Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Students' Capacity (student + capacity)
Selected AbstractsGraduate Students and Knowledge Exchange with Local Stakeholders: Possibilities and PreparationBIOTROPICA, Issue 5 2009Amy E. Duchelle ABSTRACT Tropical biologists are exploring ways to expand their role as researchers through knowledge exchange with local stakeholders. Graduate students are well positioned for this broader role, particularly when supported by graduate programs. We ask: (1) how can graduate students effectively engage in knowledge exchange during their research; and (2) how can university programs prepare young scientists to take on this partnership role? We present a conceptual framework with three levels at which graduate students can exchange knowledge with stakeholders (information sharing, skill building, and knowledge generation) and discuss limitations of each. Examples of these strategies included disseminating preliminary research results to southern African villages, building research skills of Brazilian undergraduate students through semester-long internships, and jointly developing and implementing a forest ecology research and training program with one community in the Amazon estuary. Students chose strategies based on stakeholders' interests, research goals, and a realistic evaluation of student capacity and skill set. As strategies became more complex, time invested, skills mobilized, and strength of relationships between students and stakeholders increased. Graduate programs can prepare students for knowledge exchange with partners by developing specialized skills training, nurturing external networks, offering funding, maximizing strengths of universities in developed and developing regions through partnership, and evaluating knowledge exchange experiences. While balancing the needs of academia with those of stakeholders is challenging, the benefits of enhancing local scientific capacity and generating more locally relevant research for improved conservation may be worth the risks associated with implementing this type of graduate training model. [source] Coping with academic failure, a study of Dutch children with dyslexiaDYSLEXIA, Issue 4 2008Elly Singer Abstract This paper reports the results of a study of strategies that Dutch children with dyslexia employ to cope with recurrent academic failure. All of the students in the study had developed strategies for protecting their self-esteem. Using Harter's theory of coping with discrepancies between performance and standards, we distinguish four strategies: (1) working hard and committing to standards, (2) lowering standards, (3) seeking support from significant others (i.e. parents and teachers), and (4) avoiding comparisons with significant others (i.e. peers). Although self-talk emerged as an important component of all four strategies, it was employed both adaptively (e.g. to preserve the students' belief in their own academic capacities) and maladaptively (e.g. to devalue the importance of learning). The students relied most strongly on support from their parents; teachers and peers were more likely to be seen as threats to self-esteem. Strategies of teachers and parents to encourage adaptive coping with recurrent academic failure are confirming the student's self-worth, explaining dyslexia, showing faith in the student's capacities, fostering adaptive self-talk, providing educational treatment, and preventing teasing and bullying. Besides that, teachers and parents should cooperate. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Reconciling pedagogy and health sciences to promote Indigenous healthAUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, Issue 2 2000Denise Main Objectives: To increase knowledge and skills regarding Indigenous learning styles. To raise awareness within the tertiary education sector that Aboriginal students learn differently and that Indigenous cultures and pedagogy have validity and strength. To examine pedagogical strategies that assist both tertiary students capacity for learning and university lecturers' delivery and evaluation of teaching and learning strategies. Methods: A qualitative, ethnographic framework using personal observations, field and classroom experience, interviews and review of literature in the fields of education, public health and Indigenous cultural perspectives. Results: Aboriginal people are the receivers of services and programs that will be delivered, in the majority of cases, by university-educated, non-Aboriginal, professional health care providers. Indigenous students face specific challenges in obtaining an effective education for working in the Aboriginal and wider community in the field of public health; the challenges relate to culture, health paradigms and community. Conclusion: Lecturers in health and human science courses for Aboriginal students need to both examine and appreciate the cultural constraints on learning faced by their students within the context of mainstream curriculum, and to build on the large pool of knowledge and learning styles that Aboriginal society bequeaths to Aboriginal students. Implications: Academics can apply the cultural differences and knowledge base of the Indigenous community as a force to promote health through learning. [source] Student Conflict Resolution, Power "Sharing" in Schools, and Citizenship EducationCURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 2 2001Kathy Bickmore One goal of elementary education is to help children develop the skills, knowledge, and values associated with citizenship. However, there is little consensus about what these goals really mean: various schools, and various programs within any school, may promote different notions of "good citizenship." Peer conflict mediation, like service learning, creates active roles for young people to help them develop capacities for democratic citizenship (such as critical reasoning and shared decision making). This study examines the notions of citizenship embodied in the contrasting ways one peer mediation model was implemented in six different elementary schools in the same urban school district. This program was designed to foster leadership among diverse young people, to develop students' capacities to be responsible citizens by giving them tangible responsibility, specifically the power to initiate and carry out peer conflict management activities. In practice, as the programs developed, some schools did not share power with any of their student mediators, and other schools shared power only with the kinds of children already seen as "good" students. All of the programs emphasized the development of nonviolent community norms,a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy. A few programs began to engage students in critical reasoning and/or in taking the initiative in influencing the management of problems at their schools, thus broadening the space for democratic learning. These case studies help to clarify what our visions of citizenship (education) may look and sound like in actual practice so that we can deliberate about the choices thus highlighted. [source] System thinking skills at the elementary school levelJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 5 2010Orit Ben-Zvi Assaraf Abstract This study deals with the development of system thinking skills at the elementary school level. It addresses the question of whether elementary school students can deal with complex systems. The sample included 40 4th grade students from one school in a small town in Israel. The students studied an inquiry-based earth systems curriculum that focuses on the hydro-cycle. The program involved lab simulations and experiments, direct interaction with components and processes of the water cycle in the outdoor learning environment and knowledge integration activities. Despite the students' minimal initial system thinking abilities, most of them made significant progress with their ability to analyze the hydrological earth system to its components and processes. As a result, they recognized interconnections between components of a system. Some of the students reached higher system thinking abilities, such as identifying interrelationships among several earth systems and identifying hidden parts of the hydrological system. The direct contact with real phenomena and processes in small scale scenarios enabled these students to create a concrete local water cycle, which could later be expanded into large scale abstract global cycles. The incorporation of outdoor inquiry-based learning with lab inquiry-based activities and knowledge integration assignments contributed to the 4th grade students' capacity to develop basic system thinking abilities at their young age. This suggests that although system thinking is regarded as a high order thinking skill, it can be developed to a certain extent in elementary school. With a proper long-term curriculum, these abilities can serve as the basis for the development of higher stages of system thinking at the junior,high/middle school level. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 540,563, 2010 [source] "Unsightly Huts": Shanties and the Divestment Movement of the 1980sPEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2007Bradford Martin This article analyzes students' efforts to pressure American colleges and universities to divest their South African investments during the 1980s, focusing on the movement's most visible feature, the shantytowns students built to express solidarity with black South Africans and to oppose their institutions' investment policies. I argue that the shanties were constructed in spaces chosen to achieve maximum symbolic power and often succeeded in spatially transforming campuses into public forums that heightened students' capacity to affect the institutional decision-making process. Not surprisingly, the shanties evoked fervent responses. Shantytown residents identified with the plight of black South Africans under apartheid, while opponents called them "eyesores," and, as in the notorious case at Dartmouth, even forcibly destroyed them. When set against the conservative tenor of the Reagan/Bush 1980s, the varying responses to campus shantytowns, at both elite private institutions as well as large public ones, raise important questions about the cultural constructedness of "vision" and aesthetics and about the efficacy and the limits of using public space for symbolic oppositional politics. [source] | ||||||||||