The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap Between Internet Savvy Students and Their Schools

Presents findings from a survey of public middle and high school students from thirty schools across the U.S. Looks at how students rely on the Internet to help them do their schoolwork, in addition to dozens of other education related tasks

The Internet and Education

Presents findings from a survey of online youth and their parents, conducted between November and December 2000. Looks at how the Internet has become increasingly important for teenagers as an essential study aid both outside and inside the classroom

Online Homework for Agricultural Economics Instruction: Frankenstein’s Monster or Robo TA?

This paper describes the programming required for online homework, evaluates its use, and presents methods for student identification and for processing student input. Online homework applications were evaluated in a real class setting. Generally, online homework is cost effective for large classes that have numerous assignments and repeated usage. Online homework appears to increase learning through increased student study-time allocations. Students felt that online homework made course website interaction more productive. They also indicated that online homework increased their perception of the value of lectures and that its use in other courses would be welcome. All findings were highly statistically significant.computer-aided instruction, economics teaching methods, instruction cost effectiveness, online homework, Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession, A220, G130, Q100,

It\u27s Fun, But Is It Science? Goals and Strategies in a Problem-Based Learning Course

All students at Hampshire College must complete a science requirement in which they demonstrate their understanding of how science is done, examine the work of science in larger contexts, and communicate their ideas effectively. Human Biology: Selected Topics in Medicine is one of 18-20 freshman seminars designed to move students toward completing this requirement. Students work in cooperative groups of 4-6 people to solve actual medical cases about which they receive information progressively. Students assign themselves homework tasks to bring information back for group deliberation. The goal is for case teams to work cooperatively to develop a differential diagnosis and recommend treatment. Students write detailed individual final case reports. Changes observed in student work over six years of developing this course include: increased motivation to pursue work in depth, more effective participation on case teams, increase in critical examination of evidence, and more fully developed arguments in final written reports. As part of a larger study of eighteen introductory science courses in two institutions, several types of pre- and post-course assessments were used to evaluate how teaching approaches might have influenced students’ attitudes about science, their ability to learn science, and their understanding of how scientific knowledge is developed [1]. Preliminary results from interviews and Likert-scale measures suggest improvements in the development of some students’ views of epistemology and in the importance of cooperative group work in facilitating that development

Correlation Between Student Collaboration Network Centrality and Academic Performance

We compute nodal centrality measures on the collaboration networks of students enrolled in three upper-division physics courses, usually taken sequentially, at the Colorado School of Mines. These are complex networks in which links between students indicate assistance with homework. The courses included in the study are intermediate Classical Mechanics, introductory Quantum Mechanics, and intermediate Electromagnetism. By correlating these nodal centrality measures with students' scores on homework and exams, we find four centrality measures that correlate significantly with students' homework scores in all three courses: in-strength, out-strength, closeness centrality, and harmonic centrality. These correlations suggest that students who not only collaborate often, but also collaborate significantly with many different people tend to achieve higher grades. Centrality measures between simultaneous collaboration networks (analytical vs. numerical homework collaboration) composed of the same students also correlate with each other, suggesting that students' collaboration strategies remain relatively stable when presented with homework assignments targeting different skills. Additionally, we correlate centrality measures between collaboration networks from different courses and find that the four centrality measures with the strongest relationship to students' homework scores are also the most stable measures across networks involving different courses. Correlations of centrality measures with exam scores were generally smaller than the correlations with homework scores, though this finding varied across courses.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. PE

Student Engagement in a Team-Based Capstone Course: A Comparison of What Students Do and What Instructors Value

Student engagement is an important consideration across all levels of education. The adoption of student-centered teaching methods is an effective way to increase student engagement. Student engagement is at risk when instructor expectations and student participation in purposeful engagement activities are not aligned. Traditionally, student engagement is measured at the institutional level, which proves less than useful to instructors who wish to gauge engagement in specific courses in higher education. In this study, we sought to determine classroom level engagement in a capstone farm management course recently converted to the team-based learning format by comparing student perceptions regarding participation in engagement-specific activities with the instructors’ perceived importance of those same activities. The Classroom-Level Survey of Student Engagement (CLASSE) was utilized to collect student participation and instructor importance data. Data were examined utilizing a 2x2 quadrant analysis. Congruence between student participation frequency and instructor importance was found between 73.7% of the educational activities, while discrepancies were found on 26.3% of educational activities. Overall, students who completed the team-based learning-structured farm management course were physically and psychologically engaged in the learning environment. It is recommended that team-based learning be implemented in other courses within agricultural education to examine its utility in other contexts

A New Look at Translation: Teaching tools for language and literature

Does translation have a place in the modern language or literature classroom? This article argues that as long as translation is recognized as a distinct skill rather than a path to language acquisition it can and should play a role in language instruction. The rising popularity of Web-based machine translation (WBMT) sites among students points to a need to help foreign language learners better understand the translation process. Along with a discussion of how instructors can minimize inappropriate use of WBMT, the article provides examples of how translation in the proper context can be used productively to teach both language and literature. It also shows that teachers have much to gain by supporting translation and interpretation as professional options for advanced language learners. Examples are given in Spanish