A teaching experiment to foster the conceptual understanding of multiplication based on children's literature to facilitate dialogic learning

The importance of conceptual understanding as opposed to low-level procedural knowledge in mathematics has been well documented (Hiebert & Carpenter, 1992). Development of conceptual understanding of multiplication is fostered when students recognise the equal group structure that is common in all multiplicative problems (Mulligan & Mitchelmore, 1996). This paper reports on the theoretical development of a transformative teaching experiment based on conjecture-driven research design (Confrey & Lachance, 1999) that aims to enhance Year 3 students’ conceptual understanding of multiplication. The teaching experiment employs children’s literature as a motivational catalyst and mediational tool for students to explore and engage in multiplication activities and dialogue. The SOLO taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1989) is used to both frame the novel teaching and learning activities, as well as assess the level of students’ conceptual understanding of multiplication as displayed in the products derived from the experiment. Further, student’s group interactions will be analysed in order to investigate the social processes that may contribute positively to learning

Examination of Eco-Behavioral Assessments Designed for Understanding Complex Behaviors and Environments.

Second-generation intervention research requires methods for overcoming challenges to understanding complex learning ecologies and interactions of students. Eco-behavioral assessments (EBAs) are one solution to past intervention research challenges. EBAs record the effects of ecological variables in students’ behavior and daily interactions. The utility of EBAs in second-generation research has increased substantially. Numerous EBAs now exist for use with all ages of learners and provide a valid, reliable, and cost effective method for intervention research. This paper examines 18 EBAs as well as software systems designed to support and enhance the use of EBAs. The examination serves as a comprehensive resource to better understand how EBAs can be used in answering complex questions about students’ learning and for advancing second-generation research

Behavioral Economics and Developmental Science: A New Framework to Support Early Childhood Interventions

Public policies have actively responded to an emergent social and neuroscientific evidence base documenting the benefits of targeting services to children during the earliest period of their development. But problems of low utilization, inconsistent participation, and low retention continue to present themselves as challenges. Although most interventions recognize and address structural and psycho-social barriers to parent’s engagement, few take seriously the decision making roles of parents. Using insights from the behavioral sciences, we revisit assumptions about the presumed behavior of parents in a developmental context. We then describe ways in which this framework informs features of interventions that can be designed to augment the intended impacts of early development, education and care initiatives by improving parent engagement

Visual world studies of conversational perspective taking: similar findings, diverging interpretations

Visual-world eyetracking greatly expanded the potential for insight into how listeners access and use common ground during situated language comprehension. Past reviews of visual world studies on perspective taking have largely taken the diverging findings of the various studies at face value, and attributed these apparently different findings to differences in the extent to which the paradigms used by different labs afford collaborative interaction. Researchers are asking questions about perspective taking of an increasingly nuanced and sophisticated nature, a clear indicator of progress. But this research has the potential not only to improve our understanding of conversational perspective taking. Grappling with problems of data interpretation in such a complex domain has the unique potential to drive visual world researchers to a deeper understanding of how to best map visual world data onto psycholinguistic theory. I will argue against this interactional affordances explanation, on two counts. First, it implies that interactivity affects the overall ability to form common ground, and thus provides no straightforward explanation of why, within a single noninteractive study, common ground can have very large effects on some aspects of processing (referential anticipation) while having negligible effects on others (lexical processing). Second, and more importantly, the explanation accepts the divergence in published findings at face value. However, a closer look at several key studies shows that the divergences are more likely to reflect inconsistent practices of analysis and interpretation that have been applied to an underlying body of data that is, in fact, surprisingly consistent. The diverging interpretations, I will argue, are the result of differences in the handling of anticipatory baseline effects (ABEs) in the analysis of visual world data. ABEs arise in perspective-taking studies because listeners have earlier access to constraining information about who knows what than they have to referential speech, and thus can already show biases in visual attention even before the processing of any referential speech has begun. To be sure, these ABEs clearly indicate early access to common ground; however, access does not imply integration, since it is possible that this information is not used later to modulate the processing of incoming speech. Failing to account for these biases using statistical or experimental controls leads to over-optimistic assessments of listeners’ ability to integrate this information with incoming speech. I will show that several key studies with varying degrees of interactional affordances all show similar temporal profiles of common ground use during the interpretive process: early anticipatory effects, followed by bottom-up effects of lexical processing that are not modulated by common ground, followed (optionally) by further late effects that are likely to be post-lexical. Furthermore, this temporal profile for common ground radically differs from the profile of contextual effects related to verb semantics. Together, these findings are consistent with the proposal that lexical processes are encapsulated from common ground, but cannot be straightforwardly accounted for by probabilistic constraint-based approaches

Peer mediation for conflict management: a Singaporean case study

The burgeoning interest in conflict and its management has recently begun to impact on schools and school systems worldwide. Motivated by a concern for increasing levels of violence in schools and student�student conflict, many school administrators are looking at conflict management programs as a means of dealing with the problem. Most of the more widely used programs have their origins in the United States; their appropriateness and effectiveness in other countries and cultures is, at best, unknown, and in some respects open to conjecture. In this paper the cultural appropriateness of a peer mediation program in a primary school in Singapore is the subject of investigation. The study also addresses, in an exploratory manner, the effectiveness of peer mediation as a mechanism for student�student conflict management

Empirical modelling principles to support learning in a cultural context

Much research on pedagogy stresses the need for a broad perspective on learning. Such a perspective might take account (for instance) of the experience that informs knowledge and understanding [Tur91], the situation in which the learning activity takes place [Lav88], and the influence of multiple intelligences [Gar83]. Educational technology appears to hold great promise in this connection. Computer-related technologies such as new media, the internet, virtual reality and brain-mediated communication afford access to a range of learning resources that grows ever wider in its scope and supports ever more sophisticated interactions. Whether educational technology is fulfilling its potential in broadening the horizons for learning activity is more controversial. Though some see the successful development of radically new educational resources as merely a matter of time, investment and engineering, there are also many critics of the trends in computer-based learning who see little evidence of the greater degree of human engagement to which new technologies aspire [Tal95]. This paper reviews the potential application to educational technology of principles and tools for computer-based modelling that have been developed under the auspices of the Empirical Modelling (EM) project at Warwick [EMweb]. This theme was first addressed at length in a previous paper [Bey97], and is here revisited in the light of new practical developments in EM both in respect of tools and of model-building that has been targetted at education at various levels. Our central thesis is that the problems of educational technology stem from the limitations of current conceptual frameworks and tool support for the essential cognitive model building activity, and that tackling these problems requires a radical shift in philosophical perspective on the nature and role of empirical knowledge that has significant practical implications. The paper is in two main sections. The first discusses the limitations of the classical computer science perspective where educational technology to support situated learning is concerned, and relates the learning activities that are most closely associated with a cultural context to the empiricist perspective on learning introduced in [Bey97]. The second outlines the principles of EM and describes and illustrates features of its practical application that are particularly well-suited to learning in a cultural setting

Enhancing the Quality of Argumentation in School Science

The research reported in this paper focussed on the design of learning environments that support the teaching and learning of argumentation in a scientific context. The research took place over two years between 1999 and 2001 in junior high schools in the greater London area. The research was conducted in two phases. In the first developmental phase, working with a group of 12 science teachers, the main emphasis was to develop sets of materials and strategies to support argumentation in the classroom and to assess teachers‘ development with teaching argumentation. Data were collected by videoing and audio recording the teachers attempts to implement these lessons at the beginning and end of the year. During this phase, analytical tools for evaluating the quality of argumentation were developed based on Toulmin‘s argument pattern. Analysis of the data shows that there was significant development in the majority of teachers use of argumentation across the year. Results indicate that the pattern of use of argumentation is teacher specific, as is the nature of the change. In the second phase of the project, teachers taught the experimental groups a minimum of nine lessons which involved socioscientific or scientific argumentation. In addition, these teachers taught similar lessons to a control group at the beginning and end of the year. Here the emphasis lay on assessing the progression in student capabilities with argumentation. Hence data were collected from several lessons of two groups of students engaging in argumentation. Using a framework for evaluating the nature of the discourse and its quality, the findings show that there was an improvement in the quality of students‘ argumentation. In addition, the research offers methodological developments for work in this field