50 research outputs found
Towards Analytics for Wholistic School Improvement: Hierarchical Process Modelling and Evidence Visualization
Central to the mission of most educational institutions is the task of preparing the next generation of citizens to contribute to society. Schools, colleges, and universities value a range of outcomes â e.g., problem solving, creativity, collaboration, citizenship, service to community â as well as academic outcomes in traditional subjects. Often referred to as âwider outcomes,â these are hard to quantify. While new kinds of monitoring technologies and public datasets expand the possibilities for quantifying these indices, we need ways to bring that data together to support sense-making and decision-making. Taking a systems perspective, the hierarchical process modelling (HPM) approach and the âPerimetaâ visual analytic provides a dashboard that informs leadership decision-making with heterogeneous, often incomplete evidence. We report a prototype of Perimeta modelling from education, aggregating wider outcomes data across a network of schools, and calculating their cumulative contribution to key performance indicators, using the visual analytic of the Italian flag to make explicit not only the supporting evidence, but also the challenging evidence, as well as areas of uncertainty. We discuss the nature of the modelling decisions and implicit values involved in quantifying these kinds of educational outcomes
Learning Journeys and Infrastructure Services: a game changer for effectiveness
Organisations need to be able to learn and thus benefit from their experience. They need the capability to respond profitably to information about processes, people and the environment in order to improve performance in the digital world: in other words to develop their corporate learning power. Infrastructure services businesses have a great deal to gain from such learning because they work in partnership with many other organisations but in highly competitive industries. They design for end use but are often detached from their users. Unlocking the learning power of individuals, teams and leaders to adapt and change will increase the pace of business transformation and generate greater value for all stakeholders. It will transform tacit knowledge that is locked within individuals into corporate intelligence. The cost of not doing this is quantifiable through sub-optimal performance and business failure or conversely through the benefits of success. Knowledge is increasingly about âflowsâ and ânetworksâ rather than âstocksâ so how individuals and teams use their learning power âon the jobâ to generate actionable insights from data that inform decision-making is a crucial new capability for the future. Data is increasingly complex, rapidly available and ubiquitous and requires continuous and collaborative interpretation and response aligned to business purpose. The premium is on the ability to interpret and use it rather than to simply collect it. This represents a significant mind-set shift from seeing knowledge as static to understanding data as the âraw materialâ through which knowledge is generated and re-generated in the service of business strategy. The learning journey is a metaphor which incorporates four measurable processes: forming identity and purpose (ii) generating learning power (iii) knowledge structuring and (iv) producing value. Learning power is the way in which we regulate the flow of information and energy over time and this can be developed at any age. Each of these forward looking processes has implications for operational practices as well as for the ways in which digital resources are designed and deployed. Learning infrastructures can be co-designed and integrated with business strategy to (i) increase corporate agility, responsiveness and innovation, (ii) to model and explore customer and stakeholder behaviour and thus improve service and (iii) to develop digital platforms which support self-directed learning and behaviour change at scale
Crossing borders: new teachers co-constructing professional identity in performative times
This paper draws on a range of theoretical perspectives on the construction of new teachersâ professional identity. It focuses particularly on the impact of the development in many national education systems of a performative culture of the management and regulation of teachersâ work. Whilst the role of interactions with professional colleagues and school managers in the performative school has been extensively researched, less attention has been paid to new teachersâ interactions with students. This paper highlights the need for further research focusing on the process of identity co-construction with students. A key theoretical concept employed is that of liminality, the space within which identities are in transition as teachers adjust to the culture of a new professional workplace, and the nature of the engagement of new teachers, or teachers who change schools, with students. The authors argue that an investigation into the processes of this co-construction of identity offers scope for new insights into the extent to which teachers might construct either a teacher identity at odds with their personal and professional values, or a more âauthenticâ identity that counters performative discourses. These insights will in turn add to our understanding of the complex range of factors impacting on teacher resilience and motivation
The FuturICT education accelerator
Education is a major force for economic and social wellbeing. Despite high aspirations, education at all levels can be expensive and ineffective. Three Grand Challenges are identified: (1) enable people to learn orders of magnitude more effectively, (2) enable people to learn at orders of magnitude less cost, and (3) demonstrate success by exemplary interdisciplinary education in complex systems science. A ten year âman-on-the-moonâ project is proposed in which FuturICTâs unique combination of Complexity, Social and Computing Sciences could provide an urgently needed transdisciplinary language for making sense of educational systems. In close dialogue with educational theory and practice, and grounded in the emerging data science and learning analytics paradigms, this will translate into practical tools (both analytical and computational) for researchers, practitioners and leaders; generative principles for resilient educational ecosystems; and innovation for radically scalable, yet personalised, learner engagement and assessment. The proposed Education Accelerator will serve as a âwind tunnelâ for testing these ideas in the context of real educational programmes, with an international virtual campus delivering complex systems education exploiting the new understanding of complex, social, computationally enhanced organisational structure developed within FuturICT
The FuturICT education accelerator
Education is a major force for economic and social wellbeing. Despite high aspirations, education at all levels can be expensive and ineffective. Three Grand Challenges are identified: (1) enable people to learn orders of magnitude more effectively, (2) enable people to learn at orders of magnitude less cost, and (3) demonstrate success by exemplary interdisciplinary education in complex systems science. A ten year âman-on-the-moonâ project is proposed in which FuturICTâs unique combination of Complexity, Social and Computing Sciences could provide an urgently needed transdisciplinary language for making sense of educational systems. In close dialogue with educational theory and practice, and grounded in the emerging data science and learning analytics paradigms, this will translate into practical tools (both analytical and computational) for researchers, practitioners and leaders; generative principles for resilient educational ecosystems; and innovation for radically scalable, yet personalised, learner engagement and assessment. The proposed Education Accelerator will serve as a âwind tunnelâ for testing these ideas in the context of real educational programmes, with an international virtual campus delivering complex systems education exploiting the new understanding of complex, social, computationally enhanced organisational structure developed within FuturICT
Whither Postgraduate Professional Development? Towards a theoretical framework to guide longâterm teacher development in England
A Five-Dimensional Model of Creativity and its Assessment in Schools.
Creativity is increasingly valued as an important outcome of schooling,\ud
frequently as part of so-called â21st century skills.â This article offers a\ud
model of creativity based on five Creative Habits of Mind (CHoM) and\ud
trialed with teachers in England by the Centre for Real-World Learning\ud
(CRL) at the University of Winchester. It explores the defining and tracking\ud
of creativityâs development in school students from a perspective of formative\ud
assessment. Two benefits are identified: (a) When teachers understand\ud
creativity they are, consequently, more effective in cultivating it in\ud
learners; (b) When students have a better understanding of what creativity\ud
is, they are better able to develop and to track the development of their\ud
own CHoM. Consequently, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and\ud
Development has initiated a multicountry study stimulated by CRLâs\ud
approach. In Australia work to apply CRLâs thinking on the educational\ud
assessment of creative and critical thinking is underway
Towards a global participatory platform Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence
The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate Ă©lites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the projectâs own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed
Empowering underachieving adolescents: an emancipatory learning perspective on underachievement
The article reports on an empirical study into underachievement of 14-year-old students in four English schools by drawing upon learning power theory and practice. The study examined the characteristic learning power profiles of underachieving and overachieving adolescents, and then used student learning profiles diagnostically to support the learning needs of a selected sample of underachievers. This was followed by an impact study of the interventions on the development of student learning power and their academic achievement. The pre-intervention quantitative findings demonstrated a significant difference between the learning power dimensions of underachieving students and the rest of their cohort. Qualitative and narrative analysis provided greater depths in interpretation. Coaching conversations as a major intervention strategy were found to be successful in strengthening underachieving teenagers' learning power and enhancing their learning experiences rather than just raising their exam performance. The study concludes that in addressing the learning needs of underachieving adolescents, serious attention should be given to their learning subjectivities, enabling them to relate school learning to their personal values, attitudes, aspirations and identities. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC