Common Educational Practices Research Articles

New Literacies as a Challenge for Traditional Knowledge Conceptions in School: A Case Study from Fifth Graders Digital Media Production

New literacies children practice and learn in their everyday life, and these concepts have challenged school's traditional knowledge conceptions as certain facts, principles or techniques. Schools have also more broadly struggled with the question of how to deal with digital media in terms of access, technological support, teacher agencies or fundamental structures of school culture. Digital media production as a common media education practice brings new literacies inside classrooms as children engage collaboratively with creative and multimodal tools. This article introduces a case study from fifth graders digital media production with software called Kar2ouche, and describes what kinds of production practices related to new literacies are emerging in this kind of media work. Further, this article discusses how these practices challenge the traditional conceptions of knowledge in school. It is argued that the first step in order to challenge a school's knowledge conceptions are to recognize the knowledge embedded with the new literacies, and make space for them despite the traditional culture of schooling that still seems to frame digital media production practices in classrooms.

How new is the new philosophy of psychiatry?

In their recent paper, Natalie Banner and Tim Thornton evaluate seven volumes of the Oxford University Press series “International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry,” an international book series begun in 2003 focusing on the emerging interdisciplinary field at the interface of philosophy and psychiatry. According to Natalie Banner and Tim Thornton, the series represents a clear indication that the interdisciplinary field of philosophy of psychiatry has been flourishing lately. Philosophers and psychiatrists face a “new philosophy of psychiatry”. However, the optimism which the “new” philosophy of psychiatry celebrates is precisely the exiling of philosophy from the foundations of psychiatry. The 150 year old belief that psychopathology cannot do without philosophical reflection has virtually disappeared from common psychiatric education and daily clinical practice. Though the discipline of psychiatry is particularly suited to contributions from philosophy, the impact of philosophy on psychiatry nowadays remains limited. With some exceptions, philosophical papers are embedded in a philosophical context inscrutable to ordinary psychiatrists. Much current philosophical work is perceived by psychiatrists as negativistic. I would encourage the field of psychiatry to incorporate once again basic philosophical attitudes which render possible true dialogue with philosophy and enrich both disciplines. The views developed here should not discredit the value and importance of Natalie Banner and Tim Thornton’s paper and the excellent series “International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry.” As Jaspers said “Everybody inclined to disregard philosophy will be overwhelmed by philosophy in an unperceived way”.

Assessment to improve learning in higher education: The BEAR Assessment System

This paper discusses how assessment practices in higher education can improve or hinder learning. An example is given to illustrate some common educational practices that may be contributing to underpreparation and underperformance of students. Elements of effective learning environments that may better address underlying metacognitive issues are discussed. The principles of the Berkeley Evaluation & Assessment Research Assessment (BEAR) System are introduced, and their use to improve learning is described in the context of the UC Berkeley ChemQuery project.

Audit of use of a common undergraduate physiotherapy clinical assessment form

Assessment of student performance in clinical settings is common practice in healthcare education. As part of quality procedures, a three-part audit was undertaken of the use of a common undergraduate physiotherapy clinical education assessment form. Part one involved comparative statistical analysis of the marks awarded to students from the four participating institutions in relation to five variables – student age, gender, race, level of study, and clinical speciality. Significant differences were found for some variables. In Part two, the final marks and clinicians' comments were compared. Content analysis identified perceived differences in some forms. Part three involved clinician completion of a postal questionnaire survey of how they used and completed the form. Appropriate use of the form was found for the vast majority of respondents. Overall, the audit found the form to be a useful, sensitive tool. Recommendations were made for small improvements in form detail and specific focus areas during clinician educator training.

Creating a realistic context for team projects in HCI

Team projects are nowadays common practice in HCI education. This paper focuses on the role of clients and users in team projects in introductory HCI courses. In order to provide projects with a realistic context we invite people from industry to serve as clients for the student teams. Some of them have a professional interest in participating in our course and define a project themselves. Another way we make projects realistic is to have teams evaluate their designs with real users.We describe how we incorporate the role of clients and users in our courses and describe our experiences. One of the results of our evaluations is that most students find it very interesting and stimulating to work with a client on a 'real' project from industry.

Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education, and the Workplace.

Research from numerous corners of psychological inquiry suggests that self-assessments of skill and character are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways. We review empirical findings on the imperfect nature of self-assessment and discuss implications for three real-world domains: health, education, and the workplace. In general, people's self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to meager-indeed, at times, other people's predictions of a person's outcomes prove more accurate than that person's self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are "above average" in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), overestimate the likelihood that they will engage in desirable behaviors and achieve favorable outcomes, furnish overly optimistic estimates of when they will complete future projects, and reach judgments with too much confidence. Several psychological processes conspire to produce flawed self-assessments. Research focusing on health echoes these findings. People are unrealistically optimistic about their own health risks compared with those of other people. They also overestimate how distinctive their opinions and preferences (e.g., discomfort with alcohol) are among their peers-a misperception that can have a deleterious impact on their health. Unable to anticipate how they would respond to emotion-laden situations, they mispredict the preferences of patients when asked to step in and make treatment decisions for them. Guided by mistaken but seemingly plausible theories of health and disease, people misdiagnose themselves-a phenomenon that can have severe consequences for their health and longevity. Similarly, research in education finds that students' assessments of their performance tend to agree only moderately with those of their teachers and mentors. Students seem largely unable to assess how well or poorly they have comprehended material they have just read. They also tend to be overconfident in newly learned skills, at times because the common educational practice of massed training appears to promote rapid acquisition of skill-as well as self-confidence-but not necessarily the retention of skill. Several interventions, however, can be introduced to prompt students to evaluate their skill and learning more accurately. In the workplace, flawed self-assessments arise all the way up the corporate ladder. Employees tend to overestimate their skill, making it difficult to give meaningful feedback. CEOs also display overconfidence in their judgments, particularly when stepping into new markets or novel projects-for example, proposing acquisitions that hurt, rather then help, the price of their company's stock. We discuss several interventions aimed at circumventing the consequences of such flawed assessments; these include training people to routinely make cognitive repairs correcting for biased self-assessments and requiring people to justify their decisions in front of their peers. The act of self-assessment is an intrinsically difficult task, and we enumerate several obstacles that prevent people from reaching truthful self-impressions. We also propose that researchers and practitioners should recognize self-assessment as a coherent and unified area of study spanning many subdisciplines of psychology and beyond. Finally, we suggest that policymakers and other people who makes real-world assessments should be wary of self-assessments of skill, expertise, and knowledge, and should consider ways of repairing self-assessments that may be flawed.

Mental representation-based task analysis for analyzing value-laden performance

In keeping with recent research findings in the areas of constructivist learning and affective mediation of complex behavior, the authors assert that the conduct of task analysis should reflect the holistic nature of this performance. Although a common practice in special education is for teachers to instruct parents on how to teach exceptional children at home, the differing values that teachers and parents hold regarding the “best practice” for the children often lead to strikingly different implementations of the same teaching approach. Using knowledge representation theory, we attempt to better understand how and why such discrepancies happen. In this paper we explore the theoretical dimensions of a modified task analysis model that purports to integrate cognitive-affective-behavioral dynamics underlying teacher and parental teaching behaviors. Applied in a qualitative study conducted in a special educational program in Taiwan, this model reveals the differences between teachers’ and mothers’ mental representations of teaching at the (a) conceptual orientation, (b) values, (c) reasoning, and (d) behavioral levels. With more applied research, we believe that this model will help trainers and trainees to reach a better understanding of the cognitive and psychological roots of complex value laden performance.

Learning about psychological professions with the world‐wide web

Abstract Teaching with the world‐wide web is becoming a common practice in modern education. The web serves two main interrelated functions, namely, retrieval and publication of information. To enhance learning and motivation, the student‐as‐teacher (SAT) principle was adopted in the study reported in this paper. Students were given the role of teacher of high school students and the general public about the subject matter they learned on a course. To achieve this goal, the students created educational web sites featuring two selected psychological professions. Being the major assignment for the course, the web sites created by students received higher scores than the assignments of their peers who learned the same materials through traditional pedagogical approaches. Course evaluation confirmed that the web implementation of the SAT principle enhanced learning, increased motivation and provided a transfer‐able skill, without compromising accomplishment of major course goals.

Israeli mothers' expectations from early intervention with their preschool deaf children

Family-oriented early intervention programs have become a common practice in deaf education and intervention. This trend requires the extensive investigation of parents' expectations about programs and professionals in order to enhance the efficacy of parent-professional collaboration. The goal of this study was to closely examine the expectations of mothers whose children were already enrolled i a comprehensive early intervention program for deaf children and their families. Three means of data collection were utilized: two open-ended written questions, an individual oral interview with the mother, and a set of formal questionnaires on various maternal, family, and child characteristics. A heterogeneous sample of 50 mothers of 2- to 5-year-old deaf children in Israel participated in the study. A wealth of maternal expectations emerged from this qualitative methodology, underscoring mothers' impressive knowledge and awareness, as well as individual differences. Through cluster analysis, the mothers were sorted into four distinct groups, yielding interesting patterns of expectations for programs and processionals.

School Differences in Tracking Effects on Achievement

This article examines whether tracking students for instruction can have a differential effect on student achievement across schools. Two mechanisms are posited for possible school effects: (1) schlool differences in the determinants of track placement and (2) school variance in the opportunities for learning presented to students by track. I argue that track placement is influenced by characteristics of a school's track structure, by assignment criteria, by theflexibility of track membership, and by a school's scheduling priorities. Differential growth in achievement within track level across schools is explained by school differences in track size and homogeneity, in the quantity and quality of instruction within track, and in the determinants of academic achievement. Longitudinal data from two cohorts of more than 4,000 students provide empirical evidence of school differences in tracking practices and tracking effects on learning. Policy implications of the results for the school choice debate and for organizational and pedagogical practice are discussed. Tracking, or the assignment of students to instructional groups by ability, is a common educational practice in American secondary schools. Most high schools track students for English and mathematics instruction, and many schools track for instruction in other academic subjects as well. In the past, comprehensive high schools generally had a three-track structure, designated as the academic, general, and vocational tracks. More recently, track designations are associated with course levels. A typical tracking structure today consists of advanced placement, honors, regular, and basic level courses. Larger schools may have more course levels while smaller schools may lack advanced placement courses

University teachers' thinking about lecturing: student evaluation of lecturing as an improvement perspective for the lecturer

Student evaluation of instruction (SEI) is a common practice in higher education. Despite a great deal of progress that has been made during the last two decades of SEI-research, some questions remain unanswered. One of the unsolved problems concerns theutility of SEI, i.e., its efficacy for improving instruction. Apparently there is a need for understanding ‘how university teachershandle SEI-feedback.’ In that perspective cognitive and motivational psychology stress the importance of the so-calledsubjective theory of a teacher about his lecturing.

An Assessment of Common Practice in Music Education

As a profession, music education has long been plagued by a sense of its own inadequacy, particularly in the area of school music. This brief essay suggests that factors which contribute to this condition include the common acceptance of the notion that the primary function of music is to amuse and entertain and the concomitant rejection of serious music in favour of insubstantial ‘popular’ repertoire. The paper calls practitioners to a thoughtful re-evaluation of the value of music and the proper purposes of music education. The author concludes with the recommendation that the objectives of aesthetic education be adopted as foundational to the practice of music education.

The Ethnographic Research Tradition and Mathematics Education Research

Although in theory ethnography has been put forward as a powerful naturalistic methodology, in practice it has rarely been used by educational researchers because of differences in assumptions, goals, and primary research questions. From my perspective as an educational anthropologist, I describe the research tradition of ethnography—its underlying assumptions, its heritage in holistic cultural anthropology, its goals and research questions, and the organization of its research methods. Throughout, I compare elements of this ethnographic tradition with more common educational research practices. In the final section, I discuss the advantages of improved communication for future research in both mathematics education and educational anthropology.

Success and failure in educational reform: Are there historical “lessons”?

Even early in this century, when enthusiasm for reform was at its height and reputations were being made by proposals of all sorts to modify and in many instances replace common practice in education, there already existed pale cast of pessimism as to whether the proposed innovative practices would actually make their way into schools and, if they did, whether they would endure. In 1922, for example, W. W. Charters (1922), one of the leading educational reformers of the 20th century and man who practically set the style for contemporary studies of curriculum, referred to the history of education as a chronicle of fads. Since then, the terms fads and frills and pendulum swings have become commonplace characterizations of the efforts to reform school practice. While present efforts to improve school practice continue unabated and at time when we hear calls from every side about the mediocrity of American schooling, there remains not just pessimism but almost cynicism about the chances for success in changing pedagogical practice. Two of the nagging questions, then, are whether this pessimism about educational reform is warranted and, if it is, why are at least some common educational practices so resistant to change. Beyond those questions is the related phenomenon of pendulum swings and whether and in what sense that rather cynical view of educational reform may or may not have any substance. Finally, there is the question of whether there are any lessons to be derived from previous

The generation of educational practice from developmental theory

It is argued that there are no statements of legitimate educational implications that can be deduced from Piaget's theory which would invalidate that theory if they were proved false by empirical failure. An examination of common educational practices that the theory might prescribe or proscribe finds that many superficially incompatible practices are either compatible with the theory or not treated by it at all.