Education Commons^™

Enhancing Classroom Instruction With Online News, Michael D. Ekstrand, Katherine Landau Wright, Maria Soledad Pera

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Purpose

Investigate how school teachers look for informational texts for their classrooms. Access to current, varied, and authentic informational texts improves learning outcomes for K-12 students, but many teachers lack resources to expand and update readings. The Web offers freely-available resources, but finding suitable ones is time-consuming. This research lays the groundwork for building tools to ease that burden.

Methodology

This paper reports qualitative findings from a study in two stages: (1) a set of semi-structured interviews, based on the Critical Incident Technique, eliciting teachers’ information-seeking practices and challenges; and (2) observations of teachers using a prototype teaching-oriented news search …

Conceptual Change By Fiat?, Dewey I. Dykstra

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

What Murphy and Gash are attempting to do is to solve a significant problem some students have being successful in school, one that is not often addressed in any significant way. The language used to describe the lessons has some significant departures from radical constructivism. It is, no doubt, beneficial that the students in the study may have developed improvements in self-image, but, as seen in other work, the application of radical constructivism to develop and extend the work started in the study could result in more and more lasting improvements.