1,598 research outputs found
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The effect of multiple knowledge sources on learning and teaching
Current paradigms for machine-based learning and teaching tend to perform their task in isolation from a rich context of existing knowledge. In contrast, the research project presented here takes the view that bringing multiple sources of knowledge to bear is of central importance to learning in complex domains. As a consequence teaching must both take advantage of and beware of interactions between new and existing knowledge. The central process which connects learning to its context is reasoning by analogy, a primary concern of this research. In teaching, the connection is provided by the explicit use of a learning model to reason about the choice of teaching actions. In this learning paradigm, new concepts are incrementally refined and integrated into a body of expertise, rather than being evaluated against a static notion of correctness. The domain chosen for this experimentation is that of learning to solve "algebra story problems." A model of acquiring problem solving skills in this domain is described, including: representational structures for background knowledge, a problem solving architecture, learning mechanisms, and the role of analogies in applying existing problem solving abilities to novel problems. Examples of learning are given for representative instances of algebra story problems. After relating our views to the psychological literature, we outline the design of a teaching system. Finally, we insist on the interdependence of learning and teaching and on the synergistic effects of conducting both research efforts in parallel
Innovative learning in action (ILIA) issue four: New academics engaging with action research
This edition of ILIA showcases four papers which were originally submitted as action research projects on the
Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Practice and Research programme. Within the programme we offer an environment where participants can explore their unique teaching situations â not to produce all-encompassing
approaches to Higher Education (HE) practice but to develop
an ongoing dialogue about the act of teaching.
In effect, there are no generalisable âbestâ methods of teaching because they never work as well as âlocally
produced practice in actionâ (Kincheloe, 2003:15). Thus rather than providing short term âsurvival kitsâ the programme offers new HE teachers a âframeâ for examining their own and their colleaguesâ teaching alongside questioning educational purpose and values in the pursuit of pedagogical improvement.
This âframeâ is action research which Ebbutt (1985:156) describes as: âŠThe systematic study of attempts to
change and improve educational practice by groups of participants by means of their own practical actions
and by means of their own reflections upon the effects of their actions⊠We promote âpractitioner-researchâ or
âteacher-researchâ as a way of facilitating professional development for new HE teachers, promoting change and giving a voice to their developing personal and professional knowledge.
Teachers as researchers embark upon an action orientated, iterative and collaborative process to interrogate their
own practices, question their own assumptions, attitudes, values and beliefs in order to better understand, influence and enrich the context of their own situations.
The action researcher assumes that practitioners are knowledgeable about their own teaching situations and the
fact that they are âin-situâ and not at âarms lengthâ as the value-neutral, âscientificâ researcher is often claimed to be, does not invalidate their knowledge.
Thus, practitioners are capable of analysing their own actions within a âreflective practitionerâ modus operandi.
Action research is on-going in conception and well suited to examining the ever-changing and increasingly complex HE practice environment. Findings from action research are always subject to revision since it intrinsically acknowledges the need to constantly revisit widely diverse
teaching situations and scenarios across everyday HE practice. Teaching is not predictable and constant, it always occurs in a contemporary microcosm of uncertainty. Action research provides an analytical framework for new HE
teachers to begin to engage with this unpredictability on a continuing basis, that is its purpose and also its perennial challenge.
The papers presented here describe how four relatively new HE teachers have begun to address the challenge of
improving their practice within their locally based settings utilising the action research âparadigmâ
Law Talk: Speaking, Writing, and Entering the Discourse of Law
The author suggests talking about the legal writing process with first-year legal research and writing students, as they are learning and actively writing, and advocates for students\u27 experiencing being the audience of legal writing, as part of their education. This Article reviews three academic schools of thought regarding the relationship between speech and writing. This Article argues for change in the typical legal writing pedagogy, meaning more student interaction and teacher intervention, to effectively enable students to engage in discourse communities of law
Cognitive development in relation to science education
Various skills have been considered quintessential to the scientific method. The need for
these skills was highlighted by Armstrong at the beginning of the century and continues to be
re-iterated to the present day within the criteria of the National Curriculum. Pupils as
scientists are expected to make accurate and meaningful observations; record results from
experiments formulated to test hypotheses, controlling all the relevant variables except the
one under investigation; identify patterns within the results and recognise anomalies; draw
valid conclusions from the data collected and extrapolate from the data to predict further
results. These criteria were included in the list of thirty-two teacher assessed skills in
domains five and six of the Northern Examination Association, NEA, GCSE Biology
Syllabus.
This research project endeavoured to test the acquisition of these skills in a large sample of
students drawn from a variety of schools in an effort to establish the relative difficulty of the
individual skills. The corollation of performance of the skills with a range of factors,
including IQ, the influence of gender, school type, and associated subjects they studied was
explored. In particular the effect of an exposure to the Warwick Process Science Scheme
was investigated to establish whether a transferable long term enhancement resulted. The
main body of the research was undertaken on Year ten (4th Year) pupils, the sample being
drawn from ten schools of varying types. The work was extended to include both younger
and older age groups, to identify the progress made with age in skill acquisition and to
investigate whether success in the skills is of predictive value for the final GCSE grades of
future 'A'Level achievement.
The results indicated a wide variability in degrees of difficulty of the individual skills and a
wide range of performance by individual candidates. Success in the skills corollated very
closely with IQ, so to eliminate this effect samples cross-matched for IQ were investigated to
establish the effect of other variables. Only the study of the three separate sciences and
tuition within a selective school proved to have a significant effect on the outcome. Only
skill 30 devising three separate hypotheses to explain a complex set of results, had predictive
value for GCSE and none were of value for predicting capital 'A'Level success
Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum
The field of specialization known as the science of learning is not, in fact, one field. Science of learning is a term that serves as an umbrella for many lines of research, theory, and application. A term with an even wider reach is Learning Sciences (Sawyer, 2006). The present book represents a sliver, albeit a substantial one, of the scholarship on the science of learning and its application in educational settings (Science of Instruction, Mayer 2011). Although much, but not all, of what is presented in this book is focused on learning in college and university settings, teachers of all academic levels may find the recommendations made by chapter authors of service. The overarching theme of this book is on the interplay between the science of learning, the science of instruction, and the science of assessment (Mayer, 2011). The science of learning is a systematic and empirical approach to understanding how people learn. More formally, Mayer (2011) defined the science of learning as the âscientific study of how people learnâ (p. 3). The science of instruction (Mayer 2011), informed in part by the science of learning, is also on display throughout the book. Mayer defined the science of instruction as the âscientific study of how to help people learnâ (p. 3). Finally, the assessment of student learning (e.g., learning, remembering, transferring knowledge) during and after instruction helps us determine the effectiveness of our instructional methods. Mayer defined the science of assessment as the âscientific study of how to determine what people knowâ (p.3). Most of the research and applications presented in this book are completed within a science of learning framework. Researchers first conducted research to understand how people learn in certain controlled contexts (i.e., in the laboratory) and then they, or others, began to consider how these understandings could be applied in educational settings. Work on the cognitive load theory of learning, which is discussed in depth in several chapters of this book (e.g., Chew; Lee and Kalyuga; Mayer; Renkl), provides an excellent example that documents how science of learning has led to valuable work on the science of instruction. Most of the work described in this book is based on theory and research in cognitive psychology. We might have selected other topics (and, thus, other authors) that have their research base in behavior analysis, computational modeling and computer science, neuroscience, etc. We made the selections we did because the work of our authors ties together nicely and seemed to us to have direct applicability in academic settings
Identification and remediation of student difficulties with quantitative genetics.
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.Genetics has been identified as a subject area which many students find difficult to
comprehend. The researcher, who is also a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,
had noted over a number of years that students find the field of quantitative genetics
particularly challenging. The aim of this investigation was two-fold. Firstly, during the
diagnostic phase of the investigation, to obtain empirical evidence on the nature of
difficulties and alternative conceptions that may be experienced by some students in the
context of quantitative genetics. Secondly, to develop, implement and assess an
intervention during the remediation phase of the study which could address the identified
difficulties and alternative conceptions.
The research was conducted from a human constructivist perspective using an action
research approach. A mixed-method, pragmatic paradigm was employed. The study was
conducted at the University of KwaZulu-Natal over four years and involved third-year
students studying introductory modules in quantitative genetics. Empirical evidence of
students' conceptual frameworks, student difficulties and alternative conceptions was
obtained during the diagnostic phase using five research instruments. These included:
free-response probes, multiple-choice diagnostic tests, student-generated concept maps,
a word association study and student interviews. Data were collected, at the start and
completion of the modules, to ascertain the status of students' prior knowledge (prior
knowledge concepts), and what they had learnt during the teaching of the module
(quantitative genetics concepts).
Student-generated concept maps and student interviews were used to determine whether
students were able to integrate their knowledge and link key concepts of quantitative
genetics. This initial analysis indicated that many students had difficulty integrating their
knowledge of variance and heritability, and could not apply their knowledge of quantitative
genetics to the solution of practical problems.
Multiple-choice diagnostic tests and interviews with selected students were used to gather
data on student difficulties and alternative conceptions. The results suggested that
students held five primary difficulties or alternative conceptions with respect to prior
knowledge concepts: (1) confusion between the terms variation and variance; (2)
inappropriate association of heterozygosity with variation in a population; (3) inappropriate
association of variation with change; (4) inappropriate association of equilibrium with
inbred populations and with values of zero and one; and, (5) difficulty relating descriptive
statistics to graphs of a normal distribution. Furthermore, three major difficulties were
detected with respect to students understanding of quantitative genetics concepts: (1)
students frequently confused individual and population measures such as breeding value
and heritability; (2) students confused the terms heritability and inheritance; and, (3)
students were not able to link descriptive statistics such as variance and heritability to histograms. Students found the concepts of variance and heritability to be particularly
challenging. A synthesis of the results obtained from the diagnostic phase indicated that
many of the difficulties and alternative conceptions noted were due to confusion between
certain terms and topics and that students had difficulty with the construction and
interpretation of histograms. These results were used to develop a model of the possible
source of students' difficulties. It was hypothesized and found that the sequence in which
concepts are introduced to students at many South African universities could be
responsible for difficulties and alternative conceptions identified during the study,
particularly the inappropriate association of terms or topics.
An intervention was developed to address the identified difficulties and alternative
conceptions. This intervention consisted of a series of computer-based tutorials and
concept mapping exercises. The intervention was then implemented throughout a third year
introductory module in quantitative genetics. The effectiveness of the intervention
was assessed using the multiple-choice diagnostic tests and interview protocols
developed during the diagnostic phase. The knowledge of the student group who
participated in the intervention (test group) was compared against a student group from
the previous year that had only been exposed to conventional teaching strategies (control
group). t-tests, an analysis of covariance and a regression analysis all indicated that the
intervention had been effective. Furthermore, an inductive analysis of the student
responses indicted that most students understanding of the concepts of variance,
heritability and histograms was greatly improved.
The concept maps generated by students during the remediation phase, and data from the
student interviews, provided an indication of the nature and extent of the conceptual
change which had occurred during the teaching of the module. The results showed that
most of the conceptual change could be classified as conceptual development or
conceptual capture and not conceptual exchange. Furthermore, it seemed that conceptual
change had occurred when considered from an epistemological, ontological and affective
perspective, with most students indicating that they felt they had benefited from all aspects
of the intervention.
The findings of this research strongly suggest an urgent need to redesign quantitative
genetics course curricula. Cognisance should be taken of both the sequence and the
manner in which key concepts are taught in order to enhance students' understanding of
this highly cognitively demanding area of genetics
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Use of collaborative computer simulation activities by high school science students learning relative motion.
Galileo\u27s contemporaries as well as today\u27s students have difficulty understanding relative motion. It is hypothesized that construction of visual models, resolution of these visual models with numeric models, and, in many cases, rejection of epistemological commitments such as the belief in one true velocity, are necessary for students to form integrated mental models of relative motion events. To investigate students\u27 relative motion problem solving, high school science students were videotaped in classroom and laboratory settings as they performed collaborative predict-observe-explain activities with relative motion computer simulations. The activities were designed to facilitate conceptual change by challenging common alternative conceptions. Half of the students interacted with simulations that provided animated feedback; the other half received numeric feedback. Learning, as measured by a diagnostic test, occurred following both conditions. There was no statistically significant difference between groups on the measure. It is hypothesized that students did not show statistically significant performance differences on the relative motion test because (a) many students were able to solve numeric problems through algorithm use; (b) many numeric condition students were aided in their ability to visualize problems by interaction with the treatment; and (c) the animation condition fostered little learning because the activities were too easy for students to perform. Students\u27 problem solving was examined through analyses of protocols and through statistical analyses of written responses. Evidence supported the following findings: (1) Numeric condition students had more difficulty with the computer activities than animation condition students. (2) Many students in both groups were able to construct accurate mental models of relative motion events. (3) A number of numeric condition students used faulty mechanical algorithms to solve problems. (4) A number of animation condition students used visualization to solve problems, mapping dynamic visual features of the animations onto posttest problems. Thus, there is evidence that presentation of numeric data can foster students\u27 use of mechanical algorithms. Presentation of animations can foster visualization of target problems solved off-line. These results suggest that, in addition to the structure of the simulations, how computer simulations are used may have a great impact on students\u27 cognition
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