Group items tagged

College professors and instructors can learn a lot from the chapters of a digital textbook that they assign students to read. Reynol Junco, an associate professor in Iowa State University's School of Education, says digital books provide real-time analytics to help faculty assess how students are doing in the class.

In this research, digital textbook is used for predicting students outcomes. With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend reading. On the other hand, with regular textbooks, instructor do not know how students are doing or whether they read the assigned material or not until they give a graded assignment. Digital text book gives opportunity to teacher to monitor their students' actions and can take precation to make students read the material.With help of digital text book, instructors can track the time students spend on reading. By this way, instructor can gain some information like the material complexity for students reading level and s/he can adapt course material or take other precautions to help students succeed.

it seems that we will try to go to some Chinese Universities in ten years time, instead of Europe or States.

In my opinion education policy of the countries do not be planned based on the students' academic achievement. Real achievement of an education system could be observed as individuals' adaptation to life. For example the main vision of the elementary science curriculum defined by Ministry of National Education of Turkey [MONE] (2005) is that regardless of the individual differences of students, they are educated to become scientifically literate, the uniqueness nature of the learner; background and culture of the learners and motivation of the learners were taken into consideration in the development of the curriculum (MONE, 2005), but putting those in the practice is very difficult.

Also, as mentioned in the text "… those results come at the cost of one of the highest levels of student anxiety in the world." Anxiety is very important and big research area in educational psychology also the news in the link http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/10/content_9710997.htm exemplifies its importance in Chinese case.

Assessment of CSCL One of the messy part of CSCL is its assessment. It involves multiple processes and outcomes at multiple levels by multiple agents. This paper provides a roadmap for the role and application of intelligent tools for monitoring and assessment of (CS)CL.

An interview with Dr. Reeves about how things have changed in the field of DBR lately. Dr. Reeves suggests one of the most interesting developments in the recent period was an article published in January,2012 in which the author basically reviewed the last 10 years of DBR reported in various journals and found that basically the jury is still out on whether or not DBR is attaining its two major outcomes; the outcome of robust interventions that really improve practice and reusable design principles.

You can find examples for the adoption of CSCL and its benefits like enhanced course content knowledge, increased confidence in applying course knowledge and skills, stronger collaboration skills (arguing ideas, making decisions, providing solutions), greater ability to create instead of simply consume knowledge and added benefits of leadership and presentation skills

The outcomes: enhanced course content knowledge, increased confidence in applying course knowledge and skills, stronger collaboration skills (arguing ideas, making decisions, providing solutions), greater ability to create instead of simply consume knowledge, and added benefits of leadership and presentation skills, can also be applicable to our case. I think our course equips us with similar skills and outcomes.

Good example of DBR and CSCL.

They say "No one else does what we do" while mentioning their interdisciplinary approach. They say that "The learning sciences field emerged more than two decades ago after researchers found that what worked in a laboratory simply did not hold up with real children, teachers, classrooms and workplaces. They saw that learning technologies, which held great promise for solving education's problems, were not being transferred to classrooms and schools. Cognitive scientists, educational and instructional psychologists, and computer scientists worked together to put their ideas and knowledge to use to improve the learning outcomes for a diverse group." The institute basically do two things: 1 - They identify the critical challenges in education, literacy, mathematics, science and the social sciences. 2- They work to find solutions. Their main aim is to create learning systems for 21st century classrooms thanks to interdisciplinary research in teaching and learning. They believe that learning is a complex process and so they get benefit from different disciplines (e.g. anthropology, computer science, education, linguistics, psychology and sociology) to share knowledge and best practices on education. At their another webpage, they define learning science as a science which "focuses on how to create new, improved and equitable learning environments for 21st century learners.". In order accomplish this, they focus on four questions: 1- How do people learn? 2- What do we want them to know and be able to do? 3- How can we design learning environments that help them learn? 4- How can we monitor what they are learning? They offer a Ph.D. program to raise future learning scientists.

Many UK children have become less confident about succeeding in life by the time they leave school, a report says. The study by think-tank Demos says some pupils feel school is just preparing them for exam success. It urges the government to help schools and colleges explore how self-belief, perseverance and resilience can be instilled in pupils.

I think that not only UK chidren but also our children less confident and unhappy in real life. If same research is done in Turkey, I think that similar results can be obtained. Students spend 12 years in school (primary school, secondary and high school). And they learn socialising, success, failure in school. In traditional classrooms, success is gaining high score in exam, ranked in first three in competition and failure is gaining lower scores on exam. When students leave the school, they face with new environment that is not similar to school. I think, therefore, they can not adopt to this new environment they feel unhappy and less confident. For this reason, schools should bring the skills and qualities that are needed for out of the school. Community service course, role playing, field works should be done in the schools to introduce real life experinces to students. In addition, changing the laerning activites, assesment procedures in school also can be helpful for real life experinces.

In several videos it was said that we start to prepare our pupils for jobs that are not invented yet. It is because there are lots of information production and exchange throughout world now, which makes lots of jobs become obsolete in short period of times. Our students need to have skills to locate, synthesis, and evaluate information and adapt theirselves to new contexts instead of having static knowledge about specific jobs.

In this video kids build their designs and exhibit them, hence their parents could see what their children do, how they learn etc.

In that video, there is a project called Kids Build. Children built cities based on given maps of Boston. They construct the city environment by different materials. Although, it seems really fun, I did not understand what teachers target to teach students? Is it for only creativity? Since children are not so grown up, concrete thinking was targeted I think. Still, what was the "content" is still blur for me. edit: Opps, duplicate :).

Here's a previously-shared example of learning by design by "Kids Build!" project. I think just getting the hands of the kids dirty is an outcome by itself. Although they do not possess abstract thinking skills at such a young age, I still think these are the ages when an interest sparks in the child, which could then turn into a passion.

After I read this I become more worried about our students especially in secondary schools. There were SBS (exam for entering high schools) and they were taking 3 different exams at each grade, 6,7,8 but now with the new regulations they will have 36 exams. Apart from that in 10 years the system has changed for 5 times. what can be more devastating their chilhood than that?

I agree with you about the testing system in Turkey but it is only the top of the iceberg. For me, childhood ends for children who start the formal education in Turkey. Our system is so demanding and competitive that children cannot endure the difficulties they encounter. First of all, we have very overloaded curricula and students always need to be alert and hardworking to keep up with the required activities. While trying to make use of constructivist understanding curriculum developers missed some points: the opportunities and facilities the schools and students have, the difficulty level of activities, background of the learner and student and parent profile in Turkey, teacher characteristics in our schools and so on. The curricula cannot be implemeted in most of the schools so teachers invented their own methods and techniques which do not match to any of the instructional theories properly. Parents started to find out ways to protect their children and they made lots of mistakes. For example, some parents do projects of their children and smarter children started to sell ready-made projects at schools. Although teachers know the truth, he grade these projects because the system makes it nearly impossible to fail. In short, our system is working but not in the way writen in the curricula. The changes, negativities and difficulties in the system is damaging the childhood and future of the students. Somebody should change it, not the curricula:)

World is getting more populated, and each individual wants to have a better life. And a better life is significantly related to education. So, exams still appear to be a "must" in this racing system. Actually, I am a supporter of the exams if we want to have a more "fair race". I remember the terrible old days when successful people couldn't get what they deserved because of the bribery system in Turkey. On the other hand, I agree about the side effects of the overtesting. And as an individual who has been exposed to overtesting, the question I ask to myself is "How has the overtesting affected my mental health?" The truth is I have been stressed, depressed and sad because of the tests :(

Dr. Kağnıcı is one of the leading Turkish researchers of counseling psychology who is interested in the relationships between multiculturalism and teaching counseling. She has published articles about learning and teaching multicultural skills to enhance the outcomes of counseling relationship.

This article concentrates on collaborative methods in education to highlight their potentials in elevated learning outcomes. In the article, there is also some mention of learning by design and project-based pathways. I guess it is worth to check it out. By the way Edutopia is a great source for educational articles and videos.

There is no agreement on whether studying the way the brain works can help improve educational outcomes, but the discussion is a hot topic amongst educational experts.