ethanporcaro/eric-fulltext-meta huggingface dataset:
How Well Do Students in Secondary School Understand Temporal Development of Dynamical Systems?
Author: Forjan, Matej
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Secondary School Students,Secondary School Science,Physics,Scientific Concepts,Knowledge Level,Hypothesis Testing,Science Process Skills,Prediction,Accuracy,Science Activities,Problem Solving,Prior Learning,Task Analysis,Statistical Significance

Despite difficulties understanding the dynamics of complex systems only simple dynamical systems without feedback connections have been taught in secondary school physics. Consequently, students do not have opportunities to develop intuition of temporal development of systems, whose dynamics are conditioned by the influence of feedback processes. We present a research study on students' understanding of temporal development of simple dynamical systems. Students participating in the study were attending the final two years of a technical secondary school (&quot;gimnazija&quot;) program. Based on written equations for the rate of change of some quantity students had to qualitatively determine dynamical development. The study confirmed the initial hypotheses with regard to poor knowledge in the area of dynamical systems, irrelevant of year in secondary school or final grade in physics or mathematics. The results showed that most students understood the development of linear systems without feedback and based on equations, students were able to forecast the dynamical development of changing quantities. Issues arose in understanding systems with feedback connections that influence the nonlinear dynamical development of changing quantity. Especially with negative feedback connections that provide stabilization of changing quantities. The reason could be that in most of the cases they turned towards linear dynamical development of changing quantities. Frequently, they incorrectly concluded that the temporal development of changing quantities is the same to temporal development of current, which determines the state of quantity. As a response in overcoming such issues, we recommend a geometrical consideration of one-dimensional dynamical systems.
Music Activities as a Meaningful Context for Teaching Elementary Students Mathematics: A Quasi-Experiment Time Series Design with Random Assigned Control Group
Author: An, Song A.
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Music Activities,Teaching Methods,Interdisciplinary Approach,Elementary School Mathematics,Mathematics Instruction,Grade 3,Quasiexperimental Design,Pretests Posttests,Control Groups,Mathematics Skills,Intervention,Statistical Significance,Student Improvement,Mathematics Tests,Achievement Tests,Standardized Tests,Instructional Effectiveness

The purpose of the current research was to examine the effects of a sequence of classroom activities that integrated mathematics content with music elements aimed at providing teachers an alternative approach for teaching mathematics. Two classes of third grade students (n = 56) from an elementary school in the west coast of the United States participated in the research. A random assignment pretest-posttest control group design was used to examine students' changes in mathematical ability between the two groups. A quasi-experiment time series design with multiple pretests, midtests and posttests was utilized for investigating the effects of music-mathematics lessons on students' mathematics process ability level. The results demonstrated that the intervention of music-mathematics integrated lessons had statistically significant improvement on the music group students' mathematical abilities.
Teachers' Choice of Using Practical Activities--A Hierarchical Classification Attempt
Author: Haara, Frode Olav
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Classification,Mathematics Instruction,Teaching Methods,Qualitative Research,Teacher Attitudes,Mathematics Skills,Literacy,Professional Autonomy,Mathematics Teachers,Foreign Countries,Elementary School Teachers,Secondary School Teachers,Structured Interviews,Questionnaires

From a system theoretically grounded point of view, a hierarchy of primary and secondary impact factors influencing the mathematics teacher's choice to use practical activities in mathematics teaching is suggested initially in the article. A study, based on qualitative responses from mathematics teachers, then gives grounds for suggesting that a hierarchy of impact factors regarding the choice to use a practical activity in mathematics teaching must include more than just a binary clustering of primary and secondary impact factors. The teacher's everyday life experience, knowledge of pupils' everyday life experience, and the teacher's conscience are suggested examples of impact factors that might call for the introduction of a new level, as they are primary impact factors that seem to depend on adaptation to responses at the secondary impact factor level. This coincides with demands for strengthening of mathematical literacy in school mathematics and more independence for the teacher when it comes to teaching of mathematics.
Animation Model to Conceptualize ATP Generation: A Mitochondrial Oxidative Phosphorylation
Author: Jena, Ananta Kumar
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Animation,Science Instruction,Teaching Methods,Molecular Structure,Misconceptions,Statistical Analysis,Cytology,Instructional Effectiveness,Undergraduate Students,Control Groups,Experimental Groups,Scientific Concepts,Science Tests,Achievement Tests,Questionnaires,Quasiexperimental Design,Pretests Posttests

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the molecular unit of intracellular energy and it is the product of oxidative phosphorylation of cellular respiration uses in cellular processes. The study explores the growth of the misconception levels amongst the learners and evaluates the effectiveness of animation model over traditional methods. The data obtained from the sixty B.Sc. students found the growing misconception status in the mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation test. Euclidean Distance Formula was used to analyzing and interpreting the various growing misconception levels among the students and found that 88% of students have different types of misconception those were rooted in preconception derived from everyday experiences of students. Similarly, Chi-Square test used to observe the effects of the animation model over the &quot;correct&quot; and &quot;misconception&quot; status of the students and it was resulted that misconception levels relatively decreased from 88% to 15%, and only 15% of students have the misconception problems. However, Univariate Analysis of Variance used to measure the effectiveness of animation model of mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation over the control group. It results that F[subscript (1/118)] 323.42 P &lt; 0.01) was significant and there existed significant difference in between control and experimental group achievement of ATP generation of mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation.
Advanced Level Biology Teachers' Attitudes towards Assessment and Their Engagement in Assessment for Learning
Author: Bramwell-Lalor, Sharon
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Biology,Science Instruction,Teacher Attitudes,Questionnaires,Interviews,Mixed Methods Research,Science Teachers,Advanced Students,Peer Evaluation,Self Evaluation (Individuals),High Stakes Tests,Secondary School Students,Secondary School Teachers,Foreign Countries

This paper reports on a Mixed Methods study involving an investigation into the attitudes of advanced level biology teachers towards assessment and describes the teachers' experiences while being engaged in Assessment for Learning (AfL) practices such as sharing of learning objectives and peer- and self-assessment. Quantitative data were collected from 40 teachers using the researcher-constructed Teachers' Attitudes towards Assessment Questionnaire. Qualitative data were collected through discussions and interviews from six teachers who implemented AfL strategies. The findings revealed that advanced level biology teachers displayed highly favourable attitudes towards assessment. The teachers engaged in AfL had similar attitudes towards assessment as those who were not. Further there were no statistically significant differences in the teachers' attitudes towards traditional assessment and AfL. The teachers, however, described positive experiences while conducting AfL and highlighted the usefulness of practices such as the sharing of learning objectives and students' engagement in self-assessment. They also expressed the limitations of operating within a high-stakes examination environment. These findings have shown that the use of AfL methods in advanced level biology classrooms has value and can be practiced along with traditional assessment methods.
A Proposal: Mitigating Effects of the Economic Crisis with Career ePortfolios
Author: Lievens, Ronald
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Portfolios (Background Materials),Portfolio Assessment,Career Education,Career Guidance,Electronic Publishing,Job Search Methods,Access to Information,Occupational Information,Labor Market,Job Skills

Contemporary labor markets are suffering from the recession and structural shifts, which can cause various mismatches through processes of search friction. A lack of informational transparency among worker- and job characteristics is the common denominator of these search frictions. In this paper, the potential of the career ePortfolio, which consists of information beyond what is typically found in a jobseeker's resume, in reducing these mismatches and search frictions is explored. The career ePortfolio, it is argued, leads to better worker-to-job matches, increased worker mobility, and reduced unemployment levels and transaction costs. By exploring mismatches and search frictions theoretically, the required features of such a career ePortfolio were identified. A multi-disciplinary approach was used, drawing from literature on labor market economics as well as human resource management. It was concluded that the career ePortfolio should consist of competence-based information on both the aggregate and individual levels in order to facilitate workers and firms in their career and personnel planning and help government and educational institutes devise appropriate labor market policies and curricula. Major challenges include the required shared understanding of competences among workers and firms, given their heterogeneity, as well as the need for credible information, given the asymmetrical nature of labor market information.
What Difference Can ePortfolio Make? A Field Report from the Connect to Learning Project
Author: Eynon, Bret
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Community Colleges,Two Year College Students,Portfolios (Background Materials),Electronic Publishing,Communities of Practice,Web Sites,Academic Achievement,Technology Integration,Educational Benefits,Evidence,Outcomes of Education,Learning Processes,Reflection,Student Centered Learning,Professional Development,Scaling

Connect to Learning (C2L) is a FIPSE-funded project coordinated by LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) that links ePortfolio teams from 24 campuses nationwide into a supportive community of practice. Launched in 2011, C2L focused on exploring and documenting ePortfolio strategies to advance student, faculty, and institutional learning. Working together, the C2L community has developed a rich resource website, Catalyst for Learning: ePortfolio Resources and Research (http://c2l.mcnrc.org), that offers data, strategies, and expertise from C2L campuses. Our work has addressed two overarching questions: (1) &quot;What difference can ePortfolio make?&quot; and (2) &quot;What does it take for ePortfolio to make a difference?&quot; Focused on the first question, this article examines C2L findings through three propositions: (1) ePortfolio initiatives advance student success; (2) making student learning visible, ePortfolio initiatives support reflection, social pedagogy, and deep learning; and (3) ePortfolio initiatives catalyze learning-centered institutional change. Based on an array of evidence from campus practices and narratives--along with the C2L Core Survey, administered on campuses across our network--C2L findings advance our collective understanding of the power of integrative ePortfolio practice and its potential to support student, faculty, and institutional learning. Moreover, these findings offer multiple avenues for further research, analysis and theory-building. We believe the future of ePortfolio depends in part on our collective ability to gather, analyze, and share evidence of the difference ePortfolio initiatives can make and, therefore, offer these preliminary findings for broad consideration, testing, refinement and improvement.
ePortfolio as a Catalyst for Change in Teaching: An Autoethnographic Examination of Transformation
Author: Carson, Alison S.
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Portfolios (Background Materials),Electronic Publishing,Ethnography,Educational Change,Communities of Practice,Reflective Teaching,College Faculty,College Instruction,Teaching Experience

In this autoethnographic study, the authors/subjects examined retrospective reflections (narratives) on their experiences within an ePortfolio community of practice to help them understand the conditions that led to transformations in their teaching. The theoretical framework of situated learning and cognitive mediation was used to explore this process of transformation and explain how participation in a community of practice might lead to such change. We argue that ePortfolio itself is imbued with specific meaning, which provides potential users with opportunities to connect with its pedagogical potential. Enticed by this potential, individuals are drawn into a community of practice and their understanding of the tools and practices associated with that community becomes increasingly more complex as they become more deeply integrated into the community. As participants move from being newcomers to full participants in the community, their understanding of the tool is mediated by their engagement and practice with it. This engagement and practice leads to greater competence and has specific effects on the individuals' notions of membership and identity within the community of practice. We argue that this framework provides a unique way of understanding how transformation can occur, specifically for faculty and their teaching.
ePortfolios Reveal an Emerging Community of Underrepresented Minority Scholars
Author: Singer-Freeman, Karen
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Electronic Publishing,Portfolios (Background Materials),Summer Programs,Two Year College Students,Minority Group Students,Identification (Psychology),Journal Writing,Self Concept,Coding,Communities of Practice,Gender Differences,Portfolio Assessment

We used ePortfolios to promote and assess identity change in a summer research program for 81 underrepresented minority community college students. We hypothesized that ePortfolios would increase students' development of academic identity, future orientation, and scholarly community. Students completed weekly ePortfolio journal entries and completed the Twenty Statements Test (in which students complete the statement &quot;I am . . .&quot; 20 times) during the first and final weeks of the program. We found that: (a) both ePortfolio entries and Twenty Statements Tests included increasing references to future orientation; (b) only ePortfolio entries included increasing references to academic identity and scholarly community; (c) changes reflected in ePortfolios were independent of changes evidenced in the Twenty Statements Tests; and (d) individual responses to both ePortfolios and the Twenty Statements Tests showed stability over time. We hypothesized that the inclusion of ePortfolios enhanced students' experience in our program. Similar types of identity shift are likely to be present in many high impact activities (e.g., internships, study abroad, learning communities). The use of ePortfolios in these contexts could have similar value.
A University-Wide ePortfolio Initiative at Federation University Australia: Software Analysis, Test-to-Production, and Evaluation Phases
Author: Hains-Wesson, Rachael
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Foreign Countries,Portfolios (Background Materials),Portfolio Assessment,Electronic Publishing,Program Implementation,Universities,Literature Reviews,Computer Software,Decision Making,Models,Evaluation Methods,Computer Software Evaluation,Testing,Higher Education,Vocational Education,Surveys,Workshops,Rural Areas

This paper describes an ePortfolio implementation strategy at Federation University Australia, Victoria (formerly the University of Ballarat). The authors combined a personal and practical viewpoint to elicit pitfalls, challenges, and recommendations for improvement. The paper is divided into three main areas in order to outline the experiments that occurred. The first section provides a standard literature review around ePortfolio adoption as well as a research-based analysis of available ePortfolio software at Australian universities. The second part depicts the University's ePortfolio implementation strategy that focused on &quot;test-to-production&quot; and technology dissemination phases. This section is based on the authors' personal viewpoint of ePortfolio adoption at a university where a &quot;top-down management decision making model&quot; (Slade, Murfin, &amp; Readman, 2013, p. 178) was used. Third, the evaluation strategy is reported, which was based on similar research conducted at Australian universities (Hallam &amp; Creagh, 2010; Hallam, Harper, Hauville, Creagh, &amp; McAllister, 2009). This part is offered as a modest-scoped, mixed methods evaluation process. The paper extends on ePortfolio implementation strategies (Bell &amp; White, 2013; Coffey &amp; Ashford-Rowe, 2014; Jarrott &amp; Gambrel, 2011; Lambert &amp; Corrin, 2007; Ring &amp; Ramirez, 2012; Slade et al., 2013) and software analysis (ACODE, 2011; Slade et al., 2013). Recommendations are made for the careful integration of pre- and post-rollout of ePortfolio programs with face-to-face ePortfolio tutor support, offering online resources and alternative portfolio-making options for students with poor broadband access.
Reflective Course Design: An Interplay between Pedagogy and Technology in a Language Teacher Education Course
Author: Firdyiwek, Yitna
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Reflection,Teaching Methods,Graduate Students,Language Teachers,Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,Educational Change,Portfolios (Background Materials),Educational Technology,Electronic Publishing,Specialists,Course Objectives,Video Technology,Editing,Teacher Education,Correlation,Sociocultural Patterns,Professional Identity,Best Practices

This study reports on a sequence of iterative redesigns of a graduate-level foreign language teacher education course. The study describes the interplay between technology and pedagogy that resulted in important curricular changes, from a focus on individual to social and then holistic reflection. Using a team-based design model, instructional experts worked collaboratively over multiple redesigns, sparked by the unique affordances of emerging technologies such as video, video editing, and electronic portfolios, as well as shifts in pedagogical approaches and changes in course goals.
A Holocaust Exhibit ePortfolio: Actively Engaging Students
Author: Jordine, Melissa
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Electronic Publishing,Portfolios (Background Materials),Undergraduate Students,Museums,Technology Uses in Education,Educational Technology,Jews,Death,Crime,Exhibits,Assignments,European History,Grades (Scholastic),Portfolio Assessment

California State University, Fresno is currently considering implementing an ePortfolio requirement for all undergraduate students. The ePortfolio requirement would be introduced primarily to engage students in a HIP (high impact practice) but would also be used for assessment purposes. As a faculty member and a member of the CSU Fresno ePortfolio committee, I implemented an integrative learning ePortfolio assignment in order to gauge the degree to which students could be engaged in their own learning process by using ePortfolios and to pilot the use of such assignments for assessment purposes. Students in History 140 created an ePortfolio that was constructed as a museum exhibit on a specific topic related to the Holocaust. This exhibit project was an ideal way to measure the impact of ePortfolios because the Holocaust course was designed and had been taught previously by the same instructor. Therefore, since the most significant change to the assignment was the use of ePortfolios, changes in student engagement or the quality of the exhibit project would be suggestive and might be able to be linked to the use of ePortfolios.
General Education and ePortfolios: Syllabi and the Role of Faculty
Author: Appling, Jeffrey
Date: 2015-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Course Descriptions,General Education,Portfolios (Background Materials),Portfolio Assessment,Electronic Publishing,Educational Practices,Minimum Competencies,Degree Requirements,Performance Factors,Natural Sciences,Teacher Role,Undergraduate Study

A study of faculty views about General Education requirements, paired with a review of faculty syllabi, revealed concerns about communication of General Education goals to students. Syllabi reviewed were those for courses meeting the Natural Sciences General Education requirement. At our institution, students demonstrate Natural Science competency with work from various science courses that is deposited in an electronic portfolio. Electronic portfolios are evaluated systematically as part of the university General Education assessment plan. We explore possible reasons for gaps in faculty communication about the Natural Science competency requirement, including issues such as institution type and faculty desire for autonomy. Factors that contribute to the creation of successful syllabi are also reviewed, and we discuss how these factors could be employed to better communicate General Education requirements to students.
Using ePortfolios to Assess Program Goals, Integrative Learning, and Civic Engagement: A Case Example
Author: Richards-Schuster, Katie
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Portfolios (Background Materials),Electronic Publishing,Citizen Participation,Undergraduate Students,Social Change,Community Action,Interdisciplinary Approach,Program Evaluation,College Programs,Integrated Activities,Learning Activities,Transformative Learning,Student Evaluation,College Curriculum

Providing opportunities to foster students' civic engagement during their undergraduate education is a goal of many universities. There are a variety of ways in which students participate in community service and in community change efforts and social change initiatives; capturing how students integrate these experiences into their broader learning goals can help both students and educators to understand better the impact of civic engagement programs on educational outcomes. ePortfolios are one method being used to assess this type of integrative learning and the transformative civic engagement experiences involved. Using a case example of an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor focused on community action and social change, this paper draws on an analysis of 51 ePortfolios completed by students in the capstone class for an Interdisciplinary Community Action and Social Change Minor to demonstrate how ePortfolios can be used to assess individual student outcomes related to civic engagement, as well as to provide input about program impact.