How do different student constituencies (not) learn the history and philosophy of their subject? Case studies from science, technology and medicine

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Why should H.E. teachers concern themselves with how their students do or don’t learn? Much has been said recently about the alleged merits and demerits of ‘student-centred’ learning, especially on the extent to which student autonomy in the learning process is beneficial to their long-term interests. This paper is a not a contribution to that debate. Rather it focuses on how teachers might uphold their conventional educational responsibilities but make their role more effective. Its central thesis is that this role is most effective when treated not so much as the ‘teaching’ of students as the process of helping students to learn. This particular study concerns how university students of science, technology and medicine (STM) can be helped to learn the history and philosophy of their respective subject from practitioners in the history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine. But I will not be focussing on those students (sometimes the majority) who have no trouble learning to think in historical and philosophical ways about their subject. They are not the ones who require most help from us. More importantly, I look at those students who—despite the best efforts of their teachers—find the historical or philosophical sensibility to be difficult, repellent, uninteresting, irrelevant, pointless or simply weird. In the worst case scenario such students learn nothing substantial or valuable from classes in the history and philosophy of their subject, and become bored, alienated or hostile to the whole enterprise

Describing the Ball: Improve Teaching by Using Rubrics - Explicit Grading Criteria

Assessment is crucial to effective teaching and learning. Carnegie\u27s Educating Lawyers and Roy Stuckey\u27s Best Practices for Legal Education emphasize the importance of assessment. This article explains how detailed, written grading criteria describing what students should learn and how they will be evaluated should be a central part of law teachers\u27 assessment plans. The article details how rubrics can improve law student learning, and contains both detailed, step-by-step directions on creating rubrics and examples of rubrics from many different law school courses

Teachers Know Best: Making Data Work For Teachers and Students

The Teachers Know Best research project seeks to encourage innovation in K - 12 education by helping product developers and those who procure resources for teachers better understand teachers' views. The intent of Making Data Work is to drill down to help educators, school leaders, and product developers better understand the challenges teachers face when working with this critical segment of digital instructional tools. More than 4,600 teachers from a nationally representative sample were surveyed about their use of data to drive instruction and the use of these tools.This study focuses on the potential of a specific subset of digital instructional tools: those that help teachers collect and make use of student data to tailor and improve instruction for individual students. The use of data is a crucial component in personalized learning, which ensures that student learning experiences -- what they learn and how, when, and where they learn it -- are tailored to their individual needs, skills, and interests and enable them to take ownership of their learning. Personalized learning is critical to meeting all students where they are, so they are neither bored with assignments that are too easy nor overwhelmed by work that is too hard

The Image of Vocabulary

This research project was conducted among 96 sophomore students whom attended a suburban high school (made up of roughly 2,000 students). It is important to understand how students\u27 best learn vocabulary because it allows teachers to discuss new words most effectively. Purpose of this project is to maximize the potential for high school students to learn new vocabulary. The data that I collected showed that teaching students new vocabulary words with pictures made a substantial difference in the way they were able to recall the words\u27 definitions. The success rate of each word increases dramatically when context clues are added and increased further with the inclusion of pictures

How Students Learn Best: An Analysis of Demonstrations, Labs, and Scenario-Based Teaching

The purpose of this study is to analyze how students learn best and to discover the methods in which they like to learn new information. Students often find learning in science classrooms difficult or uninteresting. My goal as a future science teacher is to stimulate students so that they are interested in learning the processes and findings of science. There are a myriad of ways that researchers and science teachers think that students can be engaged, such as demonstrations, labs, and scenario-based teaching. I would like to survey students, mainly freshmen in introductory classes, and ask them if they prefer to learn by demonstrations, labs, or scenario-based teaching. I am hoping this information will benefit me in my future classroom so that I may connect with as many of my students as possible and elevate students\u27 knowledge of science

Student Motivation in the High School Mathematics Classroom

This research project is being conducted to better understand how to motivate students in the high school mathematics classroom and to encourage student involvement in the subject area. This project was chosen because through observation and conversations with students and other mathematics teachers I have found that mathematics is not always a strength or interest for students. As such, they have no motivation to do the work required in mathematics. Therefore, their grades are dropping along with their involvement levels. I want to have students fill out a questionnaire in order to learn what students want from a mathematics course in order to make it more interesting and worth while for them. My hope for this project is that it will help inform myself and other mathematics teachers about student motivation and how to best create lessons to motivate students in mathematics

The Impact of Beliefs and Curricular Knowledge on Planning for Science: A Multisite Case Study of Four Teachers

This descriptive multisite case study details how the beliefs and curricular knowledge of four science teachers in a southeastern school district affected their planning for science instruction. Through the analysis of interviews, think-aloud planning records for one unit of instruction, and related documentation, categories were identified and connections drawn to how their beliefs and knowledge influenced planning for instruction. The four teachers in this study jointly expressed certain beliefs about how students best learn science. They expressed beliefs that students best learn science through hands-on activities, through discourse, and by building the student’s knowledge base. The teachers also expressed beliefs about qualities that excellent science teachers should possess. These included that excellent science teachers should: possess personal curiosity, possess well-developed content knowledge, possess the ability to build a strong rapport with students, be flexible, be passionate, possess well-developed knowledge of a variety of pedagogical strategies. Their beliefs about how students learn and qualities teachers should possess often overlapped and intertwined. Qualities of excellent teachers were generalized to reflect all teachers rather than science teachers specifically. Generally, the beliefs these teachers expressed influenced the activities they selected. However, sometimes these beliefs were compromised in response to institutional constraints. Local and state standards played a significant role for these teachers as they planned for science instruction. Common Core standards also played a role in the planning process of the elementary science teachers as well. The National Science Education Standards (NSES) were not utilized as they planned for science instruction. Some of the participating teachers expressed a belief that their local and state standards were aligned with the NSES. Other factors including time, access to materials, and expectations of administration were influential on the planning process. Finally, recommendations are made for policy makers, professional developers and questions are raised for future research

Reading comprehension: nature, assessment and teaching.

The goal of reading is understanding. In order to understand print, a child must be able to decode the words on the page and to extract meaning. A large body of research focuses on how children learn to decode text and how best to foster children’s decoding skills. In contrast, we know much less about the process of reading comprehension in children. In this booklet we first consider what is required in order to ‘read for meaning’. We then move on to discuss children who have difficulties with reading comprehension. Our aim is to enable teachers to assess individual differences in reading and to foster the comprehension strategies that characterize fluent reading

The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies

Collaborative technologies offer a range of new ways of supporting learning by enabling learners to share and exchange both ideas and their own digital products. This paper considers how best to exploit these opportunities from the perspective of learners' needs. New technologies invariably excite a creative explosion of new ideas for ways of doing teaching and learning, although the technologies themselves are rarely designed with teaching and learning in mind. To get the best from them for education we need to start with the requirements of education, in terms of both learners‘ and teachers‘ needs. The argument put forward in this paper is to use what we know about what it takes to learn, and build this into a pedagogical framework with which to challenge digital technologies to deliver a genuinely enhanced learning experience