believe to be the first substantive qualitative longitudinal research conducted with those experiencing this new vocational pathway in the English Apprenticeships system. Through analysis of repeat semi-structured interviews with 22 degree apprenticeship graduates (44 interviews in total), we provide early empirical insights into experiences of this new pathway and add to existing theoretical conceptualisations of transition within the educational literature and the employer's role within it. We show that the degree apprentice to graduate transition can be broken down into three key stages: ‘getting in’, ‘getting on’ and ‘going further’, and that employers—at both strategic and relational levels—shape experiences at each stage.     

Software for managing complex learning: Examples from an educational psychology course

Inquiry-based instruction including problem-, project-, and case-based methods often incorporate complex sets of learning activities. The numerous activities run the risk of becoming disconnected in the minds of learners and teachers. STAR.Legacy is a software shell that can help designers organize learning activities into an inquiry cycle that is easy to understand and pedagogically sound. To ensure that classroom teachers can adapt the inquiry activities according to their local resources and needs, STAR.Legacy was built upon four types of design principles: learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. We describe how a STAR.Legacy constructed for an educational psychology course helped preservice teachers design and learn about effective inquiry-based instruction. This work was supported by grant #R305F60090 from the Department of Education. The authors thank the educational psychology students for their contributions to this paper and Amy Ryce for her editorial talents.     

Toward a Learning Technologies knowledge network

The National Science Foundation-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is designed to be a national resource for stimulating research and development of technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, math, engineering and technology learning. The Center, launched at the end of 1997, is organized around four themes identified as areas where research is likely to result in major gains in teaching and learning, and sponsors research across disciplines and institutions in its four theme areas. CILT brings together experts in the fields of cognitive science, educational technologies, computer science, subject matter learning, and engineering. It engages business through an Industry Alliance Program and is also training postdoctoral students. CILT's founding organizations are SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning, University of California at Berkeley (School of Education and Department of Computer Science), Vanderbilt University's Learning Technology Center, and the Concord Consortium. Through its programs, CILT seeks to reach beyond these organizations to create a web of organizations, individuals, industries, schools, foundations, government agencies, and labs, that is devoted to the production, sharing and use of new knowledge about how learning technologies can dramatically improve the processes and outcomes of learning and teaching. This paper describes the rationale and operations of the Center, and first-year progress in defining a set of CILT partnership projects with many other institutions that came out of our national theme-team workshops. Roy Pea, of SRI International, is Director of CILT. Marcia Linn (U. California, Berkeley), John Bransford (Vanderbilt University), Barbara Means (SRI International), and Robert Tinker (Concord Consortium), serve as CILT's coprincipal investigators. Sherry Hsi (Ubiquitous Computing) and Sean Brophy (Technology and Assessment Models) are among the first group of CILT Postdoctoral Fellows. Jeremy Roschelle (SRI International) and Nancy Songer (University of Michigan) are CILT theme-team leaders. Roy Pea and Marcia Linn would like to thank the Spencer Foundation for support during their year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, in which they developed the CILT concept with the other authors. CILT is funded by National Science Foundation grant #CDA-9720384. Pea and Linn would also like to acknowledge contributions to this article by the many authors of CILT partnership project proposals, and by theme-team leaders. The authors thankfully acknowledge Donna Baranski-Walker for her many contributions to developing the CILT Industrial Alliance Program while serving as its Director in 1998.     

An Integrated Knowledge Framework to Characterize and Scaffold Size and Scale Cognition (FS2C)

Size and scale cognition is a critical ability associated with reasoning with concepts in different disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As such, researchers and educators have identified the need for young learners and their educators to become scale-literate. Informed by developmental psychology literature and recent findings in nanoscale science and engineering education, we propose an integrated knowledge framework for characterizing and scaffolding size and scale cognition called the FS2C framework. Five ad hoc assessment tasks were designed informed by the FS2C framework with the goal of identifying participants' understandings of size and scale. Findings identified participants' difficulties to discern different sizes of microscale and nanoscale objects and a low level of sophistication on identifying scale worlds among participants. Results also identified that as bigger the difference between the sizes of the objects is, the more difficult was for participants to identify how many times an object is bigger or smaller than another one. Similarly, participants showed difficulties to estimate approximate sizes of sub-macroscopic objects as well as a difficulty for participants to estimate the size of very large objects. Participants' accurate location of objects on a logarithmic scale was also challenging.     

Poor relations in the preschool family: the funding of playgroups 1

Playgroups provide for more children under five than any other preschool service, and now regard themselves as an alternative to, rather than a substitute for, nursery education. There are, however, a number of major issues concerning their funding: income depends largely on parental fees and fund‐raising; playgroups are less well resourced than nursery education; and current resourcing may be too low to ensure quality. Based on research in 45 playgroups in three areas (rural, inner city, and suburban), the paper looks in more detail at the consequences for playgroups of their current funding position and, more specifically, at the impact on various aspects of playgroups ‐ including premises and equipment; opening hours and usage; the position of playgroup workers; the satisfaction of mothers and playgroup leaders; and the playgroup environment ‐ of different funding policies pursued by local authorities in the three study areas. One local authority provided substantial support to individual playgroups, while the other two gave minimal support. The paper concludes by considering three options for the future funding of playgroups.

     

Social studies: incorporating all children using community and cultural universals as the centerpiece

This article features an elementary teacher who has worked with the authors for the past 10 years in research on building a classroom community and using cultural universals as the centerpiece for elementary social studies for all children. Cultural universals are basic human needs and social experiences found in all societies, past and present, and include food, shelter, clothing, transportation, communication, family living, money, childhood, government, and so on. Actions related to cultural universals are experienced by all children regardless of their cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, achievement levels, or special needs, so teachers can connect to these experiences as bases for developing historical, geographic, political, economic, sociological, psychological, or anthropological understandings. The ultimate goal is connected knowledge about how the social system works, how and why it developed over time, how and why it varies across locations and cultures, and what all this might mean for personal, social, and civic decision making.     

Elementary social studies textbooks

Recent criticisms of textbooks have included accusations of favoring breadth over depth, dry writing, lack of context, failure to integrate minority groups, and overillustration. Social studies texts have, in addition, been criticized for meaning-less content, unclear goals, inadequate explanation, separation of knowledge from skills, and other failings. The authors of this article have specified other common faults. As a corrective, they suggests a return to the notion of developing curricula as means to accomplish major goals phrased in terms of intended student outcomes, and aligning social studies instruction with major social education goals.     

Multiple Representations in Computational Thinking Tasks: A Clinical Study of Second-Grade Students

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Computational thinking requires high cognitive load as students work to manage multiple tasks in their problem-solving environment. Through research in...