Using Student Video Cases to Assess Pre-service Elementary Teachers’ Engineering Teaching Responsiveness

Our study addresses the need for new approaches to prepare novice elementary teachers to teach both science and engineering, and for new tools to measure how well those approaches are working. This in particular would inform the teacher educators of the extent to which novice teachers are developing expertise in facilitating their students’ engineering design work. One important dimension to measure is novice teachers’ abilities to notice the substance of student thinking and to respond in productive ways. This teacher noticing is particularly important in science and engineering education, where students’ initial, idiosyncratic ideas and practices influence the likelihood that particular instructional strategies will help them learn. This paper describes evidence of validity and reliability for the Video Case Diagnosis (VCD) task, a new instrument for measuring pre-service elementary teachers’ engineering teaching responsiveness. To complete the VCD, participants view a 6-min video episode of children solving an engineering design problem, describe in writing what they notice about the students’ science ideas and engineering practices, and propose how a teacher could productively respond to the students. The rubric for scoring VCD responses allowed two independent scorers to achieve inter-rater reliability. Content analysis of the video episode, systematic review of literature on science and engineering practices, and solicitation of external expert educator responses establish content validity for VCD. Field test results with three different participant groups who have different levels of engineering education experience offer evidence of construct validity.     

When is a foreign‐language film not a foreign‐language film? When it has too much English in it: The case of a Singapore film and the Oscars 1

Abstract

In December 2005, a film called Be With Me, by Singapore director, Eric Khoo, was disqualified from entering the Best Foreign Language Film category at the following year’s Academy Awards on the grounds that it contained ‘too much English’. An Academy spokesperson attempted to explain this decision with what was apparently obvious, that ‘English is not a foreign language’. In an age where issues of cultural migration, hybridity, diaspora and globalisation are de rigueur, this intractable declaration seems almost comic. However, it indicates a continued ambivalence in the role of the English language in the making of a cultural identity: the perennial post‐colonial conundrum that shows no sign of going away. Singapore’s post‐independence decision to keep English as the first language of the country means that the use of English, albeit with local variations, is a quotidian reality. I would like to use this incident to reflect, not so much on the politics of Oscar selection, as perhaps more importantly, on the implications it presents for the internationalisation, and thus the ownership, of English, as well as its role as a marker for both local and global subjectivities – especially when the irony of the situation is compounded by the fact that Khoo’s film is, in effect, mostly silent.     

Reflecting critically on the critical disposition within Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC): the developmental journey of a curriculum design team

ABSTRACT

Internationalisation of curriculum (IoC) practices promote students developing knowledge of other cultures, attitudes, values and ethics. This conceptual article argues that embedding critical reflection in the IoC program – through integrating insights from both IoC thinkers and critical reflection literature – may allow educators and students to not only gain understanding and/or competency in other cultures but better address questions of privilege, power and colonisation and thereby interrogate their own normative cultural understandings. Borrowing from debates within IoC pedagogy, as well as from Ahmed’s work on critical reflection, this article also argues that cross/intercultural understanding should be understood (and taught) not as a competency but a disposition towards thinking, analysing and understanding the world which is based on critiquing the ‘self’ and its relationship with the ‘other’.     

Why do people use mobile payment technologies and why would they continue? An examination and implications from India

Mobile payment technology continues to spread across the globe, but its diffusion has not been uniform. Its low usage in developing economies is of particular concern to policymakers since this technology has the potential to enable financial inclusion. In this study, in order to develop policy interventions for greater usage, we comparatively analyze factors impacting actual usage and future use intention. India, with its uneven trajectory of mobile payments, gives us an appropriate field to investigate citizens’ usage behaviour. Considering users’ perceptions of both positive and negative attributes of the technology, we develop research models under the umbrella of the valence framework. We utilize technology affordances and constraints theory (TACT) to refine the research models through an understanding of various innovative uses. To test the valence-TACT models, we collect survey responses of 551 citizens across four Indian cities. The results from the models show how certain factors, such as convenience, reflection, and security, have different impacts on actual usage and future use intention, respectively. These findings have implications for critical issues like security, risk, and digital literacy, and can help in the design of policy recommendations for enhancing the use of mobile payments, thereby impacting financial inclusion for all. The valence-TACT model provides a theoretical contribution to mobile payment and innovation literature and also offers several policy insights.     

Student Learning and Performance in Information Systems Courses: The Role of Academic Motivation

Despite the need for information technology knowledge in the business world today, enrollments in information systems (IS) courses have been consistently declining. Student performance in lower level IS courses and student assumptions about the level of difficulty of the courses seem to be reasons for lower enrollments. To understand how student motivation may explain learning outcomes in introductory IS courses, this study investigates the impact of intrinsic and extrinsic academic motivations as framed by self‐determination theory on two measures of learning outcomes: (1) student self‐reported measures of learning and (2) actual grades obtained in courses and course components. Using 269 student responses collected in a second‐year undergraduate core course and a first‐year MBA core course, both of which are offered in a traditional face‐to‐face classroom environment, study hypotheses are analyzed. Results indicate that the motivational model explains both the affective and cognitive perceptions of learning held by students. In examining overall grades and grades in course components, the motivational model, however, was unable to sufficiently explain student performance. Data also indicate that there are significant differences between undergraduate and graduate students in terms of their motivation and learning outcomes.     

Epistemological framing and novice elementary teachers' approaches to learning and teaching engineering design

As engineering learning experiences increasingly begin in elementary school, elementary teacher preparation programs are an important site for the study of teacher development in engineering education. In this article, we argue that the stances that novice teachers adopt toward engineering learning and knowledge are consequential for the opportunities they create for students. We present a comparative case study examining the epistemological framing dynamics of two novice urban teachers, Ana and Ben, as they learned and taught engineering design during a four-week institute for new elementary teachers. Although the two teachers had very similar teacher preparation backgrounds, they interpreted the purposes of engineering design learning and teaching in meaningfully different ways. During her own engineering sessions, Ana took up the goal not only of meeting the needs of the client but also of making scientific sense of artifacts that might meet those needs. When facilitating students' engineering, she prioritized their building knowledge collaboratively about how things work. By contrast, when Ben worked on his own engineering, he took up the goal of delivering a product. When teaching engineering to students, he offered them constrained prototyping tasks to serve as hands-on contexts for reviewing scientific explanations. These findings call for teacher educators to support teachers' framing of engineering design as a knowledge building enterprise through explicit conversations about epistemology, apprenticeship in sense-making strategies, and tasks intentionally designed to encourage reasoning about design artifacts.