Instruction Repertoire Research Articles

A Cross-Cultural Study of Exemplary Teaching: What Do Singapore and the United States Secondary Gifted Class Teachers Say?

This study examined beliefs about best teaching practices between Singapore and American teachers of gifted students. A total of 31 Singapore and 12 U.S. secondary gifted class teachers were interviewed and/or surveyed. The study’s results suggested that there were more similarities than differences between the two cultures about what an exemplary teacher signifies, what constitutes qualities of exemplary teachers, and what challenges exemplary teachers are facing in the two educational systems. Regardless of different cultural backgrounds, it is somewhat universal that an exemplary teacher embodies content expertise, flexible instructional repertoires, and passion for the discipline taught and for the students under his or her care. Culturally unique characteristics appeared to be bounded by the system in which they work.

Moving from rhetoric to praxis: Issues faced by teachers in having students consider multiple solutions for problems in the mathematics classroom

Despite general agreement that students should consider more than one way to solve a complex mathematics problem, this practice is rarely observed in U.S. classrooms. In this paper, we examine data that trace the year-long professional development experience of 12 veteran teachers of middle grades mathematics — experienced users of a standards-based mathematics curriculum — to unearth some issues and concerns that appeared to serve as obstacles to their use of multiple solutions in the classroom. We also identify key transformations that appear to account for the success of some teachers in embedding this practice in their instructional repertoire.

Mentoring Beginning Teachers: Findings from Contextual Supervision

This article examines the contextual supervision (CS) model that has been developed and applied in several practicum settings of teacher-education programs over the past ten years. The study synthesizes the research findings on the potential effectiveness of CS in assisting faculty supervisors and classroom cooperating teachers with the task of mentoring pre-service teachers to develop their instructional repertoire. The CS model is described, its rationale is presented, research results on its application are summarized, its strengths and limitations are identified, and implications of its usefulness as a mentoring tool to enhance teacher performance are drawn.

What "Stage" Can You Use as a Platform to Teach End of Life?

Recently, W;t [sic] came to the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) for a live performance for medical students and staff. The auditorium was full, with additional students asking if they could attend even if “they hadn’t signed up for the lunch”—an unheard of phenomenon among medical students. After the performance, the actors and selected health care professionals participated in a panel discussion, which focused on communication (or lack there of) between health professionals, between health care providers and patients, and the various roles of health professionals (the fellow, the nurse, the senior attending). It was a lively and emotional discussion with the actors seeking clarification regarding why the audience laughed when “biochemistry” was alluded to in the dialogue—a phenomenon that did not occur during the public performances and more indepth and personal issues regarding end-of-life. One of the most powerful and candid comments came from a pediatric oncologist in the audience who spoke about her ongoing struggle to balance the need to “distance” herself from her patients in order to maintain her clinical judgment and her desire to care deeply for each of her young patients. After this 3-hour session, a second-year medical student came up to me and asked, “Why don’t we have more of these kinds of activities in our medical education curriculum? This is really what medicine is about, not just biochemistry!” Indeed, health professions education must include the art as well as the science within its curriculum. How do we achieve that goal? I suggest you read Daniel Sulmasy’s article, “At Wit’s End—Forgiveness, Dignity and the Care of the Dying Patient,1 and Cindy Jones’ description below of sociodrama as an instructional strategy for end-of-life education. Then consider how you can add sociodrama to your instructional repertoire as an end-of-life educator.

The Librarian as Bricoleur: Meeting the Needs of Distance Learners

Summary Like bricoleurs, instructional librarians, especially those who provide instruction to distant learners, use a “tool-box” of materials and means to address the needs of adult learners. They also need to be adaptable and resourceful, staying abreast of current research and technologies in order to create an instructional repertoire (bricolage), to deliver services comparable to those that on-campus students receive. This article describes adult learners' needs and the variety of tools used to reach students in one university's instructional program.

Computation in the context of transport triggered architectures

Processors used in embedded systems have specific requirements which are not always met by off-the-shelf processors. A templated processor architecture, which can easily be tuned towards a certain application (domain) offers a solution. The transport triggered architecture (TTA) template presented in this paper has a number of properties that make it very suitable for embedded system design. Key to its success is to give the compiler more control; it has to schedule all data transports within the processor. This paper highlights two important TTA-related issues. First a new code generation method for TTAs is discussed; it integrates scheduling and register allocation, thereby avoiding the notorious phase ordering problem between these two steps. Secondly, we discuss how to tune the instruction repertoire for an embedded processor. A tool is described which automatically detects frequent patterns of operations. These patterns can then be implemented on special function units.

The Reflecting Team as an Alternative Case Teaching Model

Contemporary business school faculties continue in their efforts to enhance graduates' preparation in terms of communication skills, critical thinking skills, perspective taking, and the ability to collaborate. The reflecting team case model presented here is a conversational, student centered, narratively based alternative to the traditional hierarchical, instructor centered, analytical model. It will hopefully be a welcome addition to the case instruction repertoire, aiming at the enhancement of students' skills in areas of both process and knowledge application. Process aspects include balancing power, dealing with gender differences, encouraging agreements among participants with diverse viewpoints, change processes, question construction, the art of positive denotation, and the development of action items. It is also attempts to place students in a `zone of proximal development', which would catalyze the development of more advanced models of cognitive and emotional intelligence.

Overhead Transparency Skills for Perioperative Nurse Educators

Successful design of creative overhead transparencies should be part of the instructional repertoire of perioperative educators. Personal computers and user-friendly software have revolutionized overhead transparencies' dynamic, imaginative production. This article reviews the advantages and disadvantages of overhead projection, presents practical suggestions for generating and using transparencies, and displays computer designed examples.

Teaching ESL Grammar through Dictation

For a variety of theoretical and practical reasons, dictation is a promising general procedure for promoting both conscious learning and subconscious acquisition of L2 grammatical structures. Although traditional dictation tends to be rather boring, the method allows a number of interesting and motivating variant techniques. This article describes four such variants, useful and effective dictation activities specifically designed for the teaching of grammar, that ESL teachers might easily add to their instructional repertoires.

La Maîtrise Pédagogique à Différents Moments de la Carrière de l'Enseignant Secondaire

summary Taking a life‐cycle’ perspective in the study of the teaching career allows us to generate some new insights into how teachers evolve professionally. More specifically, this perspective opens new windows for the study of pre‐service and in‐service education. In this particular life‐cycle’ study, teachers’ ‘mastery’ of the most important aspects of classroom instruction was explored. It turns out that many facets are not mastered, either at the outset or later on in one's career. It also turns out that the ‘classic’ or conventional offers of in‐service training are under‐utilised. A proposal is made to graft the in‐service component onto the ways in which teachers spontaneously go about trying to remedy shortcomings in their instructional repertoires.

Computer-1—a modern simple computer to introduce computer organization and assembler language programming

COMPUTER-1 is an interactive editor/assembler simulator-debugger and program evaluator to be used as an instructional tool for an introductory course in computer organization and assembler language programming. COMPUTER-1's organization, assembler language and interactive facilities are designed to introduce basic concepts of computer architecture and assembly language programming while minimizing the amount of computer system dependent details present during this learning period. COMPUTER-1 is a decimal machine with a small modern single address instruction repertoire. A run-time view into COMPUTER-1's memory and registers is provided to help in program understanding and debugging. COMPUTER-1 provides a flexible instructor-oriented method for specifying and evaluating programming assignments and a way for students to determine whether and how well their programs have worked. COMPUTER-1 runs under UNIX and presumes the availability of a CRT with full-screen cursor addressability. COMPUTER-1 is a modern descendent of BASIC1 [1] in that it simulates a more contemporary architecture and possesses interactive features which are not tied to the capabilities of hard copy terminals or card readers.

The Complexity of the Equivalence Problem for Simple Loop-Free Programs

We consider a simple class of loop-free programs whose instruction repertoire consists of $x \leftarrow 0$, $x \leftarrow c$, $x \leftarrow cx$, $x \leftarrow x/c$, $x \leftarrow x + y$, $x \leftarrow x - y$, $\textbf{skip } l$, $\textbf{if } p(x,y)$$\textbf{then skip }l$, and $\textbf{halt}$. (x and y are integer variables, c is a positive integer, $x/c$ is integer division, l is a nonnegative integer, and $p(x,y)$ is a predicate of the form $x > y$, $x \geqq y$, $x = y$, $x \ne y$, $x \leqq y$, or $x < y$; $\textbf{skip }l$ causes the $(l + 1)$st instruction following the current instruction to be executed next.) We show that the equivalence problem for this class is decidable in $2^{\lambda N^2 } $ time ($N = $ sum of the sizes of the programs and $\lambda $ is a fixed positive constant). The bound cannot be reduced to a polynomial in N unless ${\text{P}} = {\text{NP}}$. In fact, we have the following rather surprising result: The equivalence problem for programs with one input variable (which also ser...

BASICl—a simple computer to introduce computer organization and assembler language programming

BASICl is a simple interactive assembler-loader/interpreter which has been used as an instructional tool for the introductory course in computer organization and assembler language programming offered by the Computer Science Department at Washington State University. Both “hardware” and software are organized so as to emphasize basic concepts and to eliminate the confusion which occurs when these concepts are first introduced surrounded by the myriad of machine and assembler language-dependent details of an actual computer system. BASIC1 a decimal machine, has a small single address instruction repertoire with a trace, dump, reasonable diagnostics and run time interactive debugging capability. An associated simulator, called TESTER serves to evaluate whether and how well the students' programs have worked.

Test Generation for Microprocessors

The goal of this paper is to develop test generation procedures for testing microprocessors in a user environment. Classical fault detection methods based on the gate and flip-flop level or on the state diagram level description of microprocessors are not suitable for test generation. The problem is further compounded by the availability of a large variety of microprocessors which differ widely in their organization, instruction repertoire, addressing modes, data storage, and manipulation facilities, etc. In this paper, a general graph-theoretic model is developed at the register transfer level. Any microprocessor can be easily modeled using information only about its instruction set and the functions performed. This information is readily available in the user's manual. A fault model is developed on a functional level quite independent of the implementation details. The effects of faults in the fault model are investigated at the level of the graph-theoretic model. Test generation procedures are proposed which take the microprocessor organization and the instruction set as parameters and generate tests to detect all the faults in the fault model. The complexity of the test sequences measured in terms of the number of instructions is given. Our effort in generating tests for a real microprocessor and evaluating their fault coverage is described.

Register type bits

Register type bits

A Parallel Picture Processing Machine

A parallel picture processing machine (PPM) is presented. The proposed machine can perform local operations of both logical and arithmetical character on three by three neighborhoods of digitized pictures. It is essentially a two-dimensional machine but in a restricted sense it can be regarded as three-dimensional. The instruction repertoire is thoroughly discussed and several program examples are presented. In thelast section the implementation of the machine is described and v various tradeoffs between speed and economy are discussed. A dynamically programmable microprogram store is shown to give great freedom in program design.

A Digital Decoding Technique

In the course of the design of a small-scale digital computer for use as a communications buffer and processor it was found possible to greatly increase the capability of the computer in the encoding and decoding of a number of error control codes without significantly increasing the complexity of the hardware by the addition of three commands to the instruction repertoire of the computer. These commands are Galois Field Multiply, Galois Field Divide, and Compute Word Parity.

Simple Instructions Which Enhance the Error Control Capabilities of a Programmed Communications Processor

In the course of the design of a small-scale digital computer for use as a communications buffer and processor it was found possible to greatly increase the capability of the computer in the encoding and decoding of a number of error control codes without significantly increasing the complexity of the hardware by the addition of three commands to the instruction repertoire of the computer. These commands are Galois Field Multiply, Galois Field Divide, and Compute Word Parity.

Organization of No. 1 ESS Central Processor

The central processor controls the operation of the No. 1 electronic switching system by executing sequences of program instructions. The logical organization of the central processor is described by the simultaneous evolution of: (1) an instruction repertoire to carry out the required telephone and system maintenance tasks efficiently, and (2) a circuit logic design to provide the necessary circuits (flip-flop registers, accumulators, etc.) to execute the instructions at a high data processing rate. The design aims, order structure, timing, internal sequencing, and communications with the peripheral equipment of the system are described.

The CSX-l Computer

A brief description of the logical structure and the instruction repertoire of a short word length (16 bits) computer is given. The unorthodox features which are discussed are 1) a variable-length addressing procedure, 2) a common multi-accumulator and index register structure, and 3) the identical processing of data and addresses.