The Effect of Inquiry Learning on the Academic Achievement and Bilingual Verbal Cognition of Young Bilingual Students

The issues that prompt this study are based on current research indicating the positive effects of inquiry learning on the cognitive development of children. The purpose of this case study was to understand the effects of inquiry learning on the academic achievement and bilingual verbal cognition of 5th grade bilingual students in a French/English dual immersion program. The treatment group of students completed research projects through a guided inquiry learning approach, while the control group experienced the traditional problem-solving research approach. Empirical findings reported a significant mean increase in mathematics achievement, bilingual verbal cognitive ability, higher motivation to learn and increased self-efficacy in the treatment versus the control group of students

Reflections on the Practicality of Good Theory

Jennifer Kennison noticed something different about the way her high school chemistry students were working together during Complex Instruction rotation. Her attention to the change in her students’ learning caused me to think about how Elizabeth Cohen’s often referenced Kurt Lewin’s comment “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” As a result, I decided to ask two students who were teaching CI rotations if they would be interested in working together on a conference presentation that looked at their work through the eyes of Lewin’s dictum. They would take on responsibility for documenting and writing about their CI units and I, their advisor, would take on Lewin. Both Jennifer, an experienced teacher and MEd. candidate, and Bethany Brodeur, a senior elementary education major, agreed to this task. The resulting papers formed the core of our presentation at the 2004 conference of the New England Educational Research Organization. Together, they form a short volume that integrates learning about CI with the practical implications of implementation of CI at the elementary and secondary levels. This paper reports my observations of their work confirming Lewin’s dictum and Cohen’s wisdom. C

Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science

The Park City Math Institute (PCMI) 2016 Summer Undergraduate Faculty Program met for the purpose of composing guidelines for undergraduate programs in Data Science. The group consisted of 25 undergraduate faculty from a variety of institutions in the U.S., primarily from the disciplines of mathematics, statistics and computer science. These guidelines are meant to provide some structure for institutions planning for or revising a major in Data Science

Masters Students' Experiences of Learning to Program: An Empirical Model

The investigation reported here examined how Masters students experience learning to program. The phenomenographic research approach adopted permitted the analysis of 1) how students go about learning to program, that is the ‘Act’ of learning to program, and 2) what students understand by ‘programming’, that is the ‘Object’ of learning to program. Analysis of data from twenty-three participants identified five different experiences of the Act of learning to program and five different experiences of the Object of learning to program. Together the findings comprise an empirical model of the learning to program experience amongst the participating students. We suggest how our findings are significant for programming teachers and offer tools to explore students’ views

Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education

Reinventing College Physics for Biologists: Explicating an epistemological curriculum

The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMd-PERG) carried out a five-year research project to rethink, observe, and reform introductory algebra-based (college) physics. This class is one of the Maryland Physics Department's large service courses, serving primarily life-science majors. After consultation with biologists, we re-focused the class on helping the students learn to think scientifically -- to build coherence, think in terms of mechanism, and to follow the implications of assumptions. We designed the course to tap into students' productive conceptual and epistemological resources, based on a theoretical framework from research on learning. The reformed class retains its traditional structure in terms of time and instructional personnel, but we modified existing best-practices curricular materials, including Peer Instruction, Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, and Tutorials. We provided class-controlled spaces for student collaboration, which allowed us to observe and record students learning directly. We also scanned all written homework and examinations, and we administered pre-post conceptual and epistemological surveys. The reformed class enhanced the strong gains on pre-post conceptual tests produced by the best-practices materials while obtaining unprecedented pre-post gains on epistemological surveys instead of the traditional losses.Comment: 35 pages including a 15 page appendix of supplementary material

Developing reading-writing connections; the impact of explicit instruction of literary devices on the quality of children's narrative writing

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. A guiding question for the study was: Can children's writing can be enhanced by teachers drawing attention to the literary devices used by professional writers or “mentor authors”? The study was conducted with 18 teachers, working as research partners in nine elementary schools over one school year. The research group explored ways of developing children as reflective authors, able to draft and redraft writing in response to peer and teacher feedback. Daily literacy sessions were complemented by weekly writing workshops where students engaged in authorial activity and experienced writers' perspectives and readers' demands (Harwayne, 1992; May, 2004). Methods for data collection included video recording of peer-peer and teacher-led group discussions and audio recording of teacher-child conferences. Samples of children's narrative writing were collected and a comparison was made between the quality of their independent writing at the beginning and end of the research period. The research group documented the importance of peer-peer and teacher-student discourse in the development of children's metalanguage and awareness of audience. The study suggests that reading, discussing, and evaluating mentor texts can have a positive impact on the quality of children's independent writing