Career interests of students in psychology specialties degrees: psychometric evidence and correlations with the RIASEC dimensions

In this study, we present the development of a vocational interest scale for university students studying psychology. Three dimensions were extracted through principal component analysis, namely, organizational, educational, and clinical psychology. A second study with confirmatory factor analysis replicated the same three factors obtained in the first study. We found significant positive correlations between clinical and educational psychology with the social dimension of Holland’s model. The enterprising dimension appeared to be significantly and positively correlated with the organizational psychology component. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

The Role of Models and Analogies in the Electromagnetic Theory: A Historical Case Study

Despite its great importance, many students and even their teachers still cannot recognize the relevance of models to build up physical knowledge and are unable to develop qualitative explanations for mathematical expressions that exist within physics. Thus, it is not a surprise that analogies play an important role in science education, since students’ construction of mental models of abstract phenomena need to be rooted in some existing or previous experience in order to interpret more complex ideas. The present article focuses on some of these issues by analyzing some specific instances of the historical development of the electromagnetic theory. Using the mental models framework, the importance of mechanical analogies to understand some of the electromagnetic concepts are emphasized.     

A Method to Increase Student Interaction Using Student Groups and Peer Review over the Internet

A method of peer review for student groups is proposed. In this method, groups of students publish their assignments results over the Internet. A fellow student group reviews their work and publishes their findings (on the Internet). Finally, the two groups debate their points of view in front of the class. The debate and healthy competition among groups give the students a chance to learn how to give and receive criticism in a constructive way. This should increase the students' ability to interact and work in groups, an important skill for computer science professionals.     

The effectiveness of a marketing virtual reality learning simulation: A quantitative survey with psychophysiological measures

Virtual reality (VR) technology has been shown to be a promising teaching method in STEM subjects. Extending these findings, the current study is the first to develop and examine the feasibility of using a VR simulation in marketing (ie, a non-STEM subject). Specifically, the levels of immersion and three learning outcomes (learning attitude, enjoyment and performance) were compared between the marketing students who learned the same content through a VR simulation prototype versus a traditional static video presentation. Learning enjoyment was measured using facial electromyography, which served as a more objective measures for the feeling of enjoyment. Compared to the video condition, the results showed that VR resulted in a higher experience of immersion, learning attitude and learning enjoyment. Furthermore, immersion was found to fully mediate the positive effects of the VR simulation on learning attitude, but not enjoyment. Surprisingly, students in the video condition performed better on the knowledge-based test than those in the VR condition. The current study suggests that the current prototype of the VR simulations should be used as supplementary resource to increase the learning attitude and enjoyment, but not as a main teaching material to enhance knowledge-based performance in the marketing discipline.     

Understanding teacher design practices for digital inquiry–based science learning: the case of Go-Lab

Designing and implementing online or digital learning material is a demanding task for teachers. This is even more the case when this material is used for more engaged forms of learning, such as inquiry learning. In this article, we give an informed account of Go-Lab, an ecosystem that supports teachers in creating Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs). These ILSs are built around STEM–related online laboratories. Within the Go-Lab ecosystem, teachers can combine these online laboratories with multimedia material and learning apps, which are small applications that support learners in their inquiry learning process. The Go-Lab ecosystem offers teachers ready–made structures, such as a standard inquiry cycle, alternative scenarios or complete ILSs that can be used as they are, but it also allows teachers to configure these structures to create personalized ILSs. For this article, we analyzed data on the design process and structure of 2414 ILSs that were (co)created by teachers and that our usage data suggest have been used in classrooms. Our data show that teachers prefer to start their design from empty templates instead of more domain–related elements, that the makeup of the design team (a single teacher, a group of collaborating teachers, or a mix of teachers and project members) influences key design process characteristics such as time spent designing the ILS and number of actions involved, that the characteristics of the resulting ILSs also depend on the type of design team and that ILSs that are openly shared (i.e., published in a public repository) have different characteristics than those that are kept private.

     

Distribution of School Knowledge and Social Reproduction in a Brazilian Urban Setting

The present study was designed to elucidate the ways in which the distribution of school knowledge contributes to processes of cultural and social reproduction. Three schools in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre were studied for this purpose: a private institution serving an upper class clientele; a public school serving children of the middle class; and a public school attended by working‐class children. Two classrooms at each of the three schools were intensively observed during one semester. Teachers and staff were interviewed concerning their pedagogical views.

Patterns of instruction and control observed at the three schools suggest that children from different social classes receive substantially different kinds of schooling. The most obvious distinction in ideological discourse observed among staff members at the three schools concerns the existence of an explicit pedagogy endorsed at the private school and the concomitant absence of any such similar rationale at the other two schools.

The final sections of the paper discuss the implications of these findings for processes of cultural and social reproduction and their relation to relevant literature.