Designing electronic collaborative learning environments

Electronic collaborative learning environments for learning and working are in vogue. Designers design them according to their own constructivist interpretations of what collaborative learning is and what it should achieve. Educators employ them with different educational approaches and in diverse situations to achieve different ends. Students use them, sometimes very enthusiastically, but often in a perfunctory way. Finally, researchers study them and—as is usually the case when apples and oranges are compared—find no conclusive evidence as to whether or not they work, where they do or do not work, when they do or do not work and, most importantly, why, they do or do not work. This contribution presents an affordance framework for such collaborative learning environments; an interaction design procedure for designing, developing, and implementing them; and an educational affordance approach to the use of tasks in those environments. It also presents the results of three projects dealing with these three issues

An Interaction Centred Approach to the teaching of Non-technical Skills in a Virtual Environment

In most domains involving expert knowledge, there is a number of cognitive and social factors influencing how efficient one human being is at correctly assessing and responding to certain situations. These factors, which contribute to the efficient and safe realization of a technical activity, are known as non-technical skills, and correspond to a wide range of cognitive proficiencies such as situation awareness, decision making, stress or fatigue management, but also social skills such as communication, leadership and team working. Different studies have shown the impact such skills can have in the successful resolving of a number of critical situations, even more so in our domains of interest which are medical surgery or driving. In this paper, we take a look at the difficulties raised by the teaching of the technical and non-technical skills mobilized during a critical situation, in the context of TEL within virtual environments. We present the advantages of using a combined enactive and situated learning approach to this problematic, and then take an ill-defined perspective to raise some important designing issues in this respect. We show that some aspects of this problem have not been encompassed yet in the ill-defined domains literature, and should be further studied in any attempt at teaching behaviours inducing technical and non-technical skills in a virtual world

Promising Practices: Supporting Transition of Youth Served by the Foster Care System

A continuation of the 1997 study funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, this collaborative effort with the National Resource Center for Youth Services presents findings of a study of approximately 100 independent living and transitional living programs. It identifies "promising practices" linked with positive outcomes for youth leaving foster care-and presents information drawn from interviews with program staff and participating youth

Household wealth and adolescents' social-emotional functioning in schools.

This study attempts a two-part shift in educational research narrowly fixated on the socioeconomic determinants of student test-score performance. First, we focus on variations in how to measure wealth. Second, we move beyond achievement and focus on the wealth determinants of adolescents' social-emotional competencies. Using data from a nationally-representative sample of US eighth graders, we find that the correlation between wealth and social-emotional competencies varies according to how the partitions among the upper class, the middle and working classes, and the poor are defined. By emphasizing wealth in the production of classed social-emotional competencies not captured by test scores, our findings suggest that the growth of household wealth has a more salient effect for lower- and middle-class adolescents than the highest class which appears to have the least to gain, in terms of social-emotional competencies, from an increase in household wealth

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Assertive Community Treatment for People of Color: Practice & Theory

Disparities in mental health treatment have been well documented over the last 30 years. Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is poised to be able to address these disparities for people experiencing severe mental illness if we ground practice (i.e., ACT) in theory (i.e., ecological perspective of social work). The ecological perspective pushes social workers and other practitioners to be critically aware of the complexities of humanity and be expansive in our outlook and approach to practice. Product One was a systematic review focused on primary research that assessed the outcomes of the effectiveness of ACT with people of color who are experiencing severe mental illness. The purpose of conducting a systematic review was to establish a foundation of quality research that assessed the outcomes of ACT. From that body of knowledge, the question of ACT’s effectiveness with people of color was then explored. Product two was a conceptual paper that explored grounding ACT theoretically in the ecological perspective of social work to enhance its effectiveness in working with people of color. Grounding ACT services in the ecological perspective will enhance ACT teams’ ability to provide care that meets the needs of all consumers, including consumers of color. The professional standards of holism, sensitivity to diversity, and strengths were used to analyze ACT services and the ecological perspective. Product three explored the concepts of intersectionality, cultural humility, and power to operationalize the ecological perspective in practice. Practitioners who understand and operationalize these key concepts in their work are more aware and attentive to the concepts of adaptability, habitat and niche, life course, power, stress, and resilience. This enhanced understanding aids practitioners in being attentive to the complexities of human dynamics that are impacted by race, ethnicity, and culture. To effectively treat people experiencing severe mental illness, implications of their illness and identity must be considered. Inattentiveness to these factors will result in practitioners being less effective. Providing ACT services from an ecological perspective provides mental health practitioners with a framework for understanding and being critically aware of the consumer’s unique lens and life experiences. This enables practitioners to be effective in addressing the needs of all consumers, including consumers of color

Assessing care

The objective of this report is to summarize progress towards measurement of selected childcare and feeding practices, and to discuss the feasibility and usefulness of these measurements in research and program contexts. This is the third in a series of reports documenting insights regarding care and measurement of care gained from the Accra Urban Food and Nutrition Study (AUFNS). This last report complements the previous two by providing an extensive review of the published literature on experience with the measurement of selected dimensions of care.FCND ,Child Feeding. ,Child care. ,

The Effects of Group Size on Student Learning, Student Contributions, \Mental Effort, and Group Outcomes for Middle-Aged Adults Working in an Ill-Structured Problem-Solving Environment

Group work has become increasingly important within adult education as educators strive to present students with problems and processes that they encounter in their professional lives. In many work environments, individuals are expected to function as a part of a team to solve complex problems. Consequently, there has been a shift towards teaching students how to solve problems as part of a group rather than individually. An important question becomes What size group maximizes students learning? This study compared student learning, student participation levels, and mental effort for middle-aged, professional students in large (six students) and small groups (three students) while working in a collaborative, ill-structured problem solving environment to determine if group size impacted student performance. This study found that there was no significant difference in learning, participation, and mental effort between large and small groups. It also confirmed earlier research demonstrating that group product scores, even when adjusted for student participation, did not predict individual student learning. A multiple regression was used to determine if group size, participation, mental effort or group scores could be used to predict individual student learning. The study showed that for middle-aged professional students, group size, mental effort, participation, or group quality were not effective predictors of student learning

Investigating intersubjectivity in peer-review-based, technology-enabled knowledge creation and refinement social systems

In peer-based knowledge creation domains, problem complexity and subjectivity of individual understanding impedes development of actors' competencies. Prior research remains ambivalent on whether interactions between peers lead to the development of shared, intersubjective, understanding about one's own and peers' competencies. On the one hand, actors may develop this shared understanding through social learning. On the other hand, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, both less and more competent actors may persistently miscalibrate their own performance relative to peers. This dissertation examines how creation and evaluation competencies in peer-based social knowledge creation communities, where complex-problem social knowledge artifacts are produced, change and interact over time. It hypothesizes the existence of latent classes of longitudinal trajectories of creation and evaluation competency development, and convergence of these trajectories over multiple interactions, as intersubjective understanding emerges; moreover, their trajectories may be affected by the openness of peer groups. To investigate this research problem, a peer review system was designed, instantiated, and tested in a controlled experiment study. Findings support the existence of multiple latent longitudinal trajectories. Partial evidence of the peer group openness' effect on competency change over time was also found. Results indicate that longitudinal peer interaction patterns are very complex. Practical implications of these finding for various domains are discussed and directions for further investigation are proposed