Educational Context (educational + context)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


"It's Different Lives": A Guatemalan American Adolescent's Construction of Ethnic and Gender Identities across Educational Contexts

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2009
Lucila D. Ek
Drawing from a multiyear ethnography and a longitudinal case study, this article examines how one Guatemalan American teenager negotiates the multiple socializations to ethnic and gender identities in her home, her Pentecostal church, and her high school. She must face processes of Americanization and Mexicanization. Americanization's thrust is to replace the languages and cultures of Latino/a students with English and mainstream middle-class European American ways while Mexicanization pushes Central Americans to Mexican and Chicano dialects of Spanish and ways of being. With respect to gender, Amalia confronts a process of sexualization, particularly in school. Tensions between the socializations create spaces where Amalia enacts her agency and constructs her identities. The article is informed by research on multiple socializations, scholarship on identity and agency, and studies of Latino/a language and identities.,[Latina, socialization, language, identity, agency] [source]


Ethical considerations in drama and conflict resolution research in Swedish and Australian schools

CONFLICT RESOLUTION QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2005
Dale Bagshaw
This article discusses ethical considerations arising from drama and conflict research with adolescents in schools in two reasonably similar Western countries, Sweden and Australia. It proposes guidelines in sensitivity and ethical responsiveness for qualitative researchers who are working with adolescents in these areas in an educational context. [source]


Adults with learning disabilities: Differences between The Netherlands and Flanders

DYSLEXIA, Issue 4 2003
A.J.J.M. Ruijssenaars
Abstract In this paper, similarities and differences are outlined between adults with self reported learning disabilities (SRLD) drawn from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) data on adult literacy in The Netherlands and Flanders. These results are discussed in terms of striking differences in the educational context within which the adults developed. The literacy skills of SRLD adults in The Netherlands are superior to SRLD adults in Flanders. This is interpreted in terms of societal acceptance of disability. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Knowing Truth: Peirce's epistemology in an educational context

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2005
Christine L. McCarthy
Abstract In this paper I examine Peirce's epistemological and ontological theories and indicate their relevance to educational practice. I argue that Peirces conception of Firsts, Seconds and Thirds entails a fundamental ontological realism. I further argue that Peirce does have a theory of truth, that it is a particular non-traditional ,correspondence' theory, consistent with, and implicit in, an over-arching position of pragmatic realism. Peirce's epistemological position is subject to misinterpretation when the ontological realism on which it rests is overlooked. Finally I suggest that such a re-consideration of Peirce's pragmatic ontology and epistemology in an educational context is needed. [source]


Asymmetrical consequences of behavioral change through reward and punishment

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 2 2008
Tobias Greitemeyer
Previous research (Greitemeyer & Weiner, 2003) has demonstrated that compliance, because of an anticipated reward is attributed more to the person than compliance because of an anticipated punishment. The present research extended these findings to an educational context. Three studies revealed that parents who ask their children to change inappropriate behaviors are more likely to ascribe their children's improvement to the child, if the child was promised a reward, rather than threatened, to receive a punishment if the child did not improve. Moreover, because a child's improved behavior is more likely to be ascribed to the child given a reward as compared to a punishment, parents expect that rewards (as opposed to punishments) are more likely to sustain improved behavior, when the incentive is no longer offered. Finally, participants report to be more likely to induce behavioral change through reward rather than punishment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Soft ontologies, spatial representations and multi-perspective explorability

EXPERT SYSTEMS, Issue 5 2008
Mauri Kaipainen
Abstract: It is against the dynamically evolving nature of many contemporary media applications to be analysed in terms of conventional rigid ontologies that rely on expertise-based fixed categories and hierarchical structure. Many of these rely on sharing ,folksonomies', personal descriptions of information and objects for one's own retrieval. Such applications involve many feedback mechanisms via the community, and have been shown to have emergent properties of complex dynamic systems. We propose that such dynamically evolving information domains can be more usefully described by means of a soft ontology, a dynamically flexible and inherently spatial metadata approach for ill-defined domains. Our contribution is (1) the elaboration of the so far intuitive concept of soft ontology in a way that supports conceptualizing dynamically evolving domains. Further, our approach proposes (2) a whole new mode of interaction with information domains by means of recurring exploration of an information domain from multiple perspectives in search of more comprehensive understanding of it, i.e. multi-perspective exploration. We demonstrate this concept with an example of collaborative tagging in an educational context. [source]


The impact of portfolios on health professionals' practice: a literature review

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHARMACY PRACTICE, Issue 6 2008
Andrzej Jerzy Kostrzewski senior principal pharmacist in education
Objectives The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the use of a portfolio and discuss the evidence for the impact of a portfolio on professional practice, in particular pharmacy practice. Method A literature review was performed using databases from health care and education, namely AMED, BEI, CINAHL, Embase, ERIC, IPA, MedLine, PHARM-LINE, Psycinfo, TIMELIT and ZETOCs, as well as a manual search of relevant journals and documents between 1991 and 2007. The search terms included portfolio, progress files and assessment, and these were linked with pharmacy. Articles were included in the review if they had a focus on the portfolio as a contribution to professional practice. Key findings Portfolios have been used in the education field for over decade. A total of 26 out of 1901 papers were identified which examined portfolios in a post-registration setting. The majority of these publications were from medicine (12), with education (six), pharmacy (five) and nursing (three) making up a small proportion. Portfolios were seen as (a) a tool for use in feedback, (b) a useful trigger for reflection and (c) a link between academic learning and practice. A similar set of findings were seen in the educational context. In addition, a portfolio (a) requires motivation to record and (b) can change behaviour towards colleagues. Conclusions There is still confusion about the meaning of a professional portfolio in health care professions. It is suggested that portfolios should be classified according to a modified system from the teaching profession. The evidence that portfolios can contribute to practice is limited. This review suggests the need for more studies into the impact of portfolios on professional practice, in particular in a pharmacy context. [source]


Should the State Fund Religious Schools?

JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHILOSOPHY, Issue 3 2007
MICHAEL S. MERRY
abstract In this article, I make a philosophical case for the state to fund religious schools. Ultimately, I shall argue that the state has an obligation to fund and provide oversight of all schools irrespective of their religious or non-religious character. The education of children is in the public interest and therefore the state must assume its responsibility to its future citizens to ensure that they receive a quality education. Still, while both religious schools and the polity have much to be gained from direct funding, I will show that parents and administrators of these schools may have reasons to be diffident toward the state and its hypothetical interference. While the focus of the paper is primarily on the American educational context, the philosophical questions related to state funding and oversight of religious schools transcend any one national context. [source]


Uses and Gratifications of the Web among Students

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 1 2000
Samuel Ebersole
This study was designed to explore how some students in ten public schools view the WWW and how their attitudes and opinions affect their use of this new medium in an educational context. An exploratory principal components analysis of forty use statements resulted in an eight factor solution. Additionally, student responses to a computer-administered survey instrument were collected and analyzed revealing significant differences in the way that students describe their use of the WWW. Gender, grade level, and amount of time spent using the WWW were used to create between-group comparisons of the WWW use categories that made up the computer-administered survey instrument. The final phase of data analysis was a content analysis of sites visited by students. A total of 123,071 URLs were collected from the computers used to administer the computer survey instrument. These were reduced to a total of 500 sites that were reviewed by media specialists. Students were found to be visiting commercial sites at a much higher proportion than those in other domains. Also, the commercial sites received the lowest rating for "suitability for academic research" of all the domain names. And while students reported their purpose for using the WWW as "research and learning" fifty-two percent of the time, the coders found only twenty-seven percent of the sampled sites to be "suitable" for that purpose. [source]


How close is close enough?

JOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2007
Evaluating propensity score matching using data from a class size reduction experiment
In recent years, propensity score matching (PSM) has gained attention as a potential method for estimating the impact of public policy programs in the absence of experimental evaluations. In this study, we evaluate the usefulness of PSM for estimating the impact of a program change in an educational context (Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement Ratio Project [Project STAR]). Because Tennessee's Project STAR experiment involved an effective random assignment procedure, the experimental results from this policy intervention can be used as a benchmark, to which we compare the impact estimates produced using propensity score matching methods. We use several different methods to assess these nonexperimental estimates of the impact of the program. We try to determine "how close is close enough," putting greatest emphasis on the question: Would the nonexperimental estimate have led to the wrong decision when compared to the experimental estimate of the program? We find that propensity score methods perform poorly with respect to measuring the impact of a reduction in class size on achievement test scores. We conclude that further research is needed before policymakers rely on PSM as an evaluation tool. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management [source]


Reading motivation, perceptions of reading instruction and reading amount: a comparison of junior and senior secondary students in Hong Kong

JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING, Issue 4 2009
Kit-Ling Lau
This study examined the relations between students' reading motivation, perceptions of reading instruction and reading amount, together with grade differences, in a Chinese educational context. A total of 1,146 students from 19 secondary schools in Hong Kong voluntarily responded to a questionnaire that measured these three sets of variables. The study's findings indicated that students' intrinsic motivation was most strongly related to their reading amount. Students' perceptions of the reading instruction they received in their Chinese language class were significantly related to their reading motivation, but were only indirectly related to their reading amount, being mediated through reading motivation. Consistent with previous studies, significant grade differences were found in all types of reading motivation, students' perceptions of reading instruction and students' reading amount. The findings indicated that junior secondary students had better self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and social motivation than senior secondary students. The largest grade difference was in students' self-efficacy. Junior secondary students also perceived the reading instruction in their Chinese language class as more mastery-oriented and read more frequently than senior secondary students. The implications of these findings for understanding Chinese students' reading motivation and for planning effective reading instruction to enhance their motivation are discussed. [source]


A mixed-methods study of interprofessional learning of resuscitation skills

MEDICAL EDUCATION, Issue 9 2009
Paul Bradley
Objectives, This study aimed to identify the effects of interprofessional resuscitation skills teaching on medical and nursing students' attitudes, leadership, team-working and performance skills. Methods, Year 2 medical and nursing students learned resuscitation skills in uniprofessional or interprofessional settings, prior to undergoing observational ratings of video-recorded leadership, teamwork and skills performance and subsequent focus group interviews. The Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) was administered pre- and post-intervention and again 3,4 months later. Results, There was no significant difference between interprofessional and uniprofessional teams for leadership, team dynamics or resuscitation tasks performance. Gender, previous interprofessional learning experience, professional background and previous leadership experience had no significant effect. Interview analysis showed broad support for interprofessional education (IPE) matched to clinical reality with perceived benefits for teamwork, communication and improved understanding of roles and perspectives. Concerns included inappropriate role adoption, hierarchy issues, professional identity and the timing of IPE episodes. The RIPLS subscales for professional identity and team-working increased significantly post-intervention for interprofessional groups but returned to pre-test levels by 3,4 months. However, interviews showed interprofessional groups retained a ,residual positivity' towards IPE, more so than uniprofessional groups. Conclusions, An intervention based on common, relevant, shared learning outcomes set in a realistic educational context can work with students who have differing levels of previous IPE and skills training experience. Qualitatively, positive attitudes outlast quantitative changes measured using the RIPLS. Further quantitative and qualitative work is required to examine other domains of learning, the timing of interventions and impact on attitudes towards IPE. [source]


Evaluation of Continuing Professional Education: Toward a Theory of Our Own

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR ADULT & CONTINUING EDUCATION, Issue 86 2000
Judith M. Ottoson
Program evaluation theory seeks to make the evaluation of continuing professional education a transparent process. This chapter introduces the Situated Evaluation Framework, which situates the learner and knowledge assessment at the junction of the educational context, the practice context, and the evaluation context. [source]


The experiences of disabled pupils and their families

BRITISH JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION, Issue 4 2007
Ann Lewis
In this article, Ann Lewis, Professor of Education at the University of Birmingham, and Ian Davison, Jean Ellins, Louise Niblett, Sarah Parsons, Christopher Robertson and Jeremy Sharpe from the research team provide a summary of discussions and selected recommendations arising from four linked projects run between 2004 and 2006. The projects were funded by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and looked into the experiences of disabled pupils and their families across England, Scotland and Wales. A central aim of the research was to identify the key concerns and priorities in relation to their experiences of education for children and young people with special educational needs (SEN) or disabilities and their families in the UK. The research encompassed a UK-wide parent survey (N=1776); in-depth case studies of individual children and young people (N=36); group case studies (of, for example, school councils) (N=3); and a series of project advisory groups involving disabled people. Underlying these aspects was an emphasis on the importance and validity of hearing directly from (potentially all) children and young people themselves. Thus the work meshes closely with initiatives worldwide concerning the recognition of children's,voice'in matters that concern them. The authors are not aware of any comparable evidence which focuses in-depth on a wide cross-section of pupils with disabilities or special needs and their families in the UK-wide educational context and which is located alongside concurrent authoritative data concerning the views of parents and carers. [source]


Education and the Dangerous Memories of Historical Trauma: Narratives of Pain, Narratives of Hope

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 2 2008
MICHALINOS ZEMBYLAS
ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to explore the meanings and implications of dangerous memories in two different sites of past traumatic memories: one in Israel and the other in Cyprus. Dangerous memories are defined as those memories that are disruptive to the status quo, that is, the hegemonic culture of strengthening and perpetuating existing group-based identities. Our effort is to outline some insights from this endeavor,insights that may help educators recognize the potential of dangerous memories to ease pain and offer hope. First, a discussion on memory, history and identity sets the ground for discussing the meaning and significance of dangerous memories in the history curriculum. Next, we narrate two stories from our longitudinal ethnographic studies on trauma and memory in Israel and Cyprus; these stories are interpreted through the lens of dangerous memories and their workings in relation to the hegemonic powers that aim to sustain collective memories. The two different stories suggest that collective memories of historical trauma are not simply "transmitted" in any simple way down the generations,although there are powerful workings that support this transmission. Rather, there seems to be much ambivalence in the workings of memories that under some circumstances may create openings for new identities. The final section discusses the possibilities of developing a pedagogy of dangerous memories by highlighting educational implications that focus on the notion of creating new solidarities without forgetting past traumas. This last section employs dangerous memories as a critical category for pedagogy in the context of our general concern about the implications of memory, history and identity in educational contexts. [source]


The Role of Interest in Fostering Sixth Grade Students' Identities As Competent Learners

CURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 1 2000
Jean C. Mcphail
The combined works of John Dewey and Jerome Bruner provide a framework spanning a century of educational thought which can inform curriculum decisions concerning students' educational development, especially for middle school students whose waning of motivation toward school has been well documented by researchers and has long concerned parents and teachers. This framework, combined with recent contributions of motivation and interest researchers, can create broad understandings of how to collaboratively construct effective educational contexts. As early as 1913, Dewey specifically looked at the pivotal role of students' genuine interests in Interest and Effort in Education. Our current research focus on how students' interest can inform curricular contexts marks the recent shift showing an increased use of interest in education research since 1990. In this article, we discuss our study of a team-taught double classroom of sixth grade students whose interests were determined through a series of brainstorming sessions, and individual and focus group interviews. Students' interests fell into six categories centering around subject areas such as Drama, Science, and Animal Studies. Learning contexts were constructed around four of these subject areas. Students participated in their first or second choice of subject area group. We found significantly higher scores on measures of Affect and Activation if students participated in their first choice group. We found intra-group unities of preferred and dispreferred ways of learning which distinguished each group from the class as a whole. Finally, our findings indicated that students reliably described their genuine interests over time. Students' interests were found to be effective tools for informing curriculum decisions in the creation of sixth grade learning contexts. [source]


Using Multimedia to Introduce Young People to Public Art in Glasgow

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART & DESIGN EDUCATION, Issue 3 2000
Glen Coutts
This paper is based on a presentation at the NSEAD/AAIAD Millennium Conference in Bristol, April 2000 and takes as its focus a recent multimedia publication, a CD-ROM, commissioned by Glasgow 1999, entitled ,Scanning the City'. The commission was to find effective ways that students in schools could interrogate the diverse urban fabric of Glasgow. The electronic revolution has shifted the paradigms of teaching and learning by creating the opportunity to engage interactively with visual and textual data in ways that permit investigation of the built environments at a number of levels of intensity. The paper explains the background to the CD-ROM, describes the design, content and theoretical underpinning of ,Scanning the City' and discusses ways it might be used in a variety of educational contexts. It concludes by looking forward to the next stages of the research including a study of how young people and teachers are using the CD-ROM and other related multimedia publications. [source]


Using Media to Teach About Language

LINGUISTICS & LANGUAGE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 9 2010
Jeffrey Reaser
The number of documentaries being made about language has recently increased. Many of these have tremendous value in informal educational settings, but using them in classroom contexts in the United States often proves somewhat tricky. There are concerns about curricular fit, educational goals, potentially incendiary portrayals of topics, etc. High-stakes testing further reduces the likelihood that language-related documentaries will be used in schools, especially among populations who may benefit most from exposure to sociolinguistic perspectives. This article offers an evaluation of the usefulness of recent and older media in teaching about language in formal educational contexts. From this review emerges an incipient roadmap for adapting media so that it will be attractive to teachers and improve the likelihood that teachers will be successful incorporating said media in their classrooms. [source]


Reexamining the Promise of Parent Participation in Special Education: An Analysis of Cultural and Social Capital

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2010
Audrey A. TrainorArticle first published online: 15 SEP 2010
Highly regulated parent participation in special education requires both parents and teachers to use cultural and social capital relative to education legislation, disability, and parenting. Examined through a Bourdieuian analytical lens, data from focus groups and individual interviews with families provide examples of the salience of disability in the acquisition and use of cultural and social capital in educational contexts, serving to both reify dominance and support individual agency.,[special education, Bourdieu, cultural capital, disability] [source]


Advancing anthropology in schools: The accreditation of the Anthropology A-level (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 2 2010
Brian V. Street
The development of an Anthropology A Level represents a major forward movement for the discipline in this country. Now that the RAI has at last succeeded in having the course accredited for teaching in schools, from this September, it is timely to try to put this achievement into a longer historical context. I here briefly review the discipline's attempts over four decades to address the role of Anthropology in educational contexts outside of the university. This process can be seen both as part of a wider public engagement (cf Eriksen, 2006) and as evidence that colleagues in this country have indeed been concerned for a long time with both anthropology in and of education (cf see Green and Bloome 1997). [source]


Drawing facilitates children's reports of factual and narrative information: implications for educational contexts

APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 7 2009
Julien Gross
In the present study, we examined the effect of drawing on children's reports of an educational event. Five- and 6-year-old children visited a local museum and were interviewed either 1,2 days or 7 months later. After each delay, half of the children were asked to tell about what they had learned during their visit to the museum and the other half were given the opportunity to draw while telling. All children were also given a standard comprehension test, covering material that the museum staff considered to be most relevant to the visit. When tested after a short delay, children who drew while talking reported more factual and more narrative information than children who did not draw. When tested after a long delay, drawing only enhanced children's reports of narrative information. After both delays, children's verbal descriptions of the event exceeded their scores on the comprehension test. These data have important practical implications for the educational value of museum visits and suggest a new method of assessing children's learning in educational contexts. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


A series of molecular dynamics and homology modeling computer labs for an undergraduate molecular modeling course

BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATION, Issue 4 2010
Donald E. Elmore
Abstract As computational modeling plays an increasingly central role in biochemical research, it is important to provide students with exposure to common modeling methods in their undergraduate curriculum. This article describes a series of computer labs designed to introduce undergraduate students to energy minimization, molecular dynamics simulations, and homology modeling. These labs were created as part of a one-semester course on the molecular modeling of biochemical systems. Students who completed these activities felt that they were an effective component of the course, reporting improved comfort with the conceptual background and practical implementation of the computational methods. Although created as a component of a larger course, these activities could be readily adapted for a variety of other educational contexts. As well, all of these labs utilize software that is freely available in an academic environment and can be run on fairly common computer hardware, making them accessible to teaching environments without extensive computational resources. [source]


Quality in virtual education environments

BRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, Issue 1 2004
Elena Barbera
The emergence of the Internet has changed the way we teach and learn. This paper provides a general overview of the state of the quality of virtual education environments. First of all, some problems with the quality criteria applied in this field and the need to develop quality seals are presented. Likewise, the dimensions and subdimensions of an empirical instrument to improve and assess the quality of online education are examined. This tool has already been applied to several educational contexts; though not definitive, it aims to improve not only specific areas, but also the whole educational approach as a system. [source]