Wordless books: An approach to visual literacy

This is a story about a bear named Goldilocks, and a family of people called The Three Bears. What I mean is that this story is sort of likeGoldilocks and the Three Bears, but the opposite. Get it? Well listen to my story and you'll understand.     

The role of scaling up research in designing for and evaluating robustness

One of the great strengths of Jim Kaput’s research program was his relentless drive towards scaling up his innovative approach to teaching the mathematics of change and variation. The SimCalc mission, “democratizing access to the mathematics of change,” was enacted by deliberate efforts to reach an increasing number of teachers and students each year. Further, Kaput asked: What can we learn from research at the next level of scale (e.g., beyond a few classrooms at a time) that we cannot learn from other sources? In this article, we develop an argument that scaling up research can contribute important new knowledge by focusing researchers’ attention on the robustness of an innovation when used by varied students, teachers, classrooms, schools, and regions. The concept of robustness requires additional discipline both in the design process and in the conduct of valid research. By examining a progression of three studies in the Scaling Up SimCalc program, we articulate how scaling up research can contribute to designing for and evaluating robustness.     

Lifelong learning and the low‐skilled

This article is a combined result of a three years research project on low‐skilled learners’ experiences as participants of various kinds of adult training and education in Denmark, and the findings of a three years research consortium on workplace learning, summing up and generalizing our various findings as to how low‐skilled adults function in relation to participation in training and education activities, how they feel about it, what is important to them, and consequently what works in practice in relation to this very important but often neglected group of adult learners.     

The Responsive State and Teachers

Important developments in the Danish political situation are described. Emphasis is upon the relations between changes in politicians’ understanding and how the emergence of what has been called the ‘Responsive State’ might influence schooling and teachers’ work. Three changes of educational policy in Denmark are particularly relevant: (1) since 1991 a new system of govemment for schools; (2) an agreement, signed in 1992, redefining the contractual status of teachers; (3) a new school act of 1993, operational since August 1994, designed to reform the broad aims of the schooling System and the design and content of the curriculum. Broader political trends to these particular policy shifts are reviewed and discussed. They can be seen as a heavy attack on teaching as a profession; they seek to increase the influence and power of parents and politicians at the level of the local community and reduce further the influence teachers have on their own work. It is important to consider these policies against a consideration of how teachers themselves perceive and define their conditions of work. Three investigations are presented. Teachers are concerned about: (a) democratic educational values, (b) their students and their own qualifications, and (c) relations with parents to whom they feel accountable.     

The Education‐Tolerance Relationship: is it biased by social desirability?

A hypothesis in the literature suggests that the well‐documented education‐tolerance relationship is upwardly biased because of social desirability in responses. The main argument is that highly educated individuals have a better understanding of which opinions are less socially acceptable and will tend to hide their true reactions when certain items are brought up in survey interviews. They present themselves as more tolerant than they in fact are, making the relationship appear artificially large. This article reviews the possibility of such a bias in the effect of educational background on intergroup attitudes. A model is developed that takes into account potential distortions, when no direct measures for social desirability are available. We make use of the LISREL framework for specifying competing hypotheses about education and social‐desirability mechanisms. Alternative measurement models are compared in analyses based on data from a recent Norwegian survey on attitudes toward new immigrants. When hypothesized additional links are allowed for, the estimated effect of education on intergroup attitudes does not go down. Thus, the main results question the assumption usually made.     

Scaling Up Innovative Technology-Based Mathematics

We report on the initial attempts at evaluating at scale a particular technological/curricular innovation that enables more students to develop deeper knowledge. The methods, issues, and findings of the current pilot experiment speak not only to the success of SimCalc MathWorlds, the focus of our research program, but also to the evaluation at scale of a broad class of representationally innovative technologies and to the merit of long-term investment in design-based research. In particular, we present conditions and findings from a completed pilot experiment involving 21 seventh-grade mathematics teachers from Texas. Pilot outcomes suggest that (a) innovative representational technologies can have an important impact on student learning, (b) considerable impact can be found across a wide range of teachers and conditions, and (c) these gains can be detected even in the absence of other desirable conditions. In particular, detection of student gains does not, in our case, depend on having a long-term context of learning, long-term teacher professional development, or a shift to learner-centered constructivist pedagogy. The full experiment will replicate and extend our experimental design with a wider range of teachers and schools, model the factors that contribute to classroom success with such technology, and explore what happens as research support fades away.