Some empirical issues in research on academic departments: Homogeneity,aggregation, and level of analysis     

V. Jean Ramsey  L. Delf Dodge 《Research in higher education》1983,18(4):409-419

This study investigated the appropriateness of the academic departmental level of analysis. Homogeneity of faculty members' responses to measures of organizational structure, environmental uncertainty, and task routineness was examined to determine the legitimacy of aggregating those responses to create departmental level variables. Analysis of variance suggested that the structure and environmental uncertainty subscales were measuring departmental level phenomena, but that the task routineness scales were not. Results demonstrate the importance of empirically testing, rather than assuming, levels of analysis in studies of academic departments.  相似文献   

Fostering Teacher Educators’ Professional Development on Practice-Based Research Through Communities of Inquiry     

T. Martijn Willemse  Fer Boei  Marieke Pillen 《Vocations and Learning》2016,9(1):85-110

Practice-based research and supervising students’ research has become an important task for higher vocational institutes, including the teacher education departments. However, conducting practice-based research is not always common practice for a great number of teacher educators. Therefore, professional development activities are undertaken to support teacher educators in their new role as a researcher. This paper reports on one of those activities: a community of inquiry in which teacher educators conducted a collaborative research on a shared topic derived from their practices, in order to examine teacher educators’ professional development and to identify key characteristics for setting up such a community. All participants reported developments in practice-based research skills and knowledge, and developments regarding supervising students’ research. In addition, they reported on developments in their beliefs regarding research and on the topic under research. They also reported the impact of the community on other parts of their profession. Commitment, time, teacher educators as experienced researchers and completing the research stages are identified as key characteristics.  相似文献   

Plant-fungus marriages     

Ramesh Maheshwari 《Resonance》2006,11(4):33-44

The roots of most land plants establish intimate associations with soil fungi. This association of plant roots with fungi is termed mycorrhiza. It is a marriage between two highly dissimilar organisms based on mutual exchange of nutrients: while the plants provide photosynthetically made carbon compounds to the fungi, the fungi in turn provide to the plants nitrogen and phosphorus scavenged from the breakdown of organic polymers in natural substrates. This mutually beneficial partnership makes possible the green cover on Earth and of all life, ultimately, dependent on plants.  相似文献   

Achievement differences in structured versus unstructured instructional geometry programs     

Robert D. Hannafin 《Educational technology research and development : ETR & D》2004,52(1):19-32

This study investigated the effect of students' ability and type of instructional program, structured and unstructured, on easy and difficult posttest items. Seventh-grade students worked through 14 instructional activities in The Geometer Sketchpad, a dynamic geometry program, and accessed a Geometry tutorial developed to parallel the state geometry standards. Low-ability students scored higher in the less structured program, whereas high- and medium-ability learners performed better in the structured program. High- and medium-ability students outscored low-ability learners by a greater margin on the difficult items than on the easy items. Although their overall performance was poor in both programs, that low-ability learners performed relatively better in the less structured, less traditional, mathematics activities is an encouraging finding for mathematics educators and designers of open-ended learning environments.  相似文献   

A naive bayes approach for converging learning objects with open educational resources     

A. Sai Sabitha  Deepti Mehrotra  Abhay Bansal  B. K. Sharma 《Education and Information Technologies》2016,21(6):1753-1767

Open educational resources (OER) are digitised material freely available to the students and self learners. Many institutions had initiated in incorporating these OERs in their higher educational system, to improve the quality of teaching and learning. These resources promotes individualised study, collaborative learning. If they are coupled with Learning Objects of Learning Management System (LMS), they can lead to opportunities for further pedagogical innovation. It has become increasingly important for educational institutions to support these resources, in a planned and systematic manner. Adapt, assemble and conceptualise existing OERs to respond to diverse learning needs of students and support a variety of learning approaches for a given learning goal is a challenge. In this work, convergence of OERs with Learning Objects is done through metadata using classification techniques. Localisation of these high quality learning materials with the learning content of LMS, delivered as a single instructional unit may help in greater knowledge delivery and this can satisfy the learning needs of diverse student.  相似文献   

Component skills affecting elementary students’ informational text comprehension     

Meghan D. Liebfreund  Kristin Conradi 《Reading and writing》2016,29(6):1141-1160

This study was conducted to examine the factors that influence informational text comprehension and to determine how these vary for students with higher and lower component skills. The sample included 177 students in grades 3–5. Regression analyses were used to predict informational text comprehension with decoding efficiency, vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, and intrinsic motivation. This model, that also included age and grade as control variables, explained 62.5 % of the variance in informational text comprehension. Each component skill explained unique variance, and vocabulary knowledge accounted for the largest portion. Next, we examined whether the factors contributed differently to informational text comprehension for students with higher and lower component skills. Overall, the regressions were better predictors for students with higher than those with lower component skills. For students with lower component skills, motivation and vocabulary were consistent predictors, whereas vocabulary and decoding efficiency were consistent predictors for students with higher component skills. The findings indicate multiple factors are important for informational text comprehension, particularly vocabulary, and research should examine this topic for different types of readers.  相似文献   

Common core writing and language standards and aligned state assessments: a national survey of teacher beliefs and attitudes     

Gary A. Troia  Steve Graham 《Reading and writing》2016,29(9):1719-1743

A random sample of 482 teachers in grades 3 through 8 from across the United States were surveyed about (a) their perceptions of the version of the Common Core writing and language standards adopted by their state and their state’s writing assessment, (b) their preparation to teach writing, and (c) their self-efficacy beliefs for teaching writing. Regardless of grade, a majority of teachers believed that the adopted standards are more rigorous than prior standards, provide clear expectations for students that can be straightforwardly translated into activities and lessons, and have pushed them to address writing more often. However, many surveyed felt the new writing and language standards are too numerous to cover, omit key aspects of writing development, and may be inappropriate for struggling writers. Moreover, most did not feel that professional development efforts have been sufficient to achieve successful implementation, and nearly one in five respondents was not familiar with the standards. The respondents were generally less sanguine regarding their state’s writing test, with elementary teachers even less positive than middle school teachers on some aspects, though nearly a third were unfamiliar with their state test. A majority believed state writing tests, though more rigorous than prior tests, fail to address important aspects of writing development, do not accommodate the needs of students with diverse abilities, and require more time than is available to prepare students. Additionally, many teachers believed professional development efforts have been insufficient to help them understand measurement properties of the assessments and how to use test data to identify students’ writing needs. Teachers who were better prepared to teach writing and who held more positive personal teaching efficacy beliefs for writing exhibited generally more positive perceptions of their state’s standards. In contrast, only teacher efficacy beliefs made a unique contribution to the survey respondents’ attitudes and beliefs about their state’s writing test.  相似文献   

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies     

Jesús Vázquez-Abad  Nancy Brousseau  Waldegg C. Guillermina  Mylène Vézina  Alicia D. Martínez  Janet Paul de Verjovsky 《Journal of Science Education and Technology》2004,13(2):227-232

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.  相似文献   

Situated Simulation-Based Learning Environment to Improve Proportional Reasoning in Nursing Students     

Ilana Dubovi  Sharona T. Levy  Efrat Dagan 《International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education》2018,16(8):1521-1539

Proportional reasoning is the basis for most medication calculation processes and is fundamental for high-quality care and patient safety. We designed a simulated Medication Mathematics (siMMath) environment to support proportional reasoning in transitioning via concreteness fading between two mediators. The first mediator is simulated nursing tools of medication preparation. The second is a ratio-table setup which is used as a goal representation, which enables one to spatially hold in place different quantities in their relative proportion. We conducted a two-part study with nursing students. Part 1 was a quasi-experimental pretest–intervention–posttest design assessing the effectiveness of learning, by evaluating four categories of medical calculation questionnaire items (solid medications, unit conversion, concentrations, infusion rates). We used the Noelting proportional reasoning test to evaluate the generalizability and abstraction of proportional reasoning. Part 1 included an experimental group (n = 96) learning with siMMath, and a comparison group (n = 73) learning with an equation-based lecture approach. Part 2 employed a case study design to characterize the learning process. The experimental group’s learning gains were significantly higher than the comparison group’s for the two most challenging categories of the medication calculation problems questionnaire, namely concentrations and infusion rates. Furthermore, the experimental group’s learning gains were significantly higher than the comparison group’s for formal operational reasoning on the Noelting test. Students who used a ratio-table setup scored significantly higher on the Noelting posttest questionnaire. Nursing students who learned with the siMMath environment overcame difficulties in proportional reasoning to the highest levels and extended this understanding to other contexts.  相似文献   

How working memory relates to children’s reading comprehension: the importance of domain-specificity in storage and processing     

Suzan Nouwens  Margriet A. Groen  Ludo Verhoeven 《Reading and writing》2017,30(1):105-120

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of phonological and semantic storage, and phonological and semantic processing to reading comprehension in 123 Dutch children in fifth grade. We conducted regression and mediation analyses to find out to what extent variation in reading comprehension could be explained by storage and processing capacities in both the phonological and the semantic domain, while controlling for children’s decoding and vocabulary. The analyses included tasks that reflect storage only, and working memory tasks that assess processing in addition to storage. Regression analysis including only storage tasks as predictor measures, revealed semantic storage to be a better predictor of reading comprehension than phonological storage. Adding phonological and semantic working memory tasks as additional predictors to the model showed that semantic working memory explained individual variation in reading comprehension over and above all other memory measures. Additional mediation analysis made it clear that semantic storage contributed indirectly to reading comprehension via semantic working memory, indicating that semantic storage tapped by working memory, in addition to processing capacities, explains individual variation in reading comprehension. It can thus be concluded that semantic storage plays a more important role in children’s reading comprehension than previously thought.  相似文献