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Full-Text Articles in Education
Using Guided Reflective Journaling Activities To Capture Students’ Changing Perceptions, Joanna Dunlap
Using Guided Reflective Journaling Activities To Capture Students’ Changing Perceptions, Joanna Dunlap
Joanna Dunlap
Many professions are increasingly emphasizing the role of reflection, encouraging educators to look for appropriate ways to help students engage in reflective practice during their professional preparation. Journal writing is an insightful and powerful instructional technology utilizing strategies that foster understanding and the application of concepts, enhance critical thinking, improve achievement and attitude, encourage student reflection and capture changes in students' perception. Examples from three different professional preparation courses illustrate the power of journal-writing activities as a way of encouraging students' reflective thinking, and giving faculty a way to assess students' reflective practice and perceptual changes. Based on the author's …
Workload Reduction In Online Courses: Getting Some Shuteye, Joanna Dunlap
Workload Reduction In Online Courses: Getting Some Shuteye, Joanna Dunlap
Joanna Dunlap
Instructors are a key component of any successful facilitated, asynchronous online course. They are tasked with providing the infrastructure for learning; modeling effective participation, collaboration, and learning strategies; monitoring and assessing learning and providing feedback, remediation, and grades; troubleshooting and resolving instructional, interpersonal, and technical problems; and creating a learning community in which learners feel safe and connected. Accomplishing these objectives is labor and time intensive, often requiring instructors to be constantly online. Besides being impractical, this can lead to questionable instructional quality and eventual instructor burnout. Fortunately, there are instructional strategies that can help achieve instructor presence without requiring …
From Pixel On A Screen To Real Person In Your Students' Lives: Establishing Social Presence Using Digital Storytelling, Patrick Lowenthal, Joanna Dunlap
From Pixel On A Screen To Real Person In Your Students' Lives: Establishing Social Presence Using Digital Storytelling, Patrick Lowenthal, Joanna Dunlap
Joanna Dunlap
The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework is a comprehensive guide to the research "and" practice of online learning. One of the most challenging aspects of establishing a CoI in online courses is finding the best way to attend to each element of the CoI framework in a primarily text-based environment. In our online courses, we have examined the use of digital storytelling as a way to break down the barriers that can get in the way of achieving a healthy and productive CoI. In this paper, we describe how we use digital storytelling to establish our social presence as instructors.
Co-Teaching An Online Action Research Class, Brent Wilson, Jennifer Vanberschot
Co-Teaching An Online Action Research Class, Brent Wilson, Jennifer Vanberschot
Brent Wilson
Two instructors report their experience co-teaching an online action research (AR) course required as part of an e-learning master’s degree. Adopting a practice-centered stance we focus on the course activities of participants (instructors and students), with particular attention to the careful crafting of course elements with the goal of achieving an excellent learning experience for students. The case narrative describes the course and ways in which we have modified the course based on a variety of considerations. We also outline problems and areas still in need of improvement. We reflect on the role of theory in our own pursuit of …
Constructivism And Instructional Design: Some Personal Reflections, Brent Wilson
Constructivism And Instructional Design: Some Personal Reflections, Brent Wilson
Brent Wilson
Some personal reflections on instructional design and its relation to constructivism are explored. Instructional design in its present form is out of sync with the times in that its orientation, methods, and research base are behavioristic, or positivistic. However, a constructivist theory of instructional design is possible, particularly if constructivism is recognized as a philosophy rather than a strategy. To better fit the needs of practitioners, instructional design theories need to be better grounded in a broad understanding of learning and instructional processes. Generic principles and specific heuristics are needed for dealing with recurring problems and situations in instructional design …
Riding The Mathematical Merry-Go-Round To Foster Conceptual Understanding Of Angle, Ron Tzur, Matthew Clark
Riding The Mathematical Merry-Go-Round To Foster Conceptual Understanding Of Angle, Ron Tzur, Matthew Clark
Ron Tzur
This article presents playful activities for fostering students' conceptual understanding of angle--a root concept in mathematics--that revolve around the Mathematical Merry-Go-Round game. The authors focus on activities for two reasons. On one hand, NCTM's Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000) stresses the central role of student activity in coming to understand mathematics. This emphasis is consistent with a constructivist stance (Piaget 1971) about learning as an active process. On the other hand, typical activities used for teaching angle, in which an introduction of the definition is followed by operations on angles, such as measuring, adding, comparing, and classifying, seem …
Fine Grain Assessment Of Students' Mathematical Understanding: Participatory And Anticipatory Stages In Learning A New Mathematical Conception, Ron Tzur
Ron Tzur
This study addressed a twofold problem--the soundness of a theoretical stage-distinction regarding the process of constructing a new (to the learner) mathematical conception and how such distinction contributes to fine grain assessment of students' mathematical understandings. As a context for the study served the difficult-to-grasp concept of "inverse" order relationship among unit fractions, that is, the larger the number of parts the smaller the size of each part (e.g., 1/7 greater than 1/10 although 10 greater than 7). I conducted this study as a whole-class teaching experiment in a third grade classroom at a public school in Israel. The qualitative …
From Theory To Practice: Explaining Successful And Unsuccessful Teaching Activities (Case Of Fractions), Ron Tzur
Ron Tzur
In a teaching experiment, I examined a theoretical model of mathematics teaching and learning in practice. In this paper I focus on how the model can guide the teacher's thinking about students' understandings and the generation of activities that foster intended transformations in those understandings. As a research-teacher I taught, twice a week for four months, basic ideas of fractions to 28 third graders, in a public school in Israel. The analysis of both classroom data and researcher's documented reflections indicates how the model can empower the generation and explanation of successful teaching activities, as well as thinking about and …