Teacher Scaffolding: An Exploration of Exemplary Practice     

Jennifer Masters  Nicola Yelland 《Education and Information Technologies》2002,7(4):313-321

While computers have increasingly been used in classroom over the last twenty years, their application has often been mundane; being merely used to reinforce existing educational practices rather than as a catalyst for educational innovation. An effective way to bring about change may be to identify instances of best practice and then study associated strategies that may be useful for teachers trying to use computers in new and meaningful ways. This study investigates strategies used by a teacher deemed to be exemplary at using computers and associated technology in her classroom. It involved observing and recording teaching sessions conducted by the teacher. This paper discusses the learning task, the children's progression through the task and the teaching strategies used. In particular, it looks for instances of teacher scaffolding as a strategy for supporting children working with computers.  相似文献   

Primary Telesoftware     

Nicola J. Yeates 《Learning, Media and Technology》1983,9(3):179-182

The Telesoftware and Education Project, which was set up in 1980 by the BBC, the IBA and Brighton Polytechnic, demonstrated the feasibility of using broadcast transmissions to distribute computer programs as teletext pages, to be downloaded (i.e. recorded) onto a microcomputer in school. The success of the project led to the setting up of a Telesoftware and Primary Education Project, to distribute software to the area of education in which programming expertise is least often available. Telesoftware is not only a means of distributing stand‐alone software but can also be coupled with schools’ broadcasts and can read relevant information from any page of teletext, providing an educational television ‘package’. The project provides a link between schools and programmers and functions as a pre‐ and post‐broadcast evaluation team. The initial feedback from schools has been very positive and it is hoped that the broadcasting of high quality, relevant telesoftware will be a useful TV service in the future.  相似文献   

Technology as Play     

Nicola Yelland 《Early Childhood Education Journal》1999,26(4):217-220

The role of play in young children's learning has always been considered to be of primary importance. Thus, early childhood programs have been characterized by curricula that provide plenty of opportunity for young children to play and interact with materials, ideas, and people. As we approach the new millennium, the impact of the new information technologies on play and as play, for young children need to be conceptualized and discussed. This article begins that discussion. The view that there are opportunities for young children to play in technological environments as well as with traditional materials and contexts is presented.  相似文献   

Expressive Vocabulary Predicts Nonverbal Executive Function: A 2-year Longitudinal Study of Deaf and Hearing Children     

Anna Jones  Joanna Atkinson  Chloe Marshall  Nicola Botting  Michelle C. St Clair  Gary Morgan 《Child development》2020,91(2):e400-e414

Numerous studies suggest an association between language and executive function (EF), but evidence of a developmental relationship remains inconclusive. Data were collected from 75 deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) children and 82 hearing age-matched controls. Children were 6–11 years old at first time of testing and completed a battery of nonverbal EF tasks and a test of expressive vocabulary. These tasks were completed again 2 years later. Both groups improved their scores on all tasks over this period. DHH children performed significantly less well than hearing peers on some EF tasks and the vocabulary test at both time points. Cross-lagged panel models showed that vocabulary at Time 1 predicted change in EF scores for both DHH and hearing children but not the reverse.  相似文献   

Inside or outside the IP system? Business creation in academia     

Riccardo Fini  Nicola Lacetera  Scott Shane 《Research Policy》2010,39(8):1060-1069

Research and public policy on academic entrepreneurship are largely based on the assumption that faculty members start businesses to commercialize inventions that have been disclosed to university administrators and have been patented. In this paper, we analyze a sample of 11,572 professors and find that much academic entrepreneurship occurs outside the university intellectual property system. Specifically, about 2/3 of businesses started by academics are not based on disclosed and patented inventions. Moreover, we show that individual characteristics, departmental and organizational affiliations, and time allocation of academics that have started business outside the IP system are different from those of academics that have started businesses to exploit disclosed and patented inventions. We discuss the implications for research on and the practice of academic entrepreneurship.  相似文献   

Feedback mechanisms in learning virtual community settings     

Luigi Colazzo Alessio Comai Filippo Davi Andrea Molinari Nicola Villa 《美中教育评论》2010,(1):76-84

This paper introduces a set of services for the creation of on-line surveys, questionnaires, exams and self-assessment tests within a virtual community system used in e-learning settings. The system, called ＂Online Communities＂, is a dynamic web application used as platform for blended learning activities by the Faculty of Economics of the University of Trento. The functionalities added to the platform are contextualized into virtual communities, where activities take place. This allows us to create, submit and analyze questionnaires within and/or outside the boundaries of a community. Furthermore, the system allows to manage libraries of queries organized by the teacher/administrator of the community according to topics and levels of difficulty, in order to produce tests and generate self-assessment sessions on behalf of students. The addition of a questionnaire/ poll/self-assessment tool to a virtual community system can add a lot of interesting features, mainly using the inheritance mechanism implemented among different hierarchically-connected communities. This paper will present these functionalities and highlight one of these services, precisely the one dedicated to self-assessment. In the system, self-assessment tests have indeed a double nature： （1） They are useful to students for checking their own level of preparation; and （2） They are useful to lecturers as an indicator of the level of preparation reached by the students. In order to encourage the use of the system within the whole educational process, and not to limit the real use of the service to the period of the final exams only, the possibility has been foreseen for each participant to share his/her own test results, comparing them with the other members of the community, and even offering real ＂challenges＂, thus transforming passive and ＂solitary＂ learning into something much more stimulating and ＂social＂.  相似文献   

Becoming numerate with information and communications technologies in the twenty‐first century     

Nicola Yelland  Anna Kilderry 《International Journal of Early Years Education》2010,18(2):91-106

This article draws on data from a three‐year Australian Research Council‐funded study that examined the ways in which young children become numerate in the twenty‐first century. We were interested in the authentic problem‐solving contexts that we believe are required to create meaningful learning. This being so, our basic tenet was that such experiences should involve the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) where relevant, but not in tokenistic ways. This article highlights learning conditions in which young children can become numerate in contemporary times. We consider ‘academic’ or ‘school‐based’ mathematical tasks in the context of a Mathematical Tasks Continuum. This continuum was conceptualised to enable focused and detailed thinking about the scope and range of mathematical tasks that young children are able to engage within contemporary school contexts. The data from this study show that most of the tasks the children experienced in early years mathematics classes were unidimensional in their make up. That is, they focus on the acquisition of specific skills and then they are practiced in disembedded contexts. We suggest that the framework created in the form of the Mathematical Tasks Continuum can facilitate teachers’ thinking about the possible ways in which they could extend children’s academic work in primary school mathematics, so that the process of becoming numerate becomes more easily related to authentic activities that they are likely to experience in everyday life.  相似文献   

Searching the Web to learn about a controversial topic: are students epistemically active?   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Lucia Mason  Angela Boldrin  Nicola Ariasi 《Instructional Science》2010,38(6):607-633

Students are making an increased use of the Web as a source for solving information problems for academic assignments. To extend current research about search behavior during navigation on the Web, this study examined whether students are able to spontaneously reflect, from an epistemic perspective, on the information accessed, and whether their epistemic metacognition is related to individual characteristics, such as prior knowledge of the topic and the need for cognition. In addition, we investigated whether Internet-based learning is influenced by the activation of spontaneous epistemic metacognition in the search context. Forty-six psychology and engineering university students were asked to research information about a controversial subject in order to write an essay. They were also asked to think aloud during their research. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed. As revealed by their spontaneous reflections, all participants were epistemically active, although to different extents and levels. As expected, there was evidence that students activated beliefs about the four epistemic dimensions identified in the literature, especially about the credibility of an electronic source and the criteria for justification of knowledge. Prior knowledge was not related to activation of epistemic beliefs in the search context, while the need for cognition significantly associated with aspects of source and its content evaluation. Two patterns of epistemic metacognition were identified and they significantly influenced Internet-based learning. Students who spontaneously generated more sophisticated reflections about the sources as well as the information provided, outperformed students who were active only at the first epistemic level. Educational implications are drawn.  相似文献   

Evaluation of an intervention to help students avoid unintentional plagiarism by improving their authorial identity   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

James Elander  Gail Pittam  Joanne Lusher  Pauline Fox  Nicola Payne 《Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education》2010,35(2):157-171

Students with poorly developed authorial identity may be at risk of unintentional plagiarism. An instructional intervention designed specifically to improve authorial identity was delivered to 364 psychology students at three post‐1992 universities in London, UK, and evaluated with before‐and‐after measures of beliefs and attitudes about academic authorship, using the Student Authorship Questionnaire. Changes in questionnaire scores showed that the intervention led to significantly increased confidence in writing, understanding of authorship, knowledge to avoid plagiarism, and top‐down approaches to writing, and significantly decreased bottom‐up and pragmatic approaches to writing. For understanding of authorship, knowledge to avoid plagiarism and pragmatic approaches to writing, significant intervention by year of study interaction effects showed that the greatest improvements were among year one undergraduates. Direct evaluative feedback showed that 86% of students believed the intervention helped them avoid plagiarism and 66% believed it helped them write better assignments. Post‐intervention focus groups revealed changed student understandings about authorial identity and academic writing. The results show that interventions can help students avoid unintentional plagiarism by adopting more authorial roles in their academic writing. Further research could explore other influences on authorial identity, and examine the impact of authorial identity interventions on other outcome indicators.  相似文献   

The effects of post-compulsory education and training systems on literacy and numeracy skills: A comparative analysis using PISA 2000 and the 2011 survey of adult skills     

Nicola Pensiero  Andy Green 《European Journal of Education》2018,53(2):238-253

This article analyses the contribution of post-compulsory education and training systems to the development of literacy and numeracy skills across OECD countries. While there is extensive cross-country comparative research on the effects of primary and lower secondary education systems on aggregate skills levels, there has been little comparative analysis of system effects after the end of lower secondary education. This article uses a quasi-cohort analysis of the tested literacy and numeracy skills of 15-year-olds in PISA 2000 and 27-year-olds in the 2011 OECD Survey of Adult Skills (SAS) to estimate the gains in different countries in mean levels of competence in literacy and numeracy. We found that Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden) with comprehensive upper secondary education and training systems and German-speaking countries (Austria and Germany) with dual systems of apprenticeship were particular effective, whilst countries with mixed systems (England, Ireland, Northern Ireland and Spain) showed a relative decline in both literacy and numeracy. The education system characteristics that account for these differences are (a) the inclusiveness – as proxied by high rates of participation at 17/18 and low social gradients of level 3 completion; (b) the esteem of vocational programmes; and (c) curriculum standardisation with regard to the study of maths and the national language.  相似文献