Visual stimulation using microcomputers     

Simon Spencer  Malcolm Ross 《欧洲特需教育杂志》2013,28(3):173-176

ABSTRACT

The dominant approach to the education of young visually handicapped children currently hinges on the idea of encouraging the use of sight through visual stimulation. This takes various forms, including the optimization of the child's visual environment, training children to use their sight efficiently, and photo‐stimulation to alter the early development of the brain. It is argued that microcomputers have an important part to play in providing visual stimulation. VDU monitors can present materials in a ‘back‐lit’ manner, avoiding the problem of occlusion of the light source. Moreover, input devices such as the touch‐sensitive screen allow children to interact directly with the images on the computer screen, ensuring that the visual stimulus received is related to their own actions.  相似文献   

Mastering cognitive development theory in computer science education     

Richard Gluga  Judy Kay  Raymond Lister  Simon  Sabina Kleitman 《Computer Science Education》2013,23(1):24-57

To design an effective computer science curriculum, educators require a systematic method of classifying the difficulty level of learning activities and assessment tasks. This is important for curriculum design and implementation and for communication between educators. Different educators must be able to use the method consistently, so that classified activities and assessments are comparable across the subjects of a degree, and, ideally, comparable across institutions. One widespread approach to supporting this is to write learning objects in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This, or other such classifications, is likely to be more effective if educators can use them consistently, in the way experts would use them. To this end, we present the design and evaluation of our online interactive web-based tutorial system, which can be configured and used to offer training in different classification schemes. We report on results from three evaluations. First, 17 computer science educators complete a tutorial on using Bloom’s Taxonomy to classify programming examination questions. Second, 20 computer science educators complete a Neo-Piagetian tutorial. Third evaluation was a comparison of inter-rater reliability scores of computer science educators classifying programming questions using Bloom’s Taxonomy, before and after taking our tutorial. Based on the results from these evaluations, we discuss the effectiveness of our tutorial system design for teaching computer science educators how to systematically and consistently classify programming examination questions. We also discuss the suitability of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Neo-Piagetian theory for achieving this goal. The Bloom’s and Neo-Piagetian tutorials are made available as a community resource. The contributions of this paper are the following: the tutorial system for learning classification schemes for the purpose of coding the difficulty of computing learning materials; its evaluation; new insights into the consistency that computing educators can achieve using Bloom; and first insights into the use of Neo-Piagetian theory by a group of classifiers.  相似文献   

Cross-National and Comparative History of Science Education: An Introduction     

Josep Simon 《Science & Education》2013,22(4):763-768

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"This won't take long…": Interviewing,ethics and diversity     

Simon Warren  Carol Vincent 《International journal of qualitative studies in education》2013,26(1):39-53

In this paper, the focus is on one particular research project, conducted in the UK, which studied the role of parent groups and organizations in relation to the mainstream education system. The authors seek to analyze and evaluate access to the different "structures of feeling" inhabited by the various respondents involved in the project. Using the project as a lens, a critical case, the relationships between respondents and researchers are problematized, highlighting a number of issues with broad applicability. These include negotiating access, securing informed consent, the debates around symmetry and asymmetry between researcher and respondent, the processes of interviewing, data analysis and dissemination. The authors also comment on the formation and development of relationships with respondents, trying to tease out the differences and similarities of age, race, social class, language, and gender, and to suggest how these disjunctions and connections affected the process of datacollection and analysis. Finally, the article concludes with a brief consideration of the implications for future research design and conduct of the arguments put forward.  相似文献   

Computational support for teachers’ design thinking: its feasibility and acceptability to practitioners and institutions     

Elizabeth Masterman  Simon Walker  Matt Bower 《Educational Media International》2013,50(1):12-23

A significant area of learning design research has been the development of software applications that guide teachers’ thinking as they plan, construct and revise learning events for their students. In this paper, we review conceptualisations of, and approaches to, the activity of pedagogic design and highlight the implications for the provision of computational support for this activity. We then outline different ways in which that support has been implemented in three digital tools: Phoebe, the LAMS Activity Planner and the Learning Designer. We consider the challenges to, and implications of, deploying these tools from the perspectives of three groups of stakeholders: developers, teachers and institutions. Our findings suggest that, while such tools are acceptable in principle, they face a number of technological and socio-cultural challenges to their acceptability from teachers’ perspectives and to their deployment within institutional strategies for teaching and learning in a digital age.  相似文献   

An ‘energetic and controversial’ historian of education yesterday and today: A. F. Leach (1851–1915)     

Joan Simon 《History of education》2013,42(3):367-380

This article is posthumously published as the late Joan Simon’s most recent contribution to ongoing debates in historiography of education. Joan remained an active writer and a contributor to this journal and submitted the present article only months before her death, with characteristic determination to engage in historiographical debate, and to contextualize and defend her own contribution to the field. Like other periods preceding the Industrial Revolution, the later Middle Ages and Renaissance tend to have been neglected by historians of education in recent years, and the discussion below reminds us how recently, and for good reason, debate concerning the Reformation remained central to the historiography of education. Implications of the contemporary politics of education for historical interpretation are well illustrated. But the autobiographical threads of this piece also reveal the significance of personalities and academic politics in the configuration of prevailing interpretations of history. These factors impinge on the publication and editing of learned journals as well as more generally on the positioning of research in education history between its originating intellectual discipline on the one hand, and on the other the field of practice to which its insights contribute.  相似文献   

Why are teacher recommendations at the transition from primary to secondary education socially biased? A mixed-methods research     

Simon Boone  Mieke Van Houtte 《British Journal of Sociology of Education》2013,34(1):20-38

The consequences of educational differentiation have been at the centre of research in sociology of education during the past decades. Processes of educational allocation have, however, received much less attention. Despite the fact that research has shown that teacher recommendations in France and Germany are partly determined by pupils’ social background, studies that inquire into the causes of this social bias seem to be virtually inexistent. This study aims to examine whether teacher recommendations at the transition from primary to secondary education in Flanders (northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) are also socially biased, and if so what causes these differentials in advice, using a mixed-methods design. We found the advice given by primary school teachers to be partly determined by pupils’ social background. Analysis of the qualitative data suggests that teachers tend to evaluate pupils from low socio-economic status backgrounds less positively, due to their emphasis on specific pupil characteristics.  相似文献   

Being Fair: Teachers’ Interpretations of Principles for Standards-Based Grading     

Robin D. Tierney  Marielle Simon  Julie Charland 《The Educational forum》2013,77(3):210-227

Knowing that grades can have long-term consequences for students, teachers voice concern about being fair in the grading process. However, their interpretations of fairness are varied and sometimes contradictory. This study looked at how teachers in one standards-based educational system determined secondary students’ grades, focusing specifically on the extent to which they followed a specific set of principles for grading. The results support previous research, and suggest that a better understanding of essential principles is needed for grades to accurately reflect students’ achievement.  相似文献   

Critical alignment in inquiry-based practice in developing mathematics teaching     

Simon Goodchild  Anne Berit Fuglestad  Barbara Jaworski 《Educational Studies in Mathematics》2013,84(3):393-412

This paper reports a case study from a mathematics teaching developmental research project. The theoretical foundation for the research comprises communities of inquiry and critical alignment, with which the developmental methodology has a particular synergy. This synergy is the main focus of the paper. The paper elaborates theoretical and methodological antecedents of the project and traces these through a case study of developments in the practices of one upper secondary school team and a group of university didacticians (mathematics teacher educators and researchers) during the first year of the project. The case study reveals that critical alignment and inquiry (necessarily) bring uncertainty and risk, and foster tensions within the teachers’ practice and between the practices of teachers and didacticians. In exposing these uncertainties, risks and tensions, the paper points to their value for the learning and knowledge gained by participants.  相似文献   

School choice in England: evidence from national administrative data     

Simon Burgess  Ellen Greaves 《牛津教育评论》2013,39(5):690-710

We study school choice in England using a new dataset containing the choices of all parents seeking a school place in state secondary schools. We provide new empirical evidence to inform how the school choice market functions, including the number of choices made, whether the nearest school is the first choice and the probability of an offer from the first choice school. These indicators show that school choice is actively used by many households in England. We use the rich data available to describe how choices vary by pupil, school and neighbourhood characteristics and how school choice is used differently by different groups and in different parts of the country. For the first time, we are able to present national data on how the school choices made by parents vary according to pupils’ ethnic group and across urban and rural areas. We show, contrary to some existing literature that has relied on smaller and less representative samples of parents and pupils, that school choices do not vary significantly by social background. We show that parents pro-actively use the choice system and present new evidence on the extent to which the current school admissions criteria that prioritise distance penalise poorer families.  相似文献