Disruptive silence: deepening experiential learning in the absence of technology

Technology plays an integral role in the lives of the majority of the US population. As technology becomes integrated into young people’s lives, questions arise regarding its effects on learning. This exploratory study draws on interviews with students who attend university in the United States to determine how separating students from technology deepens experiential learning. Participants were interviewed following a study abroad course to New Zealand, during which they were disconnected from technologies such as cell phones, the Internet and social media. In the interviews, students discussed their feelings of being disconnected and describe how disconnecting impacted their overall experience. Participants agreed that disconnecting from technology had positive effects on experiential learning and the global experience. Major themes that emerged include students’ enhanced immersion and engagement, the value of disconnection in providing opportunities for personal growth and the difficulty of initial separation from technology as a result of conditioning.     

Leadership identity in a small island developing state: the Jamaican context

While the role of leadership in improving schools is attracting more worldwide attention, there is a need for more research investigating leaders’ experiences in different national contexts. Using focus-group and semi-structured interview data, this paper explores the background, identities and experiences of a small group of Jamaican school leaders who were involved in a leadership development programme. By drawing on the concepts of culture, socialisation and identity, the paper examines how the participants’ journeys of becoming and being school leaders are influenced by national-level societal and cultural issues, experienced at a local level. The findings suggest that in becoming school leaders, the participants perceived that they had a strong sense of agency in attempting to change the social structures within the institutions they lead and in the surrounding local communities, which in turn, they hope, will have a lasting effect on the nation as a whole.     

The Role of Study Habits in Foreign Language Courses

The purpose of this study was to determine which study habits distinguish successful from unsuccessful foreign language learners. Participants were 219 college students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, enrolled in either Spanish, French, German or Japanese classes. A canonical discriminant analysis (F [6, 117], p < 0.0001; canonical R = 0.92) revealed that, compared to their high-performing counterparts, students with the lowest levels of foreign language performance tended to report that: (a) they frequently include a lot of irrelevant or unimportant information in their notes; (b) when they have difficulty with their assignments, they do not seek help from their instructor; (c) they put their lecture notes away after taking the test and never consult them again; (d) they have to be in the mood before attempting to study; (e) they have a tendency to doodle or to daydream when they are trying to study; and (f) they do not look up in a dictionary the meanings of words that they do not understand. Implications are discussed.     

Deepening the connections: Liberal education and global learning in college

Kevin Hovland and Carol Geary Schneider champion the importance of a twenty‐first‐century liberal education and provide examples of essential learning outcomes that make global and civic learning central and pervasive.     

How can an understanding of cognitive style enable trainee teachers to have a better understanding of differentiation in the classroom?

The relationship between cognitive style and trainee teacher conceptions of differentiation was studied to develop appropriate scaffolding of their learning. 149 trainee teachers enrolled on 1 year postgraduate initial teacher education (ITE) programmes at two UK universities completed the Cognitive Style Index (Allinson and Hayes, Journal of Management Studies, 33(1):119–135, 1996; Hodgkinson and Sadler-Smith, Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology, 76(2):243–268, 2003) and a questionnaire exploring their understanding of differentiation, conceptions of learning and learning preferences. A stratified sample of these trainees was also interviewed to assess their understanding and prior knowledge of differentiation and learning styles and how they would plan for these in the classroom. Responses were coded using content analysis procedures. Cognitive style was found to impact on trainees’ conceptions of differentiation; for example, trainees demonstrating higher levels of analysis and intuition had a more developed understanding of differentiation than other cognitive styles. In relation to the findings, the use of a constructivist pedagogical tool: a Personal Learning Styles Pedagogy (Evans and Waring, Zhang & Sternberg (Eds.), Perspectives on the nature of intellectual styles, 2009) is presented to inform the reconceptualisation of ITE programmes. In so doing, the use of this tool addresses key issues raised in recent international policy debates concerning the necessary development of ITE for twenty-first century learner needs.     

A Dual Identity Approach for Conceptualizing and Measuring Children's Gender Identity

The goal was to test a new dual identity perspective on gender identity by asking children (n = 467) in three grades (M_age = 5.7, 7.6, 9.5) to consider the relation of the self to both boys and girls. This change shifted the conceptualization of gender identity from one to two dimensions, provided insights into the meaning and measurement of gender identity, and allowed for revisiting ideas about the roles of gender identity in adjustment. Using a graphical measure to allow assessment of identity in young children and cluster analyses to determine types of identity, it was found that individual and developmental differences in how similar children feel to both genders, and these variations matter for many important personal and social outcomes.