171,304 research outputs found
Processing mathematics through digital technologies: A reorganisation of student thinking?
This article reports on aspects of an ongoing study examining the use of digital media in mathematics education. In particular, it is concerned with how understanding evolves when mathematical tasks are engaged through digital pedagogical media in primary school settings. While there has been a growing body of research into software and other digital media that enhances geometric, algebraic, and statistical thinking in secondary schools, research of these aspects in primary school mathematics is still limited, and emerging intermittently. The affordances of digital technology that allow dynamic, visual interaction with mathematical tasks, the rapid manipulation of large amounts of data, and instant feedback to input, have already been identified as ways mathematical ideas can be engaged in alternative ways. How might these, and other opportunities digital media afford, transform the learning experience and the ways mathematical ideas are understood? Using an interpretive methodology, the researcher examined how mathematical thinking can be seen as a function of the pedagogical media through which the mathematics is encountered. The article gives an account of how working in a spreadsheet environment framed learners' patterns of social interaction, and how this interaction, in conjunction with other influences, mediated the understanding of mathematical ideas, through framing the students' learning pathways and facilitating risk taking
Warts and all: using student portfolio outcomes to facilitate a faculty development workshop
In 2004, the Department of Writing Studies at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, the U.S., began an assessment of student outcomes for two first-year writing courses (Fall 04 to Fall 05) to evaluate performance on previously established criteria. A study of the studentsā Portfolio Assessment Sheets concluded that one pervasive problem was āDevelopmentā as determined partly by low A grades in the two courses. To engage the faculty (full-time and adjunct), the grades from Fall 04, Spring 05, and Fall 05 were presented during a SummerWorkshop in June 2006. After analyzing a sample student essay, the 28 faculty participants discussed the implications of āDevelopmentā and evaluated the presentation itself. This case study of one collegeās participatory exercise in improving writing found some faculty resistance and some unintended results
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Shape interpretation with design computing
How information is interpreted has significant impact on how it can be used. This is particularly important in design where information from a wide variety of sources is used in a wide variety of contexts and in a wide variety of ways. This paper is concerned with the information that is created, modified and analysed during design processes, specifically with the information that is represented in shapes. It investigates how design computing seeks to support these processes, and the difficulties that arise when it is necessary to consider alternative interpretations of shape. The aim is to establish the problem of shape interpretation as a general challenge for research in design computing, rather than a difficulty that is to be overcome within specific processes. Shape interpretations are common characteristics of several areas of enquiry in design computing. This paper reviews these, brings an integrated perspective and draws conclusions about how this underlying process can be supported
Systemic intervention for computer-supported collaborative learning
This paper presents a systemic intervention approach as a means to overcome the methodological challenges involved in research into computer-supported collaborative learning applied to the promotion of mathematical problem-solving (CSCL-MPS) skills in schools. These challenges include how to develop an integrated analysis of several aspects of the learning process; and how to reflect on learning purposes, the context of application and participants' identities. The focus of systemic intervention is on processes for thinking through whose views and what issues and values should be considered pertinent in an analysis. Systemic intervention also advocates mixing methods from different traditions to address the purposes of multiple stakeholders. Consequently, a design for CSCL-MPS research is presented that includes several methods. This methodological design is used to analyse and reflect upon both a CSCL-MPS project with Colombian schools, and the identities of the participants in that project
Assessing collaborative learning: big data, analytics and university futures
Traditionally, assessment in higher education has focused on the performance of individual students. This focus has been a practical as well as an epistemic one: methods of assessment are constrained by the technology of the day, and in the past they required the completion by individuals under controlled conditions, of set-piece academic exercises. Recent advances in learning analytics, drawing upon vast sets of digitally-stored student activity data, open new practical and epistemic possibilities for assessment and carry the potential to transform higher education. It is becoming practicable to assess the individual and collective performance of team members working on complex projects that closely simulate the professional contexts that graduates will encounter. In addition to academic knowledge this authentic assessment can include a diverse range of personal qualities and dispositions that are key to the computer-supported cooperative working of professionals in the knowledge economy. This paper explores the implications of such opportunities for the purpose and practices of assessment in higher education, as universities adapt their institutional missions to address 21st Century needs. The paper concludes with a strong recommendation for university leaders to deploy analytics to support and evaluate the collaborative learning of students working in realistic contexts
Experimentation and Representation in Architecture: analyzing oneās own design activity
Architects materialize ideas on physical supports to register their thoughts and to discover new possibilities from hints and suggestions in their own drawings. Uncertainty is inherent to creative processes encouraging the production of different ideas through testing.
This research brings to light that the re-examination of artefacts from new points of view allows for the review and generation of design ideas and decisions, capacitating students to make yet new discoveries from what they have done so far. Tacit knowledge aids specific decisions. Student reports become analytical records of their material registers (sketches, physical and virtual models) making it explicit that which is implicit in those artefacts. This apparently confirms previous studies that suggest that knowledge per se not always triggers or controls decisions in design. Many physical as well as perceptive actions actually lead the initial steps and play a crucial role in the whole course of production. Besides serving as external representations, sketches and models provide visual hints that will be checked later, favouring the upcoming of the unexpected, stimulating creativity. The intent here is to point out how these different means of representation and expression contribute in a peculiar manner to the whole process of discovery and solution to problems in architecture.
The authors propose here a reflection on the process of design and its uncertainties in its initial phase, concentrating on sketches and real models as experimentations. They consider these means not from a graphic and physical register stand point, but in terms of conception and concepts they embody, as records of students thinking and knowledge.
Keywords:
Experimentation; Uncertainty; Representation; Design Process; Cognition; Education</p
Educational policy, policy appropriation and Grameen Bank higher education financial aid policy process
The paper talks about higher educational polices and their process of policy appropriations, policy as practices, policy as symbolic, policy as rituals, policy as myths, policy backward- mapping and policy-forward mapping, multi-stage policy implementation process, street-bureaucrats planners, and policy reform process. It critically looks at pros-and-corns of different educational policy theories and their applications in education, and the higher education student financial aid different policies, strategies and products and their impact on the college students. The paper also narrates the higher educational policies and methods of need-based, merit-based, means-test-based grants allocation and loan disbursement and their impact on student academic achievements. Moreover, it discusses the policy process model that has both agendas and multiple streams that consider looking at policy designing problems, solutions of the problems and their usefulness to SES students. Additionally, the paper narrates the Grameen Bank higher education student loan policy making process, although there is no higher education student financial aid services are not exist in Bangladesh. Literature reviews, conversations with higher education students, contextual analysis, and the author personal working experience incorporate here. The study finds for policy improvement, policy analysis is vital because policy analysis can explores usefulness of the policy for public well being and for effectiveness of the policy appropriation.Center for Social Economy Learning and Workplace, University of Toronto. -- York Center for Asia Research, York University. -- Indiana University Bloomington
Report on a Boston University Conference December 7-8, 2012 on 'How Can the History and Philosophy of Science Contribute to Contemporary U.S. Science Teaching?'
This is an editorial report on the outcomes of an international conference
sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (REESE-1205273)
to the School of Education at Boston University and the Center for Philosophy
and History of Science at Boston University for a conference titled: How Can
the History and Philosophy of Science Contribute to Contemporary U.S. Science
Teaching? The presentations of the conference speakers and the reports of the
working groups are reviewed. Multiple themes emerged for K-16 education from
the perspective of the history and philosophy of science. Key ones were that:
students need to understand that central to science is argumentation,
criticism, and analysis; students should be educated to appreciate science as
part of our culture; students should be educated to be science literate; what
is meant by the nature of science as discussed in much of the science education
literature must be broadened to accommodate a science literacy that includes
preparation for socioscientific issues; teaching for science literacy requires
the development of new assessment tools; and, it is difficult to change what
science teachers do in their classrooms. The principal conclusions drawn by the
editors are that: to prepare students to be citizens in a participatory
democracy, science education must be embedded in a liberal arts education;
science teachers alone cannot be expected to prepare students to be
scientifically literate; and, to educate students for scientific literacy will
require a new curriculum that is coordinated across the humanities,
history/social studies, and science classrooms.Comment: Conference funded by NSF grant REESE-1205273. 31 page
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