Aspects of Intercultural Education and Curriculum Decision‐making

This article presents an analysis of intercultural education from the viewpoint of the dynamics of agenda building as a political process. In this analysis, particular attention is given to the theoretical and ideological assumptions on which the concept of intercultural education is based. The author contends that the employment of this concept serves the purpose of issue containment within the arena of conflict where educational policy alternatives are determined.

     

基于边疆稳定的民族高考政策改革的思考——以新疆维吾尔自治区南疆地区为例

科学合理的高考政策对于维护边疆少数民族地区经济社会的和谐稳定具有重要作用.应通过制定科学合理、适合边疆民族地区基础教育实际的高考招生政策,采取强硬措施,杜绝高考"移民"现象的反弹,坚决纠正高考中的假"民考汉"现象,做好高考与大学预科模式的衔接工作,实施民族地区师范生免费教育制度,为基础教育改革特别是"双语"教学的开展培养急需的高素质人才.要改革考试方式,实现民族地区高考多元化等措施,使少数民族地区高考政策在"稳疆兴疆,富民固边"战略的实施中、在和谐边疆的建构中发挥出更加重要的作用.     

Use of webquest design for inservice teacher professional development

This study investigated whether a teacher professional development module built around designing WebQuests could improve teachers’ technological and pedagogical skills. The technological skills examined included Web searching and Web evaluating skills. The pedagogical skills targeted were developing a working definition for higher-order thinking skills, and designing WebQuest tasks to improve such skills. This case study was carried out with six inservice teachers. After the training, all the teachers showed improvement in their Web searching and evaluating skills. Furthermore, teachers adopted a working definition for higher-order thinking skills, and, using Web resources, they designed activities that promote students’ higher-order thinking. This study provides evidence supporting the use of design-based activities in learning technological and pedagogical skills and suggests an effective inservice teacher professional development module.     

Video gaming as digital media,play, and family routine: implications for understanding video gaming and learning in family contexts

While a number of studies have investigated learning associated with video gaming in out-of-school settings, only recently have researchers begun to explore gaming and learning in the contexts of home and family life. This paper discusses three different frameworks within which we can situate video games and learning at home: (a) video gaming as digital media, (b) video gaming as play, and (c) video gaming as family routine. Each framework brings different issues related to learning into focus, and contributes new insights into the role gaming plays in the lives of children, adults, and families as a whole.     

Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) in a Community College Setting: A Case Study

This study examined the initial implementation process of Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) in a northern California community college. Focus groups of students, faculty, and administrators were conducted in the spring of 2008, as well as observations of several planning meetings in the spring and summer of 2008. The community college students enrolled in the AVID class reported that the support they received through AVID has helped them focus, become more organized, and become more motivated to continue their studies. This was so even though not all of AVID's 11 essentials were implemented on campus. In addition, challenges such as faculty buy-in and resistance to changing institutionalized practices were encountered by staff members responsible for implementing AVID. In this initial implementation, faculty and administration sought to change the culture of the college to better serve the underrepresented students in their quest to transfer to four-year institutions. This study provides a framework for other community colleges and higher education institutions to leverage the academic potential of underprepared and historically underrepresented students.     

Effect of emotion-aware interventions on students’ behavioral and emotional states

The goal of this research is to investigate the effect of emotion-aware interventions on students’ behavioral and emotional states. To this end, we collected data from 12 students in the 9th grade in a high school in Turkey. The data collection took place in two sessions of an English Course. While the students were reading articles and solving relevant questions, our data collection application running in the background recorded the videos of the individual students through a camera and captured students’ screens in a non-intrusive manner. In total, we had 12.5 h of student data. We employed the human expert labeling process (HELP) (Aslan et al. in Workshop proceedings at international conference on intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), pp 156–165, 2016) to have the data labeled (150 h of data labeling in total). The data collection application was designed in a way that it also collected emotional self-labels (i.e., emotional states as self-reported by students at any time of learning). We leveraged emotional self-label information to suggest various real-time interventions for the students. The results obtained using the final expert labels showed that the percentage of the students’ Satisfied state was significantly higher after interventions. The results also demonstrated that although the interventions were triggered by the emotional states as self-labeled by the students and tailored to improve such states, there was a major positive impact of these interventions on students’ behavioral states. This preliminary study showed that even with a limited set of emotion-aware interventions based on self-labels, students’ states could be impacted positively. Conducting large-scale pilots leveraging more advanced interventions is a future direction for our research.     

Educational Technologists: Leading Change for a New Paradigm of Education

The transition from the industrial age to the information age has happened and is still happening in our society (Duffy, 2009). However, our current educational systems still operate based on the needs of the industrial-age society (Watson, Watson, & Reigeluth, n.d), making them among the least impacted organizations (Reigeluth & Joseph, 2002). This misalignment between schools and society takes the form of a discrepancy between what and how we teach students in schools and how schools are organized and operated (Banathy, 1991; Hargreaves, 1999; Wagner et al., 2006). Educational systems should address current students’ needs to facilitate their learning process and better preparethem for their future lives in society (Collins & Halverson, 2009). In this article, we explain how we envision the new paradigm of education and what roles educational technologists should play to help transform educational systems to this new paradigm.