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Education Community (education + community)
Selected AbstractsHigher Education Communities and Academic IdentityHIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2000Maurice Kogan The slippery use to which the word ,community' is applied in higher education studies and pronouncements makes it desirable that it should be better defined and related to more bounded assumptions about individual academic identity and relationships within academe. There is discussion of the academic communities of the invisible colleges and their modes of internal governance by elites and the communitarian implications of the changing pattern of institutional management. The relationship of academics and their institutions to the wider world of society and the economy is considered. It is concluded that external connections are not best pursued through assumptions of shared community but of acceptance of differentiation and exchange. [source] Policy Drivers in UK Higher Education in Historical Perspective: ,Inside Out', ,Outside In' and the Contribution of ResearchHIGHER EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2006Michael Shattock Where have been the main policy drivers for the development of British higher education over the last 50 years? This article argues that while higher education policy was once driven from the inside outwards, from the late 1970s it has been driven exclusively from the outside inwards. Policy decisions under either regime were rarely driven by research findings especially from within the higher education community. The current imbalance between ,inside-out' and ,outside-in' policy formation is paradoxically most apparent when the higher education system has a more widely diversified funding base than at any time since the 1930s. The key policy challenge is now not what new policies are needed but what new framework should be developed for policy making. [source] Folk theories of "inquiry:" How preservice teachers reproduce the discourse and practices of an atheoretical scientific methodJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 5 2004Mark Windschitl Despite the ubiquity of the term "inquiry" in science education literature, little is known about how teachers conceptualize inquiry, how these conceptions are formed and reinforced, how they relate to work done by scientists, and if these ideas about inquiry are translated into classroom practice. This is a multicase study in which 14 preservice secondary science teachers developed their own empirical investigations,from formulating questions to defending results in front of peers. Findings indicate that participants shared a tacit framework of what it means to "do science" which shaped their investigations and influenced reflections on their inquiries. Some facets of the participants' shared model were congruent with authentic inquiry; however, the most consistent assumptions were misrepresentations of fundamental aspects of science: for example, that a hypothesis functions as a guess about an outcome, but is not necessarily part of a larger explanatory system; that background knowledge may be used to provide ideas about what to study, but this knowledge is not in the form of a theory or other model; and that theory is an optional tool one might use at the end of a study to help explain results. These ideas appear consistent with a "folk theory" of doing science that is promoted subtly, but pervasively, in textbooks, through the media, and by members of the science education community themselves. Finally, although all participants held degrees in science, the participants who eventually used inquiry in their own classrooms were those who had significant research experiences in careers or postsecondary study and greater science-content background. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 481,512, 2004 [source] Views of nature of science questionnaire: Toward valid and meaningful assessment of learners' conceptions of nature of scienceJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 6 2002Norm G. Lederman Helping students develop informed views of nature of science (NOS) has been and continues to be a central goal for kindergarten through Grade 12 (K,12) science education. Since the early 1960s, major efforts have been undertaken to enhance K,12 students and science teachers' NOS views. However, the crucial component of assessing learners' NOS views remains an issue in research on NOS. This article aims to (a) trace the development of a new open-ended instrument, the Views of Nature of Science Questionnaire (VNOS), which in conjunction with individual interviews aims to provide meaningful assessments of learners' NOS views; (b) outline the NOS framework that underlies the development of the VNOS; (c) present evidence regarding the validity of the VNOS; (d) elucidate the use of the VNOS and associated interviews, and the range of NOS aspects that it aims to assess; and (e) discuss the usefulness of rich descriptive NOS profiles that the VNOS provides in research related to teaching and learning about NOS. The VNOS comes in response to some calls within the science education community to go back to developing standardized forced-choice paper and pencil NOS assessment instruments designed for mass administrations to large samples. We believe that these calls ignore much of what was learned from research on teaching and learning about NOS over the past 30 years. The present state of this line of research necessitates a focus on individual classroom interventions aimed at enhancing learners' NOS views, rather than on mass assessments aimed at describing or evaluating students' beliefs. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 497,521, 2002 [source] | ||||||||||