Regular Lessons Research Articles

Evaluation der Wirkung des schulbasierten Präventionsprogramms TOPP „Teenager ohne pfundige Probleme“ auf adipositasrelevante Faktoren an Thüringer Schulen

The onset of puberty is considered a critical period for the development of overweight and obesity. For prevention purposes, we developed the school-based intervention program TOPP (Teenage Obesity Prevention Program), especially for boys. In order to test the effectiveness, we conducted a controlled study using a pre-post design. A total of 84schools in Thuringian, Germany, with 1,199boys participated in the study. Program effectiveness was analyzed with mostly standardized questionnaires referring to body-related self esteem, eating behavior, physical activity, teasing, and knowledge. The program was performed during the course of a school project within at least 3weeks or during the regular school lessons for more than 6weeks. After 9×90-minute, manual-based lessons, including interactive exercises and poster-based group discussions, significant improvement was only reached for nutritional knowledge. As a main outcome, it could be demonstrated how an area-wide prevention program with low costs could be successfully implemented. The school environment enables us to create a universal, socially equitable, and low-threshold access.

Analysis on the Actual Condition and the Awareness of Participating in Regular Lesson of high school Taekwondo Players

Analysis on the Actual Condition and the Awareness of Participating in Regular Lesson of high school Taekwondo Players

Preparing students for future learning with Teachable Agents

One valuable goal of instructional technologies in K-12 education is to prepare students for future learning. Two classroom studies examined whether Teachable Agents (TA) achieves this goal. TA is an instructional technology that draws on the social metaphor of teaching a computer agent to help students learn. Students teach their agent by creating concept maps. Artificial intelligence enables TA to use the concept maps to answer questions, thereby providing interactivity, a model of thinking, and feedback. Elementary schoolchildren learning science with TA exhibited “added-value” learning that did not adversely affect the “basic-value” they gained from their regular curriculum, despite trade-offs in instructional time. Moreover, TA prepared students to learn new science content from their regular lessons, even when they were no longer using the software.

Have they pinched it from another newspaper?

This article presents an intervention study where two conditions of reading instruction are compared. In a base condition four teachers—two in the experimental groups and two in the control groups—and their students in grade 5 discuss newspaper texts during a regular lesson. The majority of the students were poor comprehenders. In the intervention condition, the teachers in the experimental groups used a model of structured text talk, Questioning the Author (QtA), after repeatedly having participated in seminars led by the investigators where the model was practised. During the regular lessons the four teachers mostly asked questions to check if the students know the meaning of difficult words. The students made few inferences and reflections. During the QtA lessons the teachers’ question types had undergone a change. There was a dramatical increase in the number of inference- and half-open questions and the students made numerous inferences, reflections and initiated own questions. This was not the case in the control groups.

Thermal comfort in Italian classrooms under free running conditions during mid seasons: Assessment through objective and subjective approaches

This work shows the results of a field study about indoor thermal comfort, based on investigations in Italian classrooms. The surveys were carried out in Turin, in the North–West of Italy. The monitoring campaigns were performed during the mid season, in free running conditions. This study follows a previous one based on a monitoring campaign performed during the heating season. The responses from these two different configurations were integrated, analyzed and compared. The field study was conducted by physical observations, survey questionnaires and behavioral observations. Both field measurements and subjective surveys were performed at the same time during the regular lesson period. Thermal environment parameters were measured: indoor air temperature, mean radiant temperature, air relative humidity, air velocity and outdoor air temperature. Through these data, Fanger's comfort indices were calculated (predicted mean vote and predicted percentage of dissatisfied people), the actual people clothing and metabolic rate being known; furthermore an adaptive model was applied to obtain acceptable ranges for the indoor operative temperature, in function of the outdoor climatic conditions. The subjective survey investigated the thermal sensation, the thermal acceptability and the thermal preference, using subjective scales. The subjective judgments about the thermal environment were compared with the results of the field measurements. Moreover, the thermal sensation votes were compared with the votes of acceptability and preference. The responses from this study and from the previous one, performed during the heating season, were compared. The results show a trend characterized by a gradual change in the thermal preference from the heating season to the mid and warm season. In fact, the results show a preference for environments judged slightly warm or warm during the heating period and a preference for neutral environments in the mid season.

Making Students Talk about Expository Texts

This study presents a comparison between how six teachers and their 17‐year‐old students talked about texts in civics and nursing science during regular lessons and during two lessons where structured text talk in smaller groups was used. The majority of students were poor readers and attended vocational programmes. The text talks were videotaped. During the regular lessons, most of the teachers asked purely factual questions where the students just had to retrieve information from the text to be able to answer them. The students made few inferences and reflections. After the regular lessons, the teachers were invited to participate in seminars led by the investigator. In these seminars, a special model of structured text talk was practiced before videotaping a second and a third time. The results demonstrate that during the structured text talks the teachers' question types had undergone a change. The number of purely factual questions had decreased. Instead there was an increase in the number of inferences and half‐open questions. The students read more actively during the structured text talks. They clearly made an effort to explore ideas in the text and made numerous inferences and reflections.

Lost in Translation

Language ideologies shape educational practices in ways that can either limit or expand students' engagement with academic content. This article examines science lessons with third and fourth grade English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) students, focusing on (a) regular lessons, in which the monolingual teacher speaks English while a bilingual coteacher interprets, and (b) an atypical lesson without the coteacher, in which the teacher relies on a few, more English-proficient students to interpret for the others. Analysis of classroom discourse suggests an underlying ideology that views languages as neutral, semantically equivalent vehicles for science concepts that are themselves viewed as independent of language and context. This ideology must be critically examined if educational policy and practice are to productively engage the interpretive work demanded of ESOL students in science classrooms.

Reminding Scientists of Their Civic Duties

The very wise former Congressman Sherwood Boehlert of the House Science Committee said, “If scientists are going to be more effective participants in the policy arena, they have to … learn more about the policy work” (“S&T Forum: States, industry play key role in U.S. innovation drive,” AAAS News and Notes, 25 May, p. [1140][1]). For over 40 years, I have been urging the scientific societies (like AAAS, American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and Materials Research Society, to which I belong) to stop merely, again and again, berating the public's “scientific illiteracy” and turn all that energy to fixing the unbelievable policy illiteracy of scientists. For years I have tested this, in talks at largish audiences in society meetings. Over 90% typically admitted to not being able to name their two senators and congressperson. Very, very few recognized what the “House Science Committee” was or did. “Physician (or physicist, chemist, biologist), heal thyself!” A regular clever quarter-page lesson on contemporary “civics” in Science might be a start and a recurring reminder of scientists' responsibilities as citizens. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.316.5828.1140

The impact of planning time on children’s task-based interactions

Recently, tasks have been advocated for their role in promoting participation in L2 interaction and the provision and use of feedback by language learners (Bygate, M., Skehan, P., Swain, M. (Eds.), 2001. Researching Pedagogical Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing. Pearson Education, Harlow). The relationship between various aspects of pre-task planning time and the quality of learners’ output in terms of fluency, accuracy, and complexity (Ellis, R., 2005. Planning and Task Performance in a Second Language. John Benjamins Publishing Co, Philadelphia, PA) has primarily been investigated with adults. Despite general agreement that age plays an important role in SLA, and that tasks are widely used in classrooms, little research has concerned the benefits of pre-task planning for children. The current study examines the relationship between planning and production, with children carrying out tasks as part of their regular lessons in regular ESL classrooms. Twenty-one dyads of ESL learners, 5–12 years old, performed three communicative tasks over 3 weeks, with 0 min, 2 min and 5 min of planning time. In general, planning had limited benefits when considering use of corrective feedback and linguistic accuracy and fluency. Increased complexity was associated with 5 min of planning time. In general though, there was more talk, and more constructive on-task behavior among children when given little or no planning time.

Implementing strategy instruction in Chinese language classes: a school-based Chinese reading strategy instruction programme

Background This was a small-scale study conducted in Hong Kong Chinese language classes, based on the research in cognitive strategy instruction. Purpose This study aimed to explore whether Chinese language teachers were able to develop their own school-based strategy instruction programme through collaborating with the researcher. Programme description The school-based programme was mainly adapted from a Chinese reading strategy instruction programme that was developed by the researcher. It aimed to enhance students' reading comprehension through direct teaching on different reading strategies. Sample A total of 205 grade 7 students and six teachers from one secondary school in Hong Kong participated in the study. One of the teachers and six students from his class were specially invited to participate as target subjects in an in-depth investigation. Design and methods This study adopted quantitative methods, including a reading comprehension test and questionnaire, and qualitative methods, including think-aloud measures, interview and observation in programme evaluation. Results Findings of the study generally suggested that the school-based programme was implemented quite smoothly in the regular Chinese language lessons, and most of the students had better performance on their strategy use and reading comprehension after receiving the programme. While the findings provided preliminary support for developing a school-based strategy instruction programme in Hong Kong Chinese language classes, some problems in changing Chinese language teachers' instructional approach are also discussed. Conclusions This study explored the possibility of developing a school-based strategy instruction programme in Chinese language classes. Due to the small scale and exploratory nature of the study, however, certain limitations of the research design of this study should be noted.

Perception of the thermal environment in high school and university classrooms: Subjective preferences and thermal comfort

This work shows some of the results of a field study about environmental comfort investigations in classrooms. In this project thermal, acoustic, visual and air quality aspects were analysed in a number of classrooms—13 classrooms at four different high schools of the Provincia di Torino and four typical medium-sized university classrooms of the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. The investigations were carried out during the heating period. Both field measurements and subjective surveys were performed at the same time during the regular lesson periods. This paper focuses on thermal comfort, which may have a significant effect on the students’ performance, in terms of attention, comprehension and learning levels. The measurement campaign consisted in measuring the thermal environment parameters—air temperature, mean radiant temperatures, air relative humidity and air velocity. Through these data, the thermal comfort Fanger's indices (predicted mean vote (PMV), and predicted percentage of dissatisfied (PPD)people) were calculated, the actual people clothing and metabolic rate being known. The subjective survey involved questions on the thermal environmental perception. They basically investigated the thermal environment acceptability and preference. Moreover, a judgement based on the typical seven point thermal sensation scale (Fanger 7-points scale) was also asked. Through the elaboration of the questionnaire data, the actual percentage of dissatisfied (PD) people of the felt thermal environment was evaluated. The judgements about the thermal environment were compared with the results of the field measurements. Moreover, the subjective mean votes were compared with the thermal environment perceptions in terms of acceptability and preference.

Features of mathematical activities in interdisciplinary, project-based learning

Project-based learning in mathematics education leads to mathematical activities that are uncommon in regular lessons at school. Among these activities, the following are identified and examined more closely: Also, implications for the design of project-based learning environments are developed.

Flying through the Standards with: Bats

The National Research Council's document, Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (2000) describes an elementary science classroom as one that is composed of learners who are engaged in scientific processes. In such a setting, children ask real-world questions and seek real-world solutions. As students pursue their inquiries, they often move away from science textbooks, and they implement mathematical skills, read literature, conduct research in electronic databases, write stories, and so forth in a larger context. What was originally a regular science lesson becomes an opportunity for integration across the curriculum. This article describes an integrated unit on bats and specifically addresses the National Science Education Standards.

Verbal interactions in CASE lessons in Malawi

The paper discusses a study of verbal interactions in “Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE)” lessons. CASE is an intervention which aims at accelerating the cognitive development of secondary pupils in the context of science lessons. A lesson observation schedule was developed in such a way that it would be used to estimate the frequency of the type of verbal interactions advocated by the CASE method. The categories in the schedule thus reflect the main phases in a CASE lesson, namely; concrete preparation, cognitive conflict and construction, meta-cognition and bridging. The schedule was used to compare CASE lessons with regular science lessons in Malawi. In general CASE lessons were observed to have higher frequencies of the type of verbal interactions sampled by the lesson observation schedule than regular science lessons. However there were lower frequencies of verbal interactions pertaining to meta-cognition and bridging in CASE lessons than would be expected from the method. Reasons for this observation are briefly explored.

METHOD AND EFFECTIVENESS OF AN INDIVIDUALIZED EXERCISE OF FUNDAMENTAL MATHEMATICS

This article describes a method used to provide mathematics students in colleges of engineering in Japan with supplementary exercises to aid in their learning. The impact of this effort is also described. An online support function enables instructional personnel to individualize the exercise for students whose abilities vary widely. Individualizing exercises helps students to understand a mathematical method used to solve a problem and also the mathematical idea or concept upon which the method is based. The program described here consists of activities that supplement those in the regular lesson. They are designed to help those students who failed to meet certain course objectives or to solve the problems given in the lesson. Students using the individualized program are allowed to select the problems from among the problem exercises available based on the course objectives that they have not yet satisfied. The online support function of the learning environment that the authors developed assists teaching personnel in the otherwise time-consuming preparation of individualizing these activities. Students determine how well they did on the objectives in the regular lesson by visting the Web page for the course. Information is provided on the impact of the activities on student performance in a fundamental mathematics course in the authors college.

Academic Learning Time—Physical Education (ALT-PE) of Students with Mild Intellectual Disabilities in Regular Victorian Schools

The purpose was to describe the engagement of students with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) and their nondisabled peers (NDP) in regular physical education lessons and to determine whether this varied with gender, grade, or disability. Participants were 24 students with MID and 48 NDP Data on student behavior were gathered using an Academic Learning Time—Physical Education (ALT-PE) systematic observation instrument. Each lesson, including one student with MID and two same-gender NDP, was observed on five occasions (120 total). Data from primary and secondary levels were pooled. A MANOVA with PE Time, PE Engaged, Motor Engaged (ME), and Motor Appropriate (MA) as dependent measures revealed significant main effects for disability and gender. Follow-up analyses disclosed that the only difference between boys and girls was PE Time and that engagement level showed no difference. Students with MID spent significantly less time (p ≤ .01) than NDPs at each level.

Teaching and report writing in primary science: Case studies of an intervention program

Relatively little research has been conducted to monitor the role of writing in science lessons. This paper reports the findings of four case studies concerning the teaching and writing of science in isolated one-teacher schools. The teachers participated in an intervention program that aimed to facilitate the teaching of enquiry-based science. This program introduced an innovation consisting of instructional materials and a teaching approach. A multi-site case study design was used which involved regular lesson observations at the schools over a period of 12 months. Documents in the form of the students' written reports were used to supplement data regarding the teachers' use of the innovation. There was a variation in the extent and method of use of the innovation which was evident in the students' reports.

Prevention of drug abuse: Examination of the effectiveness of a program with elementary school children

While few programs for the prevention of drug abuse among children have been systematically examined, those that do exist focus on junior high and high school age children. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of a program with elementary school fourth graders. A total of 100 children were assigned to an experimental group or a no-treatment control group and were assessed at pretreatment, post-treatment, and a two month follow-up. Subjects in both groups were seen for three one-hour sessions in groups of approximately 20 children. The children receiving the drug abuse prevention program were taught information about drugs and drug abuse, the difference between good and bad drugs, information about addiction and being “conned” into drug use, and safety rules for preventing drug use/abuse. Children in the control group were seen for an equal time by an experimenter but were taught their regular class lessons. Relative to the control group, children in the experimental group acquired more information at the post-assessment. While the differences between the two groups in this area diminished somewhat at follow-up, differences between the two groups' application of skills emerged at follow-up. The results indicate that children in elementary school can be taught basic information concerning drug abuse prevention.

Teacher-Computer Interaction in Teaching a Mathematics Lesson

Elementary school teachers are being encouraged to use the computer for mathematics instruction (NCTM 1980). Many are seeking appropriate methods for integrating the computer into their mathematic lessons. Unfortunately, much of the pre ent software must be altered or creatively adapted before it can be incorporated into teacher presentations. The lack of computers in individual classrooms and the lack of regular acce to computer laboratorie are other tumbling blocks that di courage the u e of computers in a regular lesson. The estatement are supported by a survey conducted in Minnesota (Andersen 1984) that showed fewer than 5 percent of the K-8 teacher who responded had ever used the computer for teaching mathematics.

A structural categorization of verbal problems with missing, surplus or contradictory data

Verbal arithmetical problems with missing, or surplus, or contradictory data (called shortly MSCD problems) are considered as a possible means of teaching mathematics in the primary school. The problems are considered here in the logico-mathematical setup, that is, the solvers are told that they can use only the data and the information given in the problem formulation. The paper consists of three parts. The first part is concerned with a categorization of MSCD problems while the two other parts are reports on two independent, exploratory studies. In one of them, subjects were interviewed individually and given the same set of MSCD problems. In the second, MSCD problems were used during regular classroom lessons and various observations were gathered.