Preservice Teacher Engineering Design Teaching Efficacy

Science educators are tasked with enacting The Next Generation Science Standards that include engineering core ideas and practices. Many teacher preparation programs and content courses do not include or require engineering design leading many science teachers to believe they are unprepared to teach engineering design. The lack of experience and belief of being unprepared to teach engineering design results in preservice educators’ lack of engineering design teaching self-efficacy. Preparation programs inclusion of efficacy in is essential to understanding later enactment. This mixed-method case study researched the engineering design teaching self-efficacy of eleven preservice educators during an engineering design unit taught in a science methods II course at a university in the western U.S. The changes in preservice educator self-efficacy over the development and delivery of an engineering design unit was explored to describe fluctuations and elements of the engineering design unit that influenced efficacy. This researcher triangulated journals, focus groups, journey maps, video protocols, and instructor session notes to better describe the influence of the elements of an engineering design unit on preservice educator efficacy development. The analysis revealed that the engineering design unit included elements that facilitated sensemaking leading to task competency beliefs. These engineering designs teaching self-efficacy beliefs developed over time with wavelike fluctuations. Preservice educator engineering design teaching self- efficacy progresses from onset, developing, emerging, to maturing. Fluctuation in efficacy is consistent with progression if preservice educators receive mentorship to facilitate sensemaking through the process. To reach the efficacy maturing stage, teachers need the autonomy to enact engineering design curriculum and needed science education reforms. It is expected that a description of developmental engineering efficacy will assist professional learning instructors and curriculum developers to increase enactment of engineering design in secondary science classrooms. Student engagement and engineering literacy may result when teachers have increased engineering design teaching self-efficacy

New media for the promotion of self-regulated learning in higher education

In this article, some of most relevant programs of self-regulation of academic learning in the sphere of higher education were reviewed. Although there are quite a few of them, we reviewed only the interventions whose contents had been implemented in e-learning modalities or had been supported by the new information and human communication technologies. For this task, we arranged the programs along a continuum that ranged from those that deal with the development of self-regulatory competences by indirect training of such competences to the programs whose impact on such competences is much more direct. Lastly, we provide information about a program that our research team is developing and implementing as a pilot study, and whose preliminary results seem highly satisfactory.Nuevos soportes para la promoción del aprendizaje autorregulado en educación superior. En este artículo se han revisado algunos de los programas más relevantes de autorregulación del aprendizaje académico en el ámbito de la educación superior. Aunque existe un gran número de ellos, se ha fijado la revisión en aquellas intervenciones en las que los contenidos se han implantado en modalidades elearning o ayudados por las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación humana. Para esta tarea, se ordenaron los programas en un continuo que va desde aquellos que trabajan en el desarrollo de competencias autorregulatorias mediante el entrenamiento indirecto de tales competencias, hasta otros cuyo trabajo sobre dichas competencias es mucho más directo. En último lugar se ha informado de un programa que nuestro equipo de investigación está desarrollando, e implementando de manera piloto, y cuyos resultados preliminares parecen ser altamente satisfactorios

Content Area Teachers’ Perspectives and Practices in Reading Instruction in Grades 9-12

A rural school district identified a problem among high school content classrooms of insufficient attention to instruction aimed at enabling students to comprehend content area text material. Concerns about attention to reading instruction in content classrooms are also evident on the national level. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to investigate the perspectives and reading instructional practices of secondary content area teachers in math, science, and history. The conceptual framework of self-efficacy guided the study, as the perspectives of the teachers revealed what motivated them to move beyond their pedagogical comfort zone to meet the needs all students. The research questions were focused on the perspectives of teachers toward providing reading instruction in content area classrooms, instructional strategies teachers viewed as supporting reading comprehension and approaches they identified for reducing the barriers to incorporating reading instruction. Data were collected from 4 purposefully selected teachers in Grades 9-12 through semistructured interviews and examination of lesson plans. Data analysis involved an inductive search of patterns and themes of teacher perspectives and instructional practices. The findings showed that the teachers wanted to advance their knowledge of content reading instruction through content specific professional development and continuous support from mentors. Results have the potential for positive social change through identifying professional development to assist teachers with improving reading comprehension within content area reading instruction

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe

How exemplary teachers promote scientific reasoning and higher order thinking in primary science

There is an emerging interest in the development of STEM capabilities to drive Australia’s future economy and workforce. As a consequence, the focus on the teaching of higher order thinking and scientific reasoning has intensified. Despite these efforts, Australia’s level of achievement on international benchmarking tests has not improved. The aim of this PhD research was to investigate how exemplary teachers develop higher order thinking and scientific reasoning in primary science. The study drew on video data from the EQUALPRIME international research project, which explored quality primary science education in different cultures (ARC Discovery Project DP110101500). This qualitative research examined how Year 4 teachers in two contextually different schools scaffolded, supported and created opportunities for higher order thinking and scientific reasoning during the teaching of a physical science topic. Teacher beliefs, pedagogical strategies and contextual factors were viewed through the multiple theoretical lenses of social constructivism, sociocultural theory and social semiotic theory. The central data source was video which was subjected to micro-ethnographic analysis. These data were supplemented with interviews and classroom artefacts, and from these, case studies were compiled. Using a cross-case analysis and an interpretivist approach, assertions were drawn from which the research questions were answered. The study identified that the teaching of these skills was a complex multifaceted process influenced by the combination of teacher beliefs and contextual factors. Based on safe and supportive learning cultures, the teachers employed inquiry-based approaches and a combination of language- and body-based pedagogies that built students’ thinking and reasoning in parallel with conceptual development, across the unit. Outcomes of the research will contribute to new and deeper understanding of effective scaffolding, support and promotion of higher order thinking and reasoning in primary science which can inform enhancements to pre‐service and in‐service teacher professional learning