51,157 research outputs found
Using Data in Undergraduate Science Classrooms
Provides pedagogical insight concerning the skill of using data The resource being annotated is: http://www.dlese.org/dds/catalog_DATA-CLASS-000-000-000-007.htm
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Supporting location-based inquiry learning across school, field and home contexts
Here we explore how technology can be applied to support inquiry learning spanning a range of contexts. The development process of a location-based inquiry learning toolset is presented for a secondary school GCSE Geography project. The design framework used and the process of participatory development is discussed with regard to the co-development of the activities and tools involved in an inquiry project. The lessons learned relate to the formation of a motivational context for the inquiry; the role of personal data collection in the field; the use of bridging representations across field and classroom activities; and the development of flexible, re-usable tools to support and bridge sequences of activities
Big Data as a Technology-to-think-with for Scientific Literacy
This research aimed to identify indications of scientific literacy resulting
from a didactic and investigative interaction with Google Trends Big Data
software by first-year students from a high-school in Novo Hamburgo, Southern
Brazil. Both teaching strategies and research interpretations lie on four
theoretical backgrounds. Firstly, Bunge's epistemology, which provides a
thorough characterization of Science that was central to our study. Secondly,
the conceptual framework of scientific literacy of Fives et al. that makes our
teaching focus precise and concise, as well as supports one of our
methodological tool: the SLA (scientific literacy assessment). Thirdly, the
"crowdledge" construct from dos Santos, which gives meaning to our study when
as it makes the development of scientific literacy itself versatile for paying
attention on sociotechnological and epistemological contemporary phenomena.
Finally, the learning principles from Papert's Constructionism inspired our
educational activities. Our educational actions consisted of students, divided
into two classes, investigating phenomena chose by them. A triangulation
process to integrate quantitative and qualitative methods on the assessments
results was done. The experimental design consisted in post-tests only and the
experimental variable was the way of access to the world. The experimental
group interacted with the world using analyses of temporal and regional plots
of interest of terms or topics searched on Google. The control class did
'placebo' interactions with the world through on-site observations of
bryophytes, fungus or whatever in the schoolyard. As general results of our
research, a constructionist environment based on Big Data analysis showed
itself as a richer strategy to develop scientific literacy, compared to a free
schoolyard exploration.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, 8 table
Effects of immersion in inquiry-based learning on student teachers’ educational beliefs
Professional development on inquiry-based learning (IBL) generally draws heavily on the principle of providing instruction in line with what teachers are expected to do in their classroom. So far, however, relatively little is known about how this impacts teachers' educational beliefs, even though these beliefs ultimately determine their classroom behavior. The present study therefore investigates how immersion in inquiry-based learning affects student teachers' beliefs about knowledge goals, in addition to their self-efficacy for inquiry. In total, 302 student history teachers participated in a 4-h long inquiry activity designed within the WISE learning environment, and completed a pre- and posttest right before and after the intervention. Multilevel analyses suggest that the intervention had a significant positive effect on the value that student teachers attributed to procedural knowledge goals, or learning how historical knowledge is constructed, and on student teachers' self-efficacy for conducting inquiries. Despite these general positive results, however, the results also show that the impact of the intervention differed significantly across students. In particular, it appears that immersion in IBL had little effect on a subgroup of 25 student-teachers, who held largely content-oriented beliefs. Based on these findings, the present study discusses a number of implications for professional development on IBL
The representation of scientific research in the national curriculum and secondary school pupils’ perceptions of research, its function, usefulness and value to their lives
Young people’s views on what research is, how it is conducted and whether it is important, influences the decisions they make about their further studies and career choices. In this paper we report the analysis of questionnaire data with a particular focus on pupil perceptions of research in the sciences and of the scientific method. The questionnaire was a 25-item Likert Scale (1-5) distributed to seven collaborating schools. We received 2634 returns from pupils across key stages 3, 4 and 5. We also asked teachers to complete the questionnaire in order to explore how they thought their pupils would respond. We received 54 teacher responses. Statistically significant differences in the responses were identified through a chi-square test on SPSS. As what is being taught influences secondary pupil views on research we also consider how the term ‘research’ appears in the national curriculum for England and Wales and the three main English exam boards. The main theoretical construct that informs our analysis of the questionnaire data and the national curriculum is Angela Brew’s 4-tier descriptor of perceptions of research (domino, trading, layer, journey). We use this framework in order to map what, when and how research is presented to school pupils in England and Wales. We also use this framework in order to highlight and discuss certain pupil views that emerged from the questionnaire data and which indicate areas where curriculum and pedagogy intervention may be necessary: pupils seem less confident in their understanding of research as involving the identification of a research question; and, they often see research as a means to confirm one’s own opinion. They do however understand research as involving the generation of new knowledge and the collection of new data, such as interviews and questionnaires as well as laboratory work, field trips and library searches and they appear relatively confident in their statements about their ability to do research, their school experiences of research and the importance of research in their future career choice
How physics instruction impacts students' beliefs about learning physics: A meta-analysis of 24 studies
In this meta-analysis, we synthesize the results of 24 studies using the
Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and the Maryland
Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) to answer several questions: (1) How does
physics instruction impact students' beliefs? (2) When do physics majors
develop expert-like beliefs? and (3) How do students' beliefs impact their
learning of physics? We report that in typical physics classes, students'
beliefs deteriorate or at best stay the same. There are a few types of
interventions, including an explicit focus on model-building and/or developing
expert- like beliefs that lead to significant improvements in beliefs. Further,
small courses and those for elementary education and non-science majors also
result in improved beliefs. However, because the available data oversamples
certain types of classes, it is unclear whether these improvements are actually
due to the interventions, or due to the small class size, or student population
typical of the kinds of classes in which these interventions are most often
used. Physics majors tend to enter their undergraduate education with more
expert-like beliefs than non-majors and these beliefs remain relatively stable
throughout their undergraduate careers. Thus, typical physics courses appear to
be selecting students who already have strong beliefs, rather than supporting
students in developing strong beliefs. There is a small correlation between
students' incoming beliefs about physics and their gains on conceptual
mechanics surveys. This suggests that students with more expert-like incoming
beliefs may learn more in their physics courses, but this finding should be
further explored and replicated. Some unanswered questions remain. To answer
these questions, we advocate several specific types of future studies.Comment: 30 pages. Accepted to Phys Rev ST-PE
Building an Expert System for Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services
Commercial Cloud services have been increasingly supplied to customers in
industry. To facilitate customers' decision makings like cost-benefit analysis
or Cloud provider selection, evaluation of those Cloud services are becoming
more and more crucial. However, compared with evaluation of traditional
computing systems, more challenges will inevitably appear when evaluating
rapidly-changing and user-uncontrollable commercial Cloud services. This paper
proposes an expert system for Cloud evaluation that addresses emerging
evaluation challenges in the context of Cloud Computing. Based on the knowledge
and data accumulated by exploring the existing evaluation work, this expert
system has been conceptually validated to be able to give suggestions and
guidelines for implementing new evaluation experiments. As such, users can
conveniently obtain evaluation experiences by using this expert system, which
is essentially able to make existing efforts in Cloud services evaluation
reusable and sustainable.Comment: 8 page, Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Cloud and
Service Computing (CSC 2012), pp. 168-175, Shanghai, China, November 22-24,
201
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Innovating Pedagogy 2017: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University Innovation Report 6
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE).
Themes:
• Big-data inquiry: thinking with data
• Learners making science
• Navigating post-truth societies
• Immersive learning
• Learning with internal values
• Student-led analytics
• Intergroup empathy
• Humanistic knowledge-building communities
• Open Textbooks
• Spaced Learnin
- …