Understanding graphicacy : students’ making sense of graphics in mathematics assessment tasks

The ability to decode graphics is an increasingly important component of mathematics assessment and curricula. This study examined 50, 9- to 10-year-old students (23 male, 27 female), as they solved items from six distinct graphical languages (e.g., maps) that are commonly used to convey mathematical information. The results of the study revealed: 1) factors which contribute to success or hinder performance on tasks with various graphical representations; and 2) how the literacy and graphical demands of tasks influence the mathematical sense making of students. The outcomes of this study highlight the changing nature of assessment in school mathematics and identify the function and influence of graphics in the design of assessment tasks.

Exploring key sustainable development themes through learning activities

The Masters programme in Engineering for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University explores a number of key themes, including dealing with: complexity, uncertainty, change, other disciplines, people, environmental limits, whole life costs, and trade-offs. This paper examines how these concepts are introduced and analyses the range of exercises and assignments which are designed to encourage students to test their own assumptions and abilities to develop competencies in these areas. Student performance against these tasks is discussed and student feedback is also presented, with a focus on how their awareness of the themes are met through a range of activities.

Exploring key sustainable development themes through learning activities

Purpose: The paper examines how a number of key themes are introduced in the Masters programme in Engineering for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University through student centred activities. These themes include dealing with complexity, uncertainty, change, other disciplines, people, environmental limits, whole life costs, and trade-offs. Design/methodology/approach: The range of exercises and assignments designed to encourage students to test their own assumptions and abilities to develop competencies in these areas are analysed by mapping the key themes onto the formal activities which all students undertake throughout the core MPhil programme. The paper reviews the range of these activities that are designed to help support the formal delivery of the taught programme. These include residential field courses, role plays, change challenges, games, systems thinking, multi criteria decision making, awareness of literature from other disciplines and consultancy projects. An axial coding approach to the analysis of routine feedback questionnaires drawn from recent years has been used to identify how student’s own awareness develops. Also results of two surveys are presented which tests the students’ perceptions about whether or not the course is providing learning environments to develop awareness and skills in these areas. Findings: Students generally perform well against these tasks with a significant feature being the mutual support they give to each other in their learning. The paper concludes that for students from an engineering background it is an holistic approach to delivering a new way of thinking through a combination of lectures, class activities, assignments, interactions between class members, and access to material elsewhere in the University that enables participants to develop their skills in each of the key themes. Originality /value: The paper provides a reflection on different pedagogical approaches to exploring key sustainable themes and reports students own perceptions of the value of these kinds of activities. Experiences are shared of running a range of diverse learning activities within a professional practice Masters programme.

The antecedents to participation in learning activities among support staff at a college in Ontario

Les tendances de la participation à la formation des adultes au Canada n’ont pas évolué depuis des décennies, malgré les nouvelles influences économiques qui ont stimulé l’augmentation et la diversification permanente de la formation des employés et malgré les initiatives plus nombreuses en faveur de l’apprentissage des employés en milieu de travail. Il est donc nécessaire de ne plus se contenter d’étudier les prédicteurs de la formation déjà connus dans les profils des employés et des employeurs. Il est, en revanche, indispensable d’étudier les antécédents de la participation des employés à la formation, y compris les aspects et les étapes du processus qui la précède. Cette étude porte sur les antécédents de la participation des employés aux formations dans un important collège communautaire urbain en Ontario. Afin de préparer le recueil des données, un cadre théorique a été élaboré à partir du concept d’expression de la demande. Ce cadre implique l’existence d’un processus qui comporte plusieurs étapes, au cours desquelles plusieurs intervenants interagissent et dont la formation est susceptible d’être le résultat. Les résultats de l’enquête sur le profil d’apprentissage ont permis de conclure que le comportement des employés et de l’employeur est conforme aux modèles de prédicteurs existants et que les taux et les types de participation étaient similaires aux tendances nationales et internationales. L’analyse des entrevues d’un groupe d’employés atypiques, de leurs superviseurs, ainsi que de représentants du collège et du syndicat, a révélé d’importants thèmes clés : l’expression de la demande n’est pas structurée et elle est communiquée par plusieurs canaux, en excluant parfois les superviseurs. De plus, la place de l’auto évaluation est importante, ainsi que la phase de prise de décision. Ces thèmes ont souligné l’interaction de plusieurs intervenants dans le processus d’expression de la demande d’apprentissage et pendant la prise de décision. L’examen des attentes de chacun de ces intervenants au cours de ce processus nous a permis de découvrir un désir tacite chez les superviseurs et les employés, à savoir que la conversation soit à l’initiative de « l’autre ». Ces thèmes clés ont été ensuite abordés dans une discussion qui a révélé une discordance entre le profil de l’employeur et les profils des employés. Celle-ci se prête à la correction par l’employeur de son profil institutionnel pour l’harmoniser avec le profil dispositionnel des employés et optimiser ainsi vraisemblablement son offre de formation. Ils doivent, pour cela, appliquer un processus plus systématique et plus structuré, doté de meilleurs outils. La discussion a porté finalement sur les effets des motivations économiques sur la participation des employés et a permis de conclure que, bien que les employés ne semblent pas se méfier de l’offre de formation de l’employeur et que celle ci ne semble pas non plus les décourager, des questions de pouvoir sont bel et bien en jeu. Elles se sont principalement manifestées pendant le processus de prise de décision et, à cet égard, les superviseurs comme les employés reconnaissent qu’un processus plus structuré serait bénéfique, puisqu’il atténuerait les problèmes d’asymétrie et d’ambiguïté. Les constatations de cette étude sont pertinentes pour le secteur de la formation des adultes et de la formation en milieu de travail et, plus particulièrement, pour la méthodologie de recherche. Nous avons constaté l’avantage d’une méthodologie à deux volets, à l’écoute de l’employeur et des employés, afin de mieux comprendre la relation entre l’offre de formation et la participation à la formation. La définition des antécédents de la participation sous la forme d’un processus dans lequel plusieurs intervenants remplissent plusieurs rôles a permis de créer un modèle plus détaillé qui servira à la recherche future. Ce dernier a démontré qu’il est indispensable de reconnaître que la prise de décision constitue une étape à part entière, située entre l’expression de la demande et la participation à la formation. Ces constatations ont également révélé qu’il est véritablement indispensable que le secteur de la formation des adultes continue à traiter les questions reliées à la reconnaissance de la formation informelle. Ces conclusions et la discussion sur les constatations clés nous ont inspiré des recommandations à appliquer pour modifier les retombées du processus précédant la participation des employés à la formation. La majorité de ces recommandations ont trait à l’infrastructure de ce processus et ciblent donc principalement l’employeur. Certaines recommandations sont cependant destinées aux syndicats, aux superviseurs et aux employés qui peuvent aider l’employeur à remplir son rôle et favoriser la participation efficace de tous à ce processus. Les recommandations qui précédent impliquent que ce sont les antécédents de la formation qui gagneraient à être plus structurés et non la formation elle même. La structuration de l’infrastructure de l’apprentissage présente cependant des risques à elle seule. En liaison avec ce phénomène, une étude spécifique des effets de la nature, de la qualité et de l’asymétrie de la relation superviseur employé sur la participation des employés à la formation serait bénéfique. Mots clés : formation en entreprise, formation professionnelle continue, antécédents à la participation, employés de soutien

Project-oriented design-based learning: aligning students’ views with industry needs

This paper focuses on the alignment of students' views on project-oriented design-based learning (PODBL) with today's industrial needs. A Collaborative relationship between academic institutions and industrial expectations is a significant process towards analytical thinking (linking the theory and practice). Improving students' knowledge as well as the students' transition into industry, requires efficient joint ventures by both learning institutions and industry partners. Project-based learning (PBL) is well developed and implemented in most engineering schools and departments around the world. What requires closer attention is the focus on design within this project-based learning framework. Today design projects have been used to motivate and teach science in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. They are also used to assist students with possible science and engineering careers. For these reasons, design-based learning (DBL) is intended to be an effective approach to learning that is centered on a design problem-solving structure adopted for a problem-oriented project-based education. Based on an industry design forum, which the authors conducted in Melbourne, Australia in 2012, a research study was performed to investigate the industry and academic requirements for students focusing on achieving design skills. To transform the present situation in the academic teaching and learning environment and to fulfill industry needs, this research study also investigated the students' views on design skills.

Towards a framework for aligning learning outcomes, academic literacies and assessment criteria

Although Australian students spend three or more years studying they can seem quite unaware of any of the expected learning outcomes of their course. They are often single unit focused, paying most attention to individual assessment items thus not developing a holistic view of their course. This paper presents a theoretical framework to support staff and students to recognise, scaffold and achieve learning outcomes and academic skills at unit level and to recognise how these contribute to course and graduate learning outcomes, within the boundaries of Australian university and professional accreditation requirements. A case study is described that demonstrates the manual implementation of the framework. The complex nature of the implementation suggests that a software solution is required to ease the process and ensure the resulting mapping will have some longevity by being maintainable.

TQM in e-Learning: a Self-assessment Model and Questionnaire

Organizations are seeking new, integrated systems that enable rapid changes through early identification of opportunities and problems, tracking of progress against plans, flexible allocation of resources to achieve goals, and consistent operations. Total Quality Management (TQM) is an overall business strategy. It means that all activities of the company will be focused on satisfying all stakeholders of the company. TQM can be realised by using the EFQM model. The EFQM model is a tool that organizations may use as a framework for self-evaluation that enables an organization to identify its strengths and areas for improvement and the extent to which its operations and results are in line with the characteristics of an excellent organization. We focus on a training organisation or to the learning department of an organization. So we are limiting the EFQM model to the training /learning activities. We can apply EFQM perfect on the level of an activity (business line) of a company. We selected the main criteria for which the learner can play the role of assessor. So only three main criteria left: the enabling resources, the enabling processes and the (learning) results for the learner. We limited the last one to “learning results” based on the Kirkpatrick model.

Learning multi-faceted activities from heterogeneous data with the product space hierarchical Dirichlet processes

Hierarchical Dirichlet processes (HDP) was originally designed and experimented for a single data channel. In this paper we enhanced its ability to model heterogeneous data using a richer structure for the base measure being a product-space. The enhanced model, called Product Space HDP (PS-HDP), can (1) simultaneously model heterogeneous data from multiple sources in a Bayesian nonparametric framework and (2) discover multilevel latent structures from data to result in different types of topics/latent structures that can be explained jointly. We experimented with the MDC dataset, a large and real-world data collected from mobile phones. Our goal was to discover identity–location– time (a.k.a who-where-when) patterns at different levels (globally for all groups and locally for each group). We provided analysis on the activities and patterns learned from our model, visualized, compared and contrasted with the ground-truth to demonstrate the merit of the proposed framework. We further quantitatively evaluated and reported its performance using standard metrics including F1-score, NMI, RI, and purity. We also compared the performance of the PS-HDP model with those of popular existing clustering methods (including K-Means, NNMF, GMM, DP-Means, and AP). Lastly, we demonstrate the ability of the model in learning activities with missing data, a common problem encountered in pervasive and ubiquitous computing applications.

Aligning neuroscience findings with socio-cultural perspectives on learning in science

Unfortunately, despite claims that this work will greatly impact education, very little research makes it into teacher practice. Although the reasons for this are varied, a primary concern is the lack of a proper translation framework.

Modelling the process of learning in economics

Student learning research literature has shown that students' learning approaches are influenced by the learning context (Evans, Kirby, & Fabrigar, 2003). Of the many contextual factors, assessment has been found to have the most important influence on the way students go about learning. For example, assessment that is perceived to required a low level of cognitive abilities will more likely elicit a learning approach that concentrate on reproductive learning activities. Moreover, assessment demand will also interact with learning approach to determine academic performance. In this paper an assessment specific model of learning comprising presage, process and product variables (Biggs, 2001) was proposed and tested against data obtained from a sample of introductory economics students (n=434). The model developed was used to empirically investigate the influence of learning inputs and learning approaches on academic performances across assessment types (essay assignment, multiple choice question exam and exam essay). By including learning approaches in the learning model, the mechanism through which learning inputs determine academic performance was examined. Methodological limitations of the study will also be discussed.

Assessing and learning in internships: Reflecting on pedagogy and progress

An elective internship unit as part of a work integrated learning program in a business faculty is presented as a case study. In the unit, students complete a minimum of 120 hours work placement over the course of a 13 week semester. The students are majoring in advertising, marketing, or public relations and are placed in corporations, government agencies, and not for profit organisations. To support and scaffold the students’ learning in the work environment, a range of classroom and online learning activities are part of the unit. Classroom activities include an introductory workshop to prepare students for placement, an industry panel, and interview workshop. These are delivered as three workshops across the semester. Prior to commencing their placement, students complete a suite of online learning modules. The Work Placement Preparation Program assists students in securing obtaining a placement and make a successful transition to the work environment. It provides an opportunity for students to source possible work placement sites, prepare competitive applications, develop and rehearse interview skills, deal with workplace issues, and use a student ePortfolio to reflect on their skills and achievements. Students contribute to a reflective blog throughout their placement, with feedback from academic supervisors throughout the placement. The completion of the online learning modules and contribution to a reflective blog are assessed as part of the unit. Other assessment tools include a internship plan and learning contract between the student, industry supervisor, and academic supervisor; job application including responses to selection criteria; and presentation to peers, academics and industry representatives at a poster session. The paper discusses the development of the internship unit over three years, particularly learning activities and assessment. The reflection and refinement of the unit is informed by a pedagogical framework, and the development of processes to best manage placement for all stakeholders. A model of best practice is proposed, that can be adapted to a variety of discipline areas.

Teaching and learning mathematics with robotics in middle-years of schooling

Engaging and motivating students in mathematics lessons can be challenging. The traditional approach of chalk and talk can sometimes be problematic. The new generation of educational robotics has the potential to not only motivate students but also enable teachers to demonstrate concepts in mathematics by connecting concepts with the real world. Robotics hardware and the software are becoming increasing more user-friendly and as a consequence they can be blended in with classroom activities with greater ease. Using robotics in suitably designed activities promotes a constructivist learning environment and enables students to engage in higher order thinking through hands-on problem solving. Teamwork and collaborative learning are also enhanced through the use of this technology. This paper discusses a model for teaching concepts in mathematics in middle year classrooms. It will also highlight some of the benefits and challenges of using robotics in the learning environment.

A framework for determining the authenticity of assessment tasks : applied to an example in law

Authentic assessment tasks enhance engagement, retention and the aspirations of students. This paper explores the discipline-generic features of authentic assessment, which reflect what students need to achieve in the real world. Some assessment tasks are more authentic than others and this paper designs a proposed framework supported by the literature that aids unit co-ordinators to determine the level of authenticity of an assessment task. The framework is applied to three summative assessment tasks, that is, tutorial participation, advocacy exercise and problem-based exam, in a law unit. The level of authenticity of the assessment tasks is compared and opportunities to improve authenticity are identified.