Guiding intellectual and personal growth across educational contexts

This book recognizes the importance of cooperative learning, in contrast to the traditional classroom, as an effective approach to learning. Its coverage of the subject ranges across the educational spectrum, from pre-school years to university, and offers a fresh perspective on a topic that has gained increasing interest worldwide. With contributions from an international panel of leading experts in the field, this engaging text succeeds in providing key insights, linking the theories that underpin the study of group dynamics to their practical application in the classroom. It presents a comprehensive overview of this alternative educative approach, illustrating how cooperative learning experiences can promote socialisation and friendships, and facilitate learning. The editors assemble a range of well-researched essays, covering such aspects as: * The importance of teacher and student interaction * Small group, virtual and non-virtual teaching environments * Assessment practices for measuring the outcomes of individual and group progress * The effect of cooperative learning on relationships amongst students with diverse cultural, social and learning needs. Illustrated with practical examples throughout, this book will be a crucial read for teacher educators, educational psychologists, student teachers, academics and researchers who want to realize the significant potential of cooperative learning in all educational settings.

Specification and Evaluation of Safety Properties in a Component-Based Software Engineering Process

Over the past years, component-based software engineering has become an established paradigm in the area of complex software intensive systems. However, many techniques for analyzing these systems for critical properties currently do not make use of the component orientation. In particular, safety analysis of component-based systems is an open field of research. In this chapter we investigate the problems arising and define a set of requirements that apply when adapting the analysis of safety properties to a component-based software engineering process. Based on these requirements some important component-oriented safety evaluation approaches are examined and compared.