Search Results for
"Teaching"

One of the challenges facing contemporary higher education is the need to design and support authentic projects reflecting knowledge and skills relevant to the students both in the academic context and future employment field. This paper presents a project for 2nd year students preparing for careers in Instructional Technologies and Organizational Training. The project product was an interactive self-assessment item repository (SAIR) accessible via the department Learning Management System. The project involved a 3-stage instructional design, linking two courses. In the final stage student teams consulted with lecturers to ensure the quality and relevance of the product. The project design fulfils criteria for authenticity suggested by two different models. Our 3-year study showed that the SAIR gained quantity and quality along the instructional path. Lecturers' views indicated partial satisfaction with the SAIR and the interaction with student teams, along with an acknowledgment of the essential value of the process. Students' views on tests and test items were probed prior to and following instruction, and some significant changes were found regarding tests, the usefulness of choice response test items, and their own ability to identify and correct faulty item formulation. Interviews suggested that students felt empowered by the instructional and technical tools they had gained.

[No abstract available]

Background: Research regarding beginning teachers' typical responses to the difficulties encountered at work relates to the professional, personal and environmental aspects of teaching. At the professional level, research describes mainly the beginner's difficulties in dealing with discipline problems, in using teaching methods efficiently, in planning and organizing assignments, in creating motivation in learning, evaluating student work and creating interaction with the pupils' parents. At the personal level, research shows a great discrepancy between the great expectations that young teachers may have of themselves on one hand, and recurring feelings of impaired self-confidence on the other. At the environmental level, the research shows that beginners have difficulty in integrating in the school environment. teaching physical education is different from teaching most other subjects since physical education focuses on motor skills rather than verbal-academic skills, so that its teaching tools are different, and the status of the subject and those who teach it is different. Therefore, the question is whether the characteristic behavior of beginning teachers in general is typical of physical education teachers as well. Aims: The purpose of this research is to portray the strengths and difficulties of novice physical education teachers as perceived by the teachers themselves and to analyze the significance of the findings. Methods: Data were collected by open-ended questionnaires and structured interviews that were conducted with 62 beginning physical education teachers. Results: Beginning physical education teachers face similar difficulties as beginning teachers of academic subjects, but with much greater intensity. In the interpretation of the findings, the researchers identified five problems encountered by novice physical education teachers: (1) novices tend to feel and show a high degree of dependence on others; (2) they ignore the wider educational circle outside the classroom; (3) novices emphasize the importance of values, but are frustrated by their own inability to implement them; (4) they suffer from a gap between their initiatives and the environment's lack of appreciation; and (5) they possess a limited knowledge of practical pedagogy. Conclusions: It emerged from the present study that beginning teachers need to get meaningful support by: (1) being allowed to make mistakes in independent decisions and receiving suitable guidance to foster professional development; (2) being given the opportunity to link theory and practice independently; and (3) having the opportunity to learn methods to enable them to teach moral values. The article recommends considering ways to provide this support in teacher training and in the induction of new teachers in the schools. © 2010 Association for Physical Education.

teaching faculty is the most valuable resource, the pivot around which the whole teaching and learning process revolves in an educational institution. The shortage of quality faculty is currently acknowledged as the most critical problem and finding enough competent and qualified faculties is becoming a growing challenge for engineering institutions, as they have to compete with their counterparts in India and abroad, in curriculum and teaching standards. A synoptic view of the main factors behind the shortage, its impacts in the quality of education and strategies required for maintaining quality and balancing the demand and supply of teaching faculty in technical institutions are delved in this paper. The analysis also highlights the core competency of engineering teachers, the present scenario of teaching faculty, the state-wise magnitude of shortage and the educational profile of teaching faculty at all-India level. The research gives a national perspective on the problem and adds further investigation into various facets and illuminates its impacts on the quality of education. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Improving the effectiveness of eAssessment depends on the knowledge and experience of feedback-givers. This paper describes an indirect approach to improving feedback for learners - training the feedback-giver while actually preparing the feedback for the learners. Specifically, the aim is to help inexperienced teaching assistants (TAs) who lack training in how to provide quality feedback. The approach emphasises the ways in which feedback is organised through the use of feedback patterns. There is evidence that students in higher education, like adult learners, require improved feedback to make their learning more efficient. McFeSPA (metacognitive feedback scaffolding system for pedagogical apprenticeship) was designed and implemented as efeedback to help improve the TAs' feedback skills while marking programming assignments - and then evaluated to determine whether TAs could benefit from automated feedback. The evaluation involves examining the system with scaffolding turned off to help three TAs give feedback to a group of students and scaffolding turned on for three TAs using the full system. The results are broadly favourable. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

This paper seeks to examine the growth and development of tourism education within Great Britain, with specific reference to the situation in England and Wales. This is a subject that has received relatively scant attention since the publication of a number of seminal papers produced in the mid to late 1990's and early C20th. The paper reviews how tourism education has developed from relatively humble origins to that of a subject taught in a wide variety of education institutions. It examines what programmes seek to achieve in terms of knowledge skills development and preparing students to meet the labour needs of the tourism industry. It also reflects on where tourism education is going in terms of courses, course philosophy, levels of study, subject content and teaching and learning strategies.A number of key themes or issues will be highlighted all central to the thinking of the curriculum planner. These include an analysis of curriculum models, the importance of developing academic vocational and key transferable skills and the need to add value and increase employability. The paper concludes by examining the future of tourism education in an increasingly mature educational market. Here the development of the new 14-19 diplomas in travel and tourism and employer-led foundation degrees are discussed and the implications for curriculum development in higher education broached. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.

The U.S. has experienced a shift from a manufacturing-based economy to one that overwhelmingly provides services and information. This shift demands that technological skills be more fully integrated with one's academic knowledge of science and mathematics so that the next generation of engineers can reason adaptively, think critically, and be prepared to learn how to learn. Project Lead the Way (PLTW) provides a pre-college curriculum that focuses on the integration of engineering with science and mathematics. We documented the impact that enrollment in PLTW had on student science and math achievement. We consider the enriched integration hypothesis, which states that students taking PLTW courses will show achievement benefits, after controlling for prior achievement and other student and teacher characteristics. We contrast this with alternative hypotheses that propose little or no impact of the engineering coursework on students' math and science achievement (the insufficient integration hypothesis), or that PLTW enrollment might be negatively associated with student achievement (the adverse integration hypothesis). Using multilevel statistical modeling with students (N-140) nested within teachers, we report findings from a quantitative analysis of the relationship between PLTW enrollment and student achievement on state standardized tests of math and science. While students gained in math and science achievement overall from eighth to tenth grade, students enrolled in PLTW foundation courses showed significantly smaller math assessment gains than those in a matched group that did not enroll, and no measurable advantages on science assessments, when controlling for prior achievement and teacher experience. The findings do not support the enriched integration hypothesis. Engineering education programs like PLTW face both challenges and opportunities to effectively integrate academic content as they strive to prepare students for college engineering programs and careers. © 2010.

Recent developments in computing and mobile technologies have enabled the mobile and ubiquitous learning approach, which situates students in an environment that combines real-world and digital-world learning resources. Although such an approach seems to be innovative and interesting, several problems have been revealed when applying it to practical learning activities. One major problem is owing to the lack of proper learning strategies or tools that can guide or assist the students to learn in such a complex learning scenario. Students might feel excited or interested when using the mobile devices to learn in the real world; however, their learning achievements could be disappointing. To cope with this problem, in this study, a knowledge engineering approach is proposed to develop Mindtools for such innovative learning scenarios. Experimental results from a natural science course of an elementary school show that this innovative approach not only enhances learning motivation, but also improves the learning achievements of the students. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.