Eighth Grade Students' Understandings of Groundwater

According to national standards, eighth graders should possess appropriate understandings regarding groundwater and its role in the hydrologic cycle. This article describes a study of eighth-grade students to determine what types of ideas eighth graders actually possess regarding groundwater. The students completed a survey that consisted of one multiple-choice item and a drawing prompt. The results of this survey, along with videotaped class discussions about goundwater, revealed that students of this age group hold naive conceptions concerning groundwater. In addition, the students' spatial reasoning was identified as contributing to their conceptions. Educational levels: Graduate or professional, Graduate or professional

O que eu ganho com isso? - Aprendendo com o e-Learning [What's in it for me? - Getting Learning from e-Learning]

Learners will only make effective use of e-learning opportunities if they know why it will be of benefit and how it will help them achieve the assessed learning outcomes. Most adopt a form of cost-benefit analysis to decide whether or not a learning activity will aid their progress. Educators must ensure that those decisions are well-grounded by an understanding of the course outcomes. E-Learning is not simply a matter of delivery mechanisms: teachers need to reconsider the nature and circumstances of their learners, their subject and their pedagogic approach in order to transform their teaching and assessment activities to take advantage of the potential offered by e-learning

Models for Learning (Mod4L) Final Report: Representing Learning Designs

The Mod4L Models of Practice project is part of the JISC-funded Design for Learning Programme. It ran from 1 May – 31 December 2006. The philosophy underlying the project was that a general split is evident in the e-learning community between development of e-learning tools, services and standards, and research into how teachers can use these most effectively, and is impeding uptake of new tools and methods by teachers. To help overcome this barrier and bridge the gap, a need is felt for practitioner-focused resources which describe a range of learning designs and offer guidance on how these may be chosen and applied, how they can support effective practice in design for learning, and how they can support the development of effective tools, standards and systems with a learning design capability (see, for example, Griffiths and Blat 2005, JISC 2006). Practice models, it was suggested, were such a resource. The aim of the project was to: develop a range of practice models that could be used by practitioners in real life contexts and have a high impact on improving teaching and learning practice. We worked with two definitions of practice models. Practice models are: 1. generic approaches to the structuring and orchestration of learning activities. They express elements of pedagogic principle and allow practitioners to make informed choices (JISC 2006) However, however effective a learning design may be, it can only be shared with others through a representation. The issue of representation of learning designs is, then, central to the concept of sharing and reuse at the heart of JISC’s Design for Learning programme. Thus practice models should be both representations of effective practice, and effective representations of practice. Hence we arrived at the project working definition of practice models as: 2. Common, but decontextualised, learning designs that are represented in a way that is usable by practitioners (teachers, managers, etc).(Mod4L working definition, Falconer & Littlejohn 2006). A learning design is defined as the outcome of the process of designing, planning and orchestrating learning activities as part of a learning session or programme (JISC 2006). Practice models have many potential uses: they describe a range of learning designs that are found to be effective, and offer guidance on their use; they support sharing, reuse and adaptation of learning designs by teachers, and also the development of tools, standards and systems for planning, editing and running the designs. The project took a practitioner-centred approach, working in close collaboration with a focus group of 12 teachers recruited across a range of disciplines and from both FE and HE. Focus group members are listed in Appendix 1. Information was gathered from the focus group through two face to face workshops, and through their contributions to discussions on the project wiki. This was supplemented by an activity at a JISC pedagogy experts meeting in October 2006, and a part workshop at ALT-C in September 2006. The project interim report of August 2006 contained the outcomes of the first workshop (Falconer and Littlejohn, 2006). The current report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). All quotations are taken from the Mod4L wiki unless otherwise stated

Elementary Preservice Teachers as Warm Demanders in an African American School

The literature related to warm demanding describes teachers who balance care and authority to create a learning environment that supports a culture of achievement for African American students. Embedded in this stance is sociopolitical consciousness that explicitly links teachers’ care and authority with a larger social justice agenda. Drawing on interviews and online course assignments, we describe two preservice teachers’ conceptions and enactments of warm demanding in full-time elementary school internships in an African American elementary school. Findings reveal that although the preservice teachers communicated similar commitments to warm demanding, they enacted the stance differently, suggesting that while warm demanders share similar commitments, their practice may vary. The two cases highlight the promise of teacher education courses and field experiences to be structured in ways that promote the development of teacher aptitudes for strengthening equity and excellence in the education of an historically marginalized population of students

How Students Communicate Knowledge: Written Versus Drawn Responses to Formative Assessment Questions in an Introductory Undergraduate Marine Science Course

Undergraduate science education suffers from a lack of concrete instructional strategies that address real-world postgraduate skills such as visual literacy and science communication. Research within marine science education especially lags behind other, more well-researched fields such as physics or mathematics education, both of which have extensive literature addressing specific instructional strategies that instructors can implement in the classroom. Undergraduate marine science programs overlap with content areas from chemistry, physics, and biology, and provide a rich opportunity for examining how to include more authentic educational experiences in an undergraduate classroom. However, the types of assessments that are typically employed tend to encourage practices such as rote memorization and fact-recall, as assessed by lengthy multiple-choice quizzes and exams. Such assessments have come under scrutiny as professionals and educators alike call for undergraduate instruction to more closely align with actual scientific practice. This study assessed a drawing-to-learn strategy in a marine science classroom to determine if opportunities for students to utilize diagramming and drawing during formative assessments translated into greater depth of information and understanding obtained from their responses. Three different years of student cohorts enrolled in an introductory marine science course at a public university in the Northeastern United States that focused on comparative anatomy and evolution of marine phyla were given formative assessment “notecard questions” throughout the semester-long course from 2017 – 2019. A prompt regarding the close linkages between circulatory and respiratory systems – which exemplified core concepts from guiding instructional documents, as well as addressed specific course goals – was examined in detail, with responses from 2017 and 2018 comprising of traditional written answers, whereas 2019 responses were drawn. Notecards were coded for a variety of holistic and specific parameters to determine the detail of response, whether alternative conceptions were present, and expertise of response, comparing written responses to drawn. Results indicated that drawn responses tended to capture more core ideas (“Key Concepts”) out of three identified and greater depth of detail than written alone. In particular, drawn responses captured specific structures such as the heart (58.2% of responses) and lungs/gills (84.8% of responses) as compared to only 7.3% (χ2 = 73.08, df = 1, p \u3c 0.001) and 43.8% (χ2= 38.26, df = 1, p \u3c 0.001) of written responses, respectively. Certain Key Concepts also seemed to be more easily depicted in drawn form than written, such as the idea of circulatory – respiratory integration. Interestingly, although both response categories had alternative conceptions present, certain alternative conception codes that were more frequent in drawn responses required a higher threshold of knowledge for students to demonstrate before such a code could be invoked. Taken together, the results from this study reveal that strategically incorporating drawing- to-learn opportunities in the undergraduate marine science classroom can provide instructors with more insight into student knowledge than writing alone. Future research can build upon the approaches taken in this study to implement more scaffolded approaches to drawing and diagramming in order to meet the challenges of providing authentic scientific learning opportunities

Argumentation in school science : Breaking the tradition of authoritative exposition through a pedagogy that promotes discussion and reasoning

The value of argumentation in science education has become internationally recognised and has been the subject of many research studies in recent years. Successful introduction of argumentation activities in learning contexts involves extending teaching goals beyond the understanding of facts and concepts, to include an emphasis on cognitive and metacognitive processes, epistemic criteria and reasoning. The authors focus on the difficulties inherent in shifting a tradition of teaching from one dominated by authoritative exposition to one that is more dialogic, involving small-group discussion based on tasks that stimulate argumentation. The paper builds on previous research on enhancing the quality of argument in school science, to focus on how argumentation activities have been designed, with appropriate strategies, resources and modelling, for pedagogical purposes. The paper analyses design frameworks, their contexts and lesson plans, to evaluate their potential for enhancing reasoning through foregrounding the processes of argumentation. Examples of classroom dialogue where teachers adopt the frameworks/plans are analysed to show how argumentation processes are scaffolded. The analysis shows that several layers of interpretation are needed and these layers need to be aligned for successful implementation. The analysis serves to highlight the potential and limitations of the design frameworks

Vocational teachers’ conceptions of, and approaches to, ICT in professional education

The aim of this research was to investigate vocational teachers’ ways of thinking about ICT enhanced teaching and teaching approaches associated with the use of ICT in teaching. The study focused on teachers’ ways of apprehending the role of ICT in professional work. Phenomenography, a qualitative research approach that places emphasis on the importance of people’s experience of a phenomenon, was selected as a research methodology for this study. A cohort of 23 teachers from three Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions in New South Wales, Australia, participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. These interviews were used to identify the qualitatively different ways in which vocational teachers understand and conceptualise the phenomenon of ICT use in TAFE and workplace settings. Interviews were analysed using an iterative seven-step process through which five conceptions of, and five approaches to, ICT-enhanced teaching were revealed, and three conceptions of ICT in workplaces were discerned. Dimensions of variation among the categories of conceptions are presented and discussed, that extended previous knowledge by identifying new dimensions. Findings of this research enhance the existing teacher-centred and learning-centred frameworks of teachers’ conceptions. The study shows that approaches to ICT-enhanced teaching cover a range of aspects including: conveying information, promoting students’ active learning in development of knowledge and skills, and meeting the needs of industry. New knowledge on the way vocational teachers understand the role of ICT in workplaces also emerged through the study. These findings provide useful information for people who work in: the development of vocational educational, teaching of industrial practices, and academic development programs. The thesis proposes further lines of exploratory research: to investigate discipline-focused ICT-enhanced teaching in vocational education

Teachers’ conceptions of teaching at a Gulf university: A starting point for revising a teacher development program

As universities are increasingly attracting students from a wider range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, one of the challenges faced by educational developers is preparing academics to teach in a cross-cultural environment. In order to do this, teacher development programs often need to be adapted and up-dated. A widely-recognised starting point in this process is the examination of teachers’ conceptions of teaching. This paper presents a small-scale, qualitative study which looks at the conceptions of teaching held by lecturers from different ethnic and educational backgrounds at a multicultural university in the United Arab Emirates. The university in question is a small, off-shore campus of a western university. Building on existing research in this field, a phenomenographic approach is taken in which the participants were interviewed and the resulting transcripts were analysed for emerging categories of conceptions of teaching. Four qualitatively different categories were found, which had some similarities to previously established categories, but which also added some interesting dimensions to the particular context of this study, especially the emphasis placed on the syllabus. The categories are: syllabus transmission; syllabus comprehension; syllabus adaptation; and independent learning. The categories found are hierarchical and represent a general move from a teacher-focused approach to one which is more student-centred. The findings of this study were used as a starting point to revise the teacher development program at the university. Although the study is confined to one university, it is relevant to educational developers in similar off-shore institutions in the Gulf region

A Longitudinal Study on the Effect of Hypermedia on Learning Dimensions, Culture and Teaching Evaluation

Earlier studies have found the effectiveness of hypermedia systems as learning tools heavily depend on their compatibility with the cognitive processes by which students perceive, understand and learn from complex information\ud sources. Hence, a learner’s cognitive style plays a significant role in determining how much is learned from a hypermedia learning system. A longitudinal study of Australian and Malaysian students was conducted over two semesters in 2008. Five types of predictor variables were investigated with cognitive style: (i) learning dimensions (nonlinear learning, learner control, multiple tools); (ii)\ud culture dimensions (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, long/short term orientation); (iii) evaluation of units; (iv) student demographics; and (v) country in which students studied. This study uses both multiple linear regression and linear mixed effects to model the relationships among the variables. The results from this study support the findings of a cross-sectional study conducted by Lee et al. (2010); in particular, the predictor variables are significant to determine students’ cognitive style