Functional Skills Support Programme: Developing functional skills in history

This booklet is part of "... a series of 11 booklets which helps schools to implement functional skills across the curriculum. The booklets illustrate how functional skills can be applied and developed in different subjects and contexts, supporting achievement at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4. Each booklet contains an introduction to functional skills for subject teachers, three practical planning examples with links to related websites and resources, a process for planning and a list of additional resources to support the teaching and learning of functional skills." - The National Strategies website

The Development of Historical Instruction/Teaching Material in Senior High Schools Based on Local History with SOI Approach

ABSTRACT Purpose: The purpose of this research is to develop more comprehensive model of historical instructional materials that is a model of local history-based teaching materials and oriented to local historical events. The method used in the development of historical instructional materials is Research and Development (R & D) approach. This research is to formulate a development model of teaching materials on Indonesian history with local history. So the appropriate method in this research is the R & D method/approach.The development of historical materials based on local history will give students an understanding of the historical values that occur in their environment so that the understanding level of historical values will more achieve the target in the historical learning objectives. Method: The method used in the development of historical instructional materials is Research and Development (R & D) approach. This research is to formulate a development model of teaching materials on Indonesian history with local history. So the appropriate method in this research is the R & D method/approach. Findings: The developed product is teaching materials about Indonesian history arranged on the concept of SOI (Selecting, Organizing, and Integrating.). The development of historical teaching materials with SOI begins with the gathering of local historical sources which are relevant to the national curriculum on the history subjects. The selection result based on the observations of historical objects and oral sources is combined with existing knowledge of history and sorted which is included in national curriculum. After the materials are selected/sorted then the next stage is to organize them which are suitable with material orders (basic competence) on nasional curriculum. The last stage before organizing the teaching materials is to combine the local history with national curriculum of history subjects into the historical teaching materials. The product of teaching materials is able to accommodate the materials of local history relating to the basic competence in the national curriculum

Information Seeking in Context: Teachers' Content Selection during Lesson Planning Using the Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive of Holocaust Survivor Testimony

This study explored the information seeking task of content selection. An integrative conceptual framework used existing models to examine the context and process of information seeking, evaluation, and selection. The conceptual framework incorporated three main elements of the information seeking process: * The information need context, * The information search process, * Relevance criteria. Among teachers' many duties are the creation, implementation, and revision of lesson plans. A subtask of lesson planning is content selection, which occurs when teachers seek outside content, such as readings or audio recordings, to incorporate into lesson plans. Content selection is seen here as a work-task-embedded information seeking process. A qualitative study was implemented within the setting of a week-long professional development workshop, during which eight teachers used a custom software product that combined a lesson-planning module with an information retrieval (IR) system. The IR system provided access to a subset of the Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. Data types included interviews, fly-on-the-wall transcripts, transaction logs, relevance judgments, and lesson plans. Analysis combined inductive and deductive techniques, including start codes, constant comparison, emergent themes, and matrix analysis. Findings depict associations among each component of the framework. 1. The information need context consists of five layers (Environment, Role, Person, Task, Information Source), each of which influences information search and relevance. 2. The ISP includes two cognitive-behavioral facets: Conceptualizing and Actualizing. 3. Relevance criteria are the situationally-driven embodiment of contextual elements that apply to information seeking. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for information studies and education. For information studies, this study contributes to understanding of the ISP as contextual, cognitive, and interactive. Information need, while unobservable in its native form, can be depicted in enough detail to supply meaningful requirements for the design of information systems and processes. Content selection is a form of exploratory search, and this study's implications suggest that the "traditional" reference interview should be used as an interaction model during exploratory search. For education, this study extends the discourse about consequences of standards-based education for teacher practice and contributes to models of teacher planning as an iterative, cognitive process

Functional Skills Support Programme: Developing functional skills in geography

This booklet is part of "... a series of 11 booklets which helps schools to implement functional skills across the curriculum. The booklets illustrate how functional skills can be applied and developed in different subjects and contexts, supporting achievement at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4. Each booklet contains an introduction to functional skills for subject teachers, three practical planning examples with links to related websites and resources, a process for planning and a list of additional resources to support the teaching and learning of functional skills." - The National Strategies website

A systematic review of whole class, subject based, pedagogies with reported outcomes for the academic and social inclusion of pupils with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms

Schools across the world have responded to international and national initiatives designed to further the development of inclusive education. In England, there is a statutory requirement for all schools to provide effective learning opportunities for all pupils (QCA, 2000) and children with special educational needs (SEN) are positioned as having a right to be within mainstream classrooms accessing an appropriate curriculum (SENDA, 2001). Previous reviews which have sought to identify classroom practices that support the inclusion of children with SEN have been technically non-systematic and hence a need for a systematic review within this area has been identified (Nind et al., 2004; Rix et al., 2006). This systematic literature review is the last in a series of three