Characterization and Application of Educational Virtual Environments for Science Teaching in Secondary School

This work describes the characteristics of a representative set of seven different virtual laboratories (VLs) aimed for science teaching in secondary school. For this purpose, a 27-item evaluation model that facilitates the characterization of the VLs was prepared. The model takes into account the gaming features, the overall usability, and also the potential to induce scientific literacy. Five of the seven VLs were then tested with two larger and highly heterogenic groups of students, and in two different contexts – biotechnology and physics, respectively. It is described how the VLs were received by the students, taking into account both their motivation and their self-reported learning outcome. In some cases, students’ approach to work with the VLs was recorded digitally, and analyzed qualitatively. In general, the students enjoyed the VL activities, and claimed that they learned from them. Yet, more investigation is required to address the effectiveness of these tools for significant learning.

Safe and exciting science : a pack of training activities on health and safety for science departments in secondary schools and colleges and for initial teacher training.

Es un recurso formativo elaborado en respuesta a diversas solicitudes de escuelas para ayudar a éstas en los servicios de salud y actividades de formación en seguridad. Este material puede ser utilizado por los profesores en las prácticas realizadas en los laboratorios escolares con un riesgo mínimo. Va dirigido a asesores científicos, profesores, consultores y formadores de docentes.

A district conference held at Gary on history teaching in the secondary schools,

Mode of access: Internet.

Comprensión del modelo hereditario de Mendel tras la enseñanza habitual en alumnos de educación secundaria obligatoria

Mostrar que una nueva propuesta de enseñanza produce mejores actitudes y aprendizajes en los alumnos requiere disponer de un análisis de lo que se hace y se consigue con la enseñanza habitual. Para realizar dicho análisis se ha efectuado un estudio histórico y epistemológico de la evolución de las ideas en genética clásica, identificando los problemas que están en su origen, las ideas que permitieron avanzar y los obstáculos que hubo que superar. Como resultado de dicho estudio se han seleccionado un conjunto de indicadores de aprendizaje que deberían manifestarse en aquellas personas que hubieran comprendido los aspectos esenciales del modelo de herencia mendeliana, que se imparte en 4º de ESO. Dichos indicadores se han utilizado para analizar el aprendizaje tras la enseñanza convencional del tema. En este trabajo se presentan los resultados obtenidos que muestran las deficiencias más comunes y justifican la necesidad de una propuesta diferente.

The role of literature: english textbooks and literature in secondary teaching in Portugal

Trabalho de Projecto apresentado para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ensino de Inglês

Using a blog to create and support a Community of Inquiry in Secondary Education

Understanding how blogs can support collaborative learning is a vital concern for researchers and teachers. This paper explores how blogs may be used to support Secondary Education students’ collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can promote the creation of a Community of Inquiry to enhance critical thinking and meaningful learning. We designed, implemented and evaluated a science case-based project in which fifteen secondary students participated. Students worked in the science blogging project during 4 months. We asked students to be collaboratively engaged in purposeful critical discourse and reflection in their blogs in order to solve collectively science challenges and construct meaning about topics related to Astronomy and Space Sciences. Through student comments posted in the blog, our findings showed that the blog environment afforded the construction of a Community of Inquiry and therefore the creation of an effective online collaborative learning community. In student blog comments, the three presences for collaborative learning took place: cognitive, social, and teaching presence. Moreover, our research found a positive correlation among the three presences –cognitive, social and teaching– of the Community of Inquiry model with the level of learning obtained by the students. We discuss a series of issues that instructors should consider when blogs are incorporated into teaching and learning. We claim that embedded scaffolds to help students to argue and reason their comments in the blog are required to foster blog-supported collaborative learning.

Thinking Outside the Box: Enhancing Science Teaching by Combining (Instead of Contrasting) Laboratory and Simulation Activities

The focus of the present work was on 10- to 12-year-old elementary school students’ conceptual learning outcomes in science in two specific inquiry-learning environments, laboratory and simulation. The main aim was to examine if it would be more beneficial to combine than contrast simulation and laboratory activities in science teaching. It was argued that the status quo where laboratories and simulations are seen as alternative or competing methods in science teaching is hardly an optimal solution to promote students’ learning and understanding in various science domains. It was hypothesized that it would make more sense and be more productive to combine laboratories and simulations. Several explanations and examples were provided to back up the hypothesis. In order to test whether learning with the combination of laboratory and simulation activities can result in better conceptual understanding in science than learning with laboratory or simulation activities alone, two experiments were conducted in the domain of electricity. In these experiments students constructed and studied electrical circuits in three different learning environments: laboratory (real circuits), simulation (virtual circuits), and simulation-laboratory combination (real and virtual circuits were used simultaneously). In order to measure and compare how these environments affected students’ conceptual understanding of circuits, a subject knowledge assessment questionnaire was administered before and after the experimentation. The results of the experiments were presented in four empirical studies. Three of the studies focused on learning outcomes between the conditions and one on learning processes. Study I analyzed learning outcomes from experiment I. The aim of the study was to investigate if it would be more beneficial to combine simulation and laboratory activities than to use them separately in teaching the concepts of simple electricity. Matched-trios were created based on the pre-test results of 66 elementary school students and divided randomly into a laboratory (real circuits), simulation (virtual circuits) and simulation-laboratory combination (real and virtual circuits simultaneously) conditions. In each condition students had 90 minutes to construct and study various circuits. The results showed that studying electrical circuits in the simulation–laboratory combination environment improved students’ conceptual understanding more than studying circuits in simulation and laboratory environments alone. Although there were no statistical differences between simulation and laboratory environments, the learning effect was more pronounced in the simulation condition where the students made clear progress during the intervention, whereas in the laboratory condition students’ conceptual understanding remained at an elementary level after the intervention. Study II analyzed learning outcomes from experiment II. The aim of the study was to investigate if and how learning outcomes in simulation and simulation-laboratory combination environments are mediated by implicit (only procedural guidance) and explicit (more structure and guidance for the discovery process) instruction in the context of simple DC circuits. Matched-quartets were created based on the pre-test results of 50 elementary school students and divided randomly into a simulation implicit (SI), simulation explicit (SE), combination implicit (CI) and combination explicit (CE) conditions. The results showed that when the students were working with the simulation alone, they were able to gain significantly greater amount of subject knowledge when they received metacognitive support (explicit instruction; SE) for the discovery process than when they received only procedural guidance (implicit instruction: SI). However, this additional scaffolding was not enough to reach the level of the students in the combination environment (CI and CE). A surprising finding in Study II was that instructional support had a different effect in the combination environment than in the simulation environment. In the combination environment explicit instruction (CE) did not seem to elicit much additional gain for students’ understanding of electric circuits compared to implicit instruction (CI). Instead, explicit instruction slowed down the inquiry process substantially in the combination environment. Study III analyzed from video data learning processes of those 50 students that participated in experiment II (cf. Study II above). The focus was on three specific learning processes: cognitive conflicts, self-explanations, and analogical encodings. The aim of the study was to find out possible explanations for the success of the combination condition in Experiments I and II. The video data provided clear evidence about the benefits of studying with the real and virtual circuits simultaneously (the combination conditions). Mostly the representations complemented each other, that is, one representation helped students to interpret and understand the outcomes they received from the other representation. However, there were also instances in which analogical encoding took place, that is, situations in which the slightly discrepant results between the representations ‘forced’ students to focus on those features that could be generalised across the two representations. No statistical differences were found in the amount of experienced cognitive conflicts and self-explanations between simulation and combination conditions, though in self-explanations there was a nascent trend in favour of the combination. There was also a clear tendency suggesting that explicit guidance increased the amount of self-explanations. Overall, the amount of cognitive conflicts and self-explanations was very low. The aim of the Study IV was twofold: the main aim was to provide an aggregated overview of the learning outcomes of experiments I and II; the secondary aim was to explore the relationship between the learning environments and students’ prior domain knowledge (low and high) in the experiments. Aggregated results of experiments I & II showed that on average, 91% of the students in the combination environment scored above the average of the laboratory environment, and 76% of them scored also above the average of the simulation environment. Seventy percent of the students in the simulation environment scored above the average of the laboratory environment. The results further showed that overall students seemed to benefit from combining simulations and laboratories regardless of their level of prior knowledge, that is, students with either low or high prior knowledge who studied circuits in the combination environment outperformed their counterparts who studied in the laboratory or simulation environment alone. The effect seemed to be slightly bigger among the students with low prior knowledge. However, more detailed inspection of the results showed that there were considerable differences between the experiments regarding how students with low and high prior knowledge benefitted from the combination: in Experiment I, especially students with low prior knowledge benefitted from the combination as compared to those students that used only the simulation, whereas in Experiment II, only students with high prior knowledge seemed to benefit from the combination relative to the simulation group. Regarding the differences between simulation and laboratory groups, the benefits of using a simulation seemed to be slightly higher among students with high prior knowledge. The results of the four empirical studies support the hypothesis concerning the benefits of using simulation along with laboratory activities to promote students’ conceptual understanding of electricity. It can be concluded that when teaching students about electricity, the students can gain better understanding when they have an opportunity to use the simulation and the real circuits in parallel than if they have only the real circuits or only a computer simulation available, even when the use of the simulation is supported with the explicit instruction. The outcomes of the empirical studies can be considered as the first unambiguous evidence on the (additional) benefits of combining laboratory and simulation activities in science education as compared to learning with laboratories and simulations alone.

English vocabulary teaching and learning strategies in Secondary Education

Resumen basado en el de la publicaci??n

Improving secondary science teaching. 'Mejorando la enseñanza de ciencias en secundaria'.

Resumen tomado parcialmente de la publicación

Meeting the standards in secondary science : a guide to the ITT NC.

Todos los estudiantes en período de formación docente deben demostrar ciertas aptitudes y conocimientos antes de alcanzar la categoría de profesor cualificado. Aquí se abordan las normas específicas que rigen estas competencias relacionadas con la enseñanza de las ciencias en la etapa de secundaria. A lo largo de sus capítulos se recogen temas como el aprendizaje y la progresión de los alumnos en la educación científica, el desarrollo de habilidades científicas fundamentales, la ciencia y las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TIC) y, por último, el desarrollo profesional de los docentes.

English teaching in the secondary school : linking theory and practice.

Es un texto para la enseñanza de la lengua inglesa en las escuelas secundarias dirigido a los profesores que estudian, están recién titulados ó son experimentados docentes. Cumple con los requisitos del plan nacional de estudios inglés para el año 2000 y con la Estrategia Nacional de Alfabetización (National Literacy Strategy) para la etapa 3 (key stage 3). Entre sus objetivos están: dar ideas prácticas específicas que vinculen la teoría y la práctica y estimular el pensamiento crítico sobre la enseñanza del inglés.

Teaching character education through literature : awakening the moral imagination in secondary classrooms.

Trata de cómo los profesores de secundaria y post-secundaria pueden ayudar a los alumnos a ser más receptivos en los temas y cuestiones éticas que surgen de los relatos literarios estudiados en el aula. Se ofrecen al profesor varias maneras de sacar ideas instructivas de las narraciones de ficción. El libro está dividido en dos partes, la primera tiene un enfoque teórico, mientras que, en la segunda se dan los casos para su estudio, que corresponden a cuatro personajes literarios de otras tantas novelas, así como, una serie de preguntas planteadas para despertar la moral y estimular la reflexión ética en los estudiantes. Aunque, este planteamiento se puede aplicar, tambien, a los protagonistas de otras obras narrativas del plan de estudios.

Improving secondary science teaching.

Esta escrito para ayudar a los profesores, tanto nuevos como experimentados, a reflexionar sobre su práctica docente y a considerar la manera de mejorar la eficacia de su enseñanza. Así, examina los métodos de enseñanza más comunes utilizados para el aprendizaje de la ciencia por los alumnos y proporciona orientación sobre temas de dirección y procedimientos. Para ello, también, tiene en cuenta temas subyacentes tales como el interés de los estudiantes por la ciencia y su motivación para aprender, la forma en que aprenden, el tipo de ciencia que se imparte actualmente en la escuela, y el valor de la investigación pedagógica.

Practical resources for teaching Citizenship in secondary classrooms.

Este recurso proporciona a los profesores de enseñanza secundaria los instrumentos esenciales para enseñar la asignatura de la Ciudadanía. Los autores proporcionan una visión general de la materia y orientan sobre la manera de cumplir sus tres fines principales: la responsabilidad social y moral, la participación de la comunidad y la cultura política. El recurso se centra en los programas de estudio, enseñanza, aprendizaje y cuestiones de evaluación, e incluye una base para la planificación de esquemas de trabajo. También incluye planes de lecciones, ideas y recursos de enseñanza. Se hace hincapié en la inclusión de todos los alumnos y se hacen referencias a su transversalidad con otras materias curriculares.

Good practice in science teaching : what research has to say.

Ofrece un panorama completo de las principales áreas de investigación en la enseñanza científica. Esta nueva edición incluye el aprendizaje de las ciencias en contextos informales y el desarrollo profesional del docente, así como refleja los cambios y avances habidos en su enseñanza. También, es una guía para profesores de ciencias de niños de todas las edades.