Editorial

This paper analyses the experience of a teacher and her Year 6 class (10–11 year‐olds) over a school year, while participating in a pilot project introducing Personal Digital Assistants as a learning tool. The intervention was initiated and supported by the local City Learning Centre, which was concerned with how best to use technologies for learning, and the teacher was prepared to take risks to learn how to use the technology and apply it within the national curriculum. This paper focuses on the roles the teacher played in designing, managing and mediating multi‐modal approaches to teaching and learning, while meeting the curriculum requirements. Her creative approach was rewarded with high levels of student engagement, motivation and autonomy across the class, and higher than expected results in the national tests.     

Making a Difference? An Evaluation of Professional Knowledge and Pedagogy in Art and ICT

The paper presents a research perspective on a Secondary school‐based project,, Art on the Net, which explored the interaction between practising artists, students and teachers using digital technologies in the visual and performance arts in school settings. The study illustrated the role that art education plays not only in providing an authentic context for the use of digital technologies, but also in offering insights into conceptualising the nature of ICT capability. The analysis for this paper highlights key themes arising for participants engaged in such intervention projects and illustrates the interaction between professional knowledge and pedagogy in Art and ICT.     

Computer-graphics and the literary construct: a learning method

This paper describes a third-year undergraduate module, Text Through Images (TTI; known at first as Texts with Computers) which ran for some years in the School of English, University of Exeter, UK. Instead of using only words, TTI students made their own computer graphics both to discover and to describe literary structures in texts of their choice. The results were surprising: whatever their “academic” ability, students on this course regularly produced genuinely original literary perceptions, and their natural creativity was released. The module's innovative methods are eminently transferable to other disciplines. This paper is designed to be read in conjunction with a website: for further details, go to http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/asp/journal.asp?ref=0007-1013 presenting a selection of students' graphics produced on the course; these appear by generous permission of their makers, who hold copyright. The reasons for the module's success are elusive. Perhaps students feel unfettered by the attitudes associated with traditional verbal expression, the absence of preconceptions about the new process enabling them to bypass old habits of thought. Perhaps the interplay of word and image is particularly fruitful because images and words activate different areas of the brain. It may be that the computer creates the illusion of distance between design and designer, so that the latter feels less personally exposed than when drawing on paper. Perhaps success lies in the combination of individual freedom and on-screen group work, or on the way in which students are enabled to make small but publishable original discoveries. Educational psychologists may be able to explain why the mix works (it has been suggested that it represents a “constructivist/generative learning strategy that Dave Jonassen terms ‘elaboration’”) but more importantly, teachers may find the model useful. What interests me about the module is not the structure of the teaching, but the way in which the use of diagramming apparently enables the learner productively to bypass previous mental conditioning about how literature works, and what is acceptable in analysing it.     

Do we need more male primary teachers? Tensions and contradictions in the perspectives of male and female trainees

Primary teaching Initial Teacher Training courses across the UK have been under pressure from central government, Ofsted and the media to recruit more male students to their courses with the aim of increasing the proportion of males in the primary teaching workforce. This is because increasing the number of male role models in primary schools has been mooted as the solution to boys’ underachievement, especially in reading and writing. There is, however, little evidence showing any correlation between boys’ educational outcomes and the number of male primary teachers in schools. The purpose of the project reported in this paper was to ascertain the beliefs of the future primary school workforce about this focus on the need for male role models in schools. A mixed-methods approach was employed: 120 male and female primary trainees were surveyed and a further 48 took part in group interviews, all of whom were based in an Initial Teacher Training department in a university in North West England. Results indicated that although aspiring teachers felt that males and females could make equally good role models for children their personal value systems perpetuated the myth that boys need male role models to achieve better educational outcomes.     

Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective

Peer review is a reciprocal process whereby students produce feedback reviews on the work of peers and receive feedback reviews from peers on their own work. Prior research has primarily examined the learning benefits that result from the receipt of feedback reviews, with few studies specifically exploring the merits of producing feedback reviews or the learning mechanisms that this activates. Using accounts of their experiences of peer review, this study illuminates students’ perceptions of the different learning benefits resulting from feedback receipt and feedback production, and, importantly, it provides insight into the cognitive processes that are activated when students construct feedback reviews. The findings show that producing feedback reviews engages students in multiple acts of evaluative judgement, both about the work of peers, and, through a reflective process, about their own work; that it involves them in both invoking and applying criteria to explain those judgements; and that it shifts control of feedback processes into students’ hands, a shift that can reduce their need for external feedback. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. It is argued that the capacity to produce quality feedback is a fundamental graduate skill, and, as such, it should receive much greater attention in higher education curricula.     

EAIT special issue: Valuing individual and shared learning: The role of ICT

This special issue supports the conference ‘Valuing individual and shared learning: the role of ICT’ held by the Working Group 3.5 Informatics in Elementary Education in June 2008 in Prague, Czech Republic. The Editorial describes the focus and context of the conference. It draws attention to the wide variety of presentations by Czech colleagues, and the findings of two recent studies of policy and initiatives in Informatics education in the Czech Republic. The selected articles are described and represent the range of themes, including a theoretical model of teachers’ digital competence; a national study of the use of interactive whiteboards; a study of interactivity and dialogue with digital technologies in classrooms; dialogue in student teachers’ interactions with pupils in online environments; the use of virtual reality to support awareness of dyslexia; and a theoretical framework for the use of mediascapes in the curriculum.     

The Re-positioning of Oracy: A millennium project?

This paper reviews the history of oracy in the UK over the past decade as it has been articulated in significant national curricular developments, including the National Oracy Project, the National Curriculum for English and the National Literacy Strategy. Starting with Barnes' (1988) evaluation of the political tensions surrounding oracy, I identify conflicting models of oracy embedded in these educational programmes, noting the gradual erosion of the cross-curricular function of oracy in favour of a centralised oracy, controlled by the teacher and related, in complex but subordinate ways, to literacy. I trace these tensions in the classroom discourse of 7-year-old children, speculating about the implications for learners of the competing versions of oracy. Finally, I argue for a reinstatement of oracy as a whole curriculum project and for the recognition of the distinctive role played by small group interaction in realising the kind of whole class 'interactive teaching' nominated most recently in the National Literacy Strategy.     

Situating Adolescent Gender and Self-Esteem with Personal Memories

To identify social schemas that are associated with self-esteem in adolescence, the contents of approximately 1,400 memories from a longitudinal sample of 41 males and 43 females were correlated with a Q-sort measure of self-esteem. Each memory concerned an important or problematic encounter, and was coded for social motive, affect, and identity of significant other. For young women, memories about wanting to help female friends were associated with chronically high and increasingly high levels of self-esteem from ages 14 to 23. For young men, memories about successfully asserting oneself with male friends were associated with chronically high and increasingly high levels of self-esteem. Low self-esteem in women, both chronic as well as decreasing, was associated with memories about failing to get approval from friends. Decreasing self-esteem for males was associated with memories about wanting love from female friends. The results confirm and refine prior findings that adolescent self-esteem is localized in relationships with peers rather than parents, and is based on different relational schemas for females than for males. The findings may help to identify contexts for preventative interventions to enhance adolescent self-esteem.     

数字技术支持的教师学习:研究与项目综述(下)

本文在系统回顾教师知识与教师学习本质的基础上,讨论了数字技术与教师学习活动之间的关系,主张将数字技术的效用描述为教师学习中有目的的一组活动,即：知识建构、分布式认知、社群与沟通以及约定,通过对五个技术支持的教师学习的典型案例,分析了数字技术对教师学习的支持作用。最后指出了数字技术支持的教师学习与专业发展之方向。