Evaluation of a curriculum to support literacy growth in young children

This study of growth in literacy was conducted over a 5-month period in a preschool classroom in which half of the enrollees were Head Start children and the other half were tuition students. The literacy events of six children from this classroom were videotaped daily. Videotape data were supplemented by other data sources, including weekly collaborative meetings between the teacher and the researcher. Children were administered three literacy tasks at the beginning and end of the study to supplement observational data. Analysis of the data indicated that all six grew in their interest in and knowledge of written language. Implications for curriculum materials and experiences to support literacy growth were generated.     

The re-theorisation of collective pedagogy and emergent curriculum

This essay review of Goulart and Roth’s work explores the cultural-historical concepts that they have drawn upon to create a new conception of emergent curriculum in early childhood science education. The pedagogical contexts of Brazilian preschools is discussed in relation to other practices found across cultural communities, with a view to locating the specific research need that has arisen for preschools within Brazil. In the latter part of this article, Davydov’s (International perspectives in non-classical psychology, 2008) work on theoretical knowledge and dialectical thinking is discussed in order to further develop Goulart and Roth’s conception of early childhood science curriculum.     

在幼儿活动设计中如何创编幼儿游戏课件

本文是把信息技术与学前教育相结合,在研究儿童发展及认知特点的基础上,结合幼儿实际,教学的现状提出了创编幼儿游戏课件的方法,旨在简化和完善幼儿教师的授课过程及组织难度,从多个维度,帮助教师和家长解决教育活动设计中的一些困惑,帮助儿童提高学习能力和动手能力,全方面提高儿童的素质。在研究过程中设计并制作了游戏型课件,并提出了制作的主体思想及实现过程。     

Teacher learning in collaborative curriculum design

The Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) was used to identify processes of teacher learning during the collaborative design of curriculum materials in the context of curriculum innovation. Nine published studies from six different countries about teachers’ collaborative curriculum design were analyzed to identify the learning processes that collaborative curriculum design fosters. It was concluded that the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth, although initially developed to recognize learning processes in individual teachers, can also be used to identify learning processes that are fostered by collaborative curriculum design in teams of teachers.     

Engaging young students in scientific investigations: prompting for meaningful reflection

This study examined the verbal prompts a tutor used to promote reflection and young students’ responses to these prompts. Seven children (ages 8–12) participated in 260 min of one-on-one tutoring to learn scientific concepts related to gear movement; the tutor spontaneously provided these students with 763 prompts for reflection. Prompts reliably induced reflection: Students responded verbally 87% of the time. Turn-by-turn discourse analysis revealed seven distinct types of prompts and 11 distinct types of verbal responses. High-level prompts were strongly associated with high-level responses. A log-multiplicative association model with two dimensions (temporality and certainty) represented the relationships between prompt and response types; from this model, odds ratios estimated the strength of association between specific pairs of prompt and response types. Findings are discussed in terms of the effects that reflection may have on students’ developing understanding of scientific concepts.     

Teaching in a play-based curriculum: Theory,practice and evidence of developmental education for young children

This article focuses on the possibilities of teaching in a play-based curriculum, which has become an issue of international relevance. As a domain of study, the Developmental Education approach was taken in the early grades of Dutch primary schools (grades 1–4, ages 4–8). The article describes the theoretical basis of the approach and how it is elaborated in a play-based curriculum for early years classrooms. Particularly the teachers’ strategies for the promotion of development will be discussed in more detail. Finally, the article presents a piece of the evidence base of this approach by reporting a research on vocabulary acquisition. Despite methodological limitations of the empirical study, the evidence suggests that teaching in a play-based curriculum is not only theoretically plausible and practically feasible, but also seems to be effectively useful for the attainment of positive outcomes (on vocabulary learning) as compared to a strictly teacher-driven approach.     

设计基础课程的教学研究

本课题以设计基础教学创新作为理论基础,通过对我国高等艺术院校设计基础教学观念、教学内容、教学方法、教学评定等方面进行了较为全面的解析,发现设计基础课程中所存在问题,针对这些问题进行了较为深入的剖析,并从创新教育的角度,分析设计中的创意教学核心思想,进一步针对高等院校设计教学特点,提出了行之有效的教学措施与手段推进设计基础教学的发展与转型。     

Making as worlding: young children composing change through speculative design

A pedagogical perspective for rendering ways of knowing, being and being known, making and the larger maker movement are shaping contemporary educational places, practices and discourses. Despite these advances, its intersection with early literacy and childhood education are nascent. Thinking with theories of multiliteracies and speculative design, this article puts forth a making as worlding analytic frame for literacy research and practice. In doing so, we examine how two young children operate as speculative designers working towards possible, not solely plausible or preferable futures. Drawing on data from a multi‐sited study exploring making in early childhood settings, this article charts how early years and primary students used the contemporary affordances of analogue and immersive technologies to ‘make' a difference. Findings suggest that making provided opportunities not only for re‐storying realities but speculative worldbuilding encouraging young people to participate and problematise present realities.     

Qualitative variation in constructive alignment in curriculum design

Constructive alignment has emerged as a powerful curriculum design idea, but little is known of the extent to which the effectiveness of this idea is a function of qualitative variation. This article introduces a model of qualitative variation in constructive alignment, and uses the results from known alignment studies to test the model. The research reviewed reveals that university teachers have at least two qualitatively different experiences of the core elements of constructive alignment. The teachers who describe their approaches to teaching as involving conceptual change/development intentions with student-focused strategies were found to be likely to see the intended learning outcomes for students in more holistic terms, and assessment as an integral part of that teaching approach. When teachers had more of an intention to transfer information using teacher-focused strategies, they saw the object of study more in terms of parts (concepts, definitions, formulae) with assessment focused on those parts. The implications of this qualitative variation in constructive alignment for curriculum design and for the quality of the outcomes of student learning is discussed.     

ADAMS在机械设计综合实践课程设计中的应用

将虚拟样机技术引入机械设计综合实践课程设计中,以插床机械系统为例,利用ADAMS软件建立导杆机构的参数化模型,并对模型进行运动、动力学仿真及优化设计;用ADAMS软件进行课程设计精确、快捷、方便、直观,课程设计达到了满意的效果。     

Individual and collective agencies in China's curriculum reform: A case of physics teachers

This study explores how physics teachers in a high school negotiate the relationships between individual and collective agencies in the context of the on-going curriculum reform in China. Drawing on Bandura's social cognitive theory, the study employs ethnographical methods including observation, interviewing, and the researcher's and teachers’ reflective journaling through the researcher's involvement with various school activities. The findings indicate that collective teacher agency creates a platform for individual teachers’ professional development, a conducive culture for teacher collaboration, and provides concrete examples that individual teachers can constantly refer to, reflect upon, and learn from for reform implementation. The results offer an understanding of the influences underlying physics teachers’ agency deployment as they engage with curriculum reform processes, especially the negotiation between individual and collective agencies. The findings justify a case for preparing physics teachers on how to deploy both individual and collective agencies in the face of the complicated social structures and ultimately shed light on the desired curriculum decentralization in the Chinese school system.     

Sexuality education as a collective responsibility: a new health education curriculum in Cyprus

The development of health promotion is typically viewed as a reaction against both the excessive responsibility placed on individuals concerning their health-related choices and the absence of recognition of environmental factors associated with personal decision making. What though does sexuality education mean from the perspective of health promotion? According to one approach, it implies the existence of a curriculum that recognises the environmental factors affecting sexuality and sexual behaviour. It also suggests a curriculum that aims to empower students to engage with risky sexual behaviour, not just as a personal issue but also as a social matter. The emphasis is placed not merely on developing personal knowledge and skills associated with sexuality and sexual behaviour but on enabling active citizens to protect themselves and their co-citizens from sexual risks and to promote healthy sexuality. This paper discusses such a health promotion perspective in relation to the sexuality education curriculum as recently developed in Cyprus. It demonstrates how a health promotion perspective in relation to sex education can be translated into the establishment of learning objectives, appropriate pedagogic methods and the development of school materials.     

Science teachers' beliefs about curriculum design

Teacher beliefs about curriculum design affect the quality of science education in schools, but science researchers know little about the interrelation of beliefs about alternative curriculum designs. This article describes a quantitative study of secondary science teachers' beliefs about curriculum design. A 33-item Science Curriculum Orientation Inventory (SCOI) was developed to measure five distinct orientations to curriculum: academic, cognitive processes, societycentred, humanistic, and technological. Data were collected from 810 integrated science, chemistry, physics, and biology teachers in Hong Kong. A confirmatory factor analysis of teacher responses to the SCOI indicated that science teachers' beliefs about curriculum design had a hierarchical structure; the five distinct curriculum orientations were positively correlated, forming a second-order curriculum, meta-orientation. Physics teachers were less society-oriented than biology, integrated science and chemistry teachers, and integrated science teachers were more humanistic than physics teachers. Although science teachers' beliefs about any of the five alternative curriculum designs did not vary with their teaching experience, the difference between beliefs about the cognitive processes orientation and the humanistic orientation increased when teachers had gained more teaching experience. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

哈佛大学核心课程设计研究

哈佛大学核心课程是哈佛本科课程的组成部分之一,是一种通识教育课程,体现着哈佛大学一贯的教育宗旨和理想,在美国也极具典型意义。通过分析哈佛大学核心课程设计在课程目标、课程内容的选择和组织、课程实施和课程评价四方面的特征,总结其成功经验,以期为我国大学通识课程设计提供参考。     

Engaging students through new literacies: the good, bad and curriculum of visual essays

In this article, we share our experiences working with students to read and/or write visual essays, texts that rely more heavily on images with minimal print text. We explore how students consider elements of design as they create a visual essay, which entails new forms of semiotic processing of the combinations of the visual, audio, textual, gestural and spatial. In particular, we share a case study of how one adolescent engages with an alternative to the standard essay format when he is not restricted by the use of words alone, but is encouraged to tap into the affordances of digital media, expressing himself multimodally by using words, images and sound.     

Using educational software to support collective thinking and test hypotheses in the computer science curriculum

This study analyses the discourse among the teacher and the students, members of three (3) small groups, who learn in the environment of a stand-alone computer. Two educational environments are examined: the first one, a “virtual laboratory” (Virtual scale-DELYS) and the second one, a computer modeling environment (ModelsCreator). The ‘Virtual Scale’ environment provides users with curriculum focused feedback and in that sense it can be categorized as directive. The ModelsCreator environment provides users merely with a representation of their own conception of curriculum concepts, so it can be categorized as an open-ended environment. The goal of this research is to exemplify the way the two educational software environments support (a) the development of collective thinking in peer— and teacher-led discussion and (b) students’ autonomy. The software tools of the “Virtual scale” along with the resources provided for the problem solving created an educational framework of hypothesis testing. This framework did not limit the students’ contributions by directing them to give short answers. Moreover, it supported the students’ initiatives by providing tools, representations and procedures that offered educationally meaningful feedback. Based on the above results, we discuss a new educationally important structure of software mediation and describe the way the two software activities resourced collective thinking and students’ initiatives. Finally, for each type of software environment, we propose certain hypotheses for future research regarding the support of collaborative problem solving.