Commonplace book of Benjamin Penhallow, 1721-1724

This leather-bound volume contains excerpts copied by Benjamin Penhallow from books he read while he was a student at Harvard in the 1720s. The volume contains extracts from two texts: Johanis Henrici Alstedii's (John Henry Alsted / Johann Heinrich Alsted) Geometria Domini, and the anonymous text "The Legacy of a dying Father; bequeath'd to his Beloved Children, or Sundry Directions in Order unto a well Regulated Conversation," from 1724 (originally published in 1693-4). The last page of text in the volume contains the hymn "The Sacred Content of Praise" first published in 1734, and added after Penhallow's death.

Treatise on mathematics and astronomy: written about the year 1680, in Boston

Bound volume containing a late 17th century handwritten mathematical and astronomical text in one hand. The text is separated into mathematical and astronomical sections with rules, instructions for performing calculations, tables, and drawings. The subjects include arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and trigonometry, and segments have titles such as "Subtraction," "A decimal table of English coince," "Logarithes & their use," and "To find the true place of the sun." The text is undated and unattributed but references Briggs, Oughtred, Ramus, and Apollonius. Certain tables are calculated from latitudinal and longitudinal numbers associated with Boston, and many of the examples use dates in the 1670s and 1680. The manuscript pages are mounted onto unruled pages, and some of the manuscript pages are fragments.

Good practice guide in learning and teaching

Once again this publication is produced to celebrate and promote good teaching and learning support and to offer encouragement to those imaginative and innovative staff who continue to wish to challenge students to learn to maximum effect. It is hoped that others will pick up some good ideas from the articles contained in this volume. We have again changed our approach for this 2007/08 edition (our fifth) of the Aston Business School Good Practice Guide. As before, some contributions were selected from those identifying interesting best practice on their Annual Module Reflection Forms in 2006/2007. Brookes? contribution this year is directly from her annual reflection. Other contributors received HELM (Research Centre in Higher Education Learning and Management) small research grants in 2006/2007. Part of the conditions were for them to write an article for this publication. We have also been less tight on the length of the articles this year. Some contributions are, therefore, on the way to being journal articles. HELM will be working with these authors to help develop these for publication. Looking back over the last five years it is brilliant to see how many different people have contributed over the years and, therefore, how much innovative learning and teaching work has been taking place in ABS over this time. In the first edition we were just pleased for people to write a few pages on their teaching. Now things have changed dramatically. The majority of the articles are grounded in empirical research (some funded by HELM small research grants) and Palmer?s article was produced as part of the University?s Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching. Most encouraging of all, four of this year?s articles have since been developed further and submitted to refereed journals. We await news of publication as we go to press. It is not surprising that how to manage large groups still remains a central theme of the articles, ABS has a large and still growing student body. Essex and Simpson have looked at trying to encourage students to attend taught sessions, on the basis that there is a strong correlation between attendance and higher performance. Their findings are forming the platform of a further study currently being carried out in the Undergraduate Programme. A number of the other articles concentrate on trying to encourage students to engage with study in an innovative way. This is particularly obvious in Shaw?s work. Everyone who has been around campus lately has had evidence that the students on Duncan?s modules have clearly been inspired. I found myself, for example, playing golf in the student dining room as part of this initiative! The articles by Jarzabkowski & Guilietti and Ho involved much larger surveys. This is another first for the Good Practice Guide and marks the first step on what will clearly be larger research efforts for these authors in this area. We look forward to the journal publications which will result from this work. The last articles are the result of HELM?s hosting of the national conference of the Higher Education Academy?s Business, Management, Accounting and Finance (BMAF) Subject Centre Conference in May 2007. Belal and Foster have written about their impressions of the Conference and Andrews has included the paper she gave. The papers on employability and widening participation are the centre of HELM?s current work. In the second volume we mentioned the launch of the School?s Research Centre in Higher Education Learning and Management (HELM). Since then HELM has stimulated a lot of activity across the School (and University) particularly linking research and teaching. A list of the HELM seminars for 2007/2008 is listed as Appendix 1 of this publication. Further details can be obtained from Catherine Foster (c.s.foster@aston.ac.uk), who coordinates the HELM seminars. We have also been working on a list of target journals to guide ABS staff who wish to publish in this area. These are included as Appendix 2 of this publication. May I thank the contributors for taking time out of their busy schedules to write the articles and to Julie Green, the Quality Manager, for putting the varying diverse approaches into a coherent and publishable form and for agreeing to fund the printing of this volume.

Individual differences in learning from worked examples by senior secondary mathematics students

The primary purpose of this research was to examine individual differences in learning from worked examples. By integrating cognitive style theory and cognitive load theory, it was hypothesised that an interaction existed between individual cognitive style and the structure and presentation of worked examples in their effect upon subsequent student problem solving. In particular, it was hypothesised that Analytic-Verbalisers, Analytic-Imagers, and Wholist-lmagers would perform better on a posttest after learning from structured-pictorial worked examples than after learning from unstructured worked examples. For Analytic-Verbalisers it was reasoned that the cognitive effort required to impose structure on unstructured worked examples would hinder learning. Alternatively, it was expected that Wholist-Verbalisers would display superior performances after learning from unstructured worked examples than after learning from structured-pictorial worked examples. The images of the structured-pictorial format, incongruent with the Wholist-Verbaliser style, would be expected to split attention between the text and the diagrams. The information contained in the images would also be a source of redundancy and not easily ignored in the integrated structured-pictorial format. Despite a number of authors having emphasised the need to include individual differences as a fundamental component of problem solving within domainspecific subjects such as mathematics, few studies have attempted to investigate a relationship between mathematical or science instructional method, cognitive style, and problem solving. Cognitive style theory proposes that the structure and presentation of learning material is likely to affect each of the four cognitive styles differently. No study could be found which has used Riding's (1997) model of cognitive style as a framework for examining the interaction between the structural presentation of worked examples and an individual's cognitive style. 269 Year 12 Mathematics B students from five urban and rural secondary schools in Queensland, Australia participated in the main study. A factorial (three treatments by four cognitive styles) between-subjects multivariate analysis of variance indicated a statistically significant interaction. As the difficulty of the posttest components increased, the empirical evidence supporting the research hypotheses became more pronounced. The rigour of the study's theoretical framework was further tested by the construction of a measure of instructional efficiency, based on an index of cognitive load, and the construction of a measure of problem-solving efficiency, based on problem-solving time. The consistent empirical evidence within this study that learning from worked examples is affected by an interaction of cognitive style and the structure and presentation of the worked examples emphasises the need to consider individual differences among senior secondary mathematics students to enhance educational opportunities. Implications for teaching and learning are discussed and recommendations for further research are outlined.

Personal Epistemologies and Teaching

Over the last three decades, a growing body of research related to epistemic beliefs has been identified as a crucial for understanding teaching and learning (Yadav, Herron, & Samarapungavan, 2011). In particular, research related to beliefs about teaching, learning and knowledge has been considered important for understanding why teachers engage in certain approaches to pedagogy, curriculum and assessment in classrooms (Stromlo & Bråten, 2011). The beliefs held by teachers about knowledge and knowing, otherwise known as personal epistemology (Hofer, 2010), have been shown to influence other knowledge and beliefs (Schommer-Aikens, 2004). Five and Buehl (2012) indicated that because an individual’s understanding of reality is always seen through the lens of existing beliefs, the role of beliefs as a filter is particularly relevant in the context of teacher education. That is, if beliefs influence how individuals interpret new information and experiences, preservice and practicing teachers’ beliefs shape what and how they learn about teaching.” (p. 470-480). It is likely that such beliefs have an important relationship with teacher knowledge and practices...