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anonymous

Education Week: States Mulling Creativity Indexes for Schools - 3 views

  • Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin recently announced plans for a public-private partnership to produce an innovation index for schools, which she described as a "public measurement of the opportunities for our students to engage in innovative work."
  • "We're tapping into a very clear need, as expressed particularly by employers, to reincorporate into the curriculum and school experience many opportunities for young people to develop creativity-oriented skills," said Massachusetts Sen. Stan Rosenberg, a Democrat and the lead sponsor of his chamber's 2010 bill calling for the index
  • fostering creativity has become a high priority among some of the United States' top economic competitors. In a recent Education Week Commentary, Byong-man Ahn, a former South Korean minister of education, said that "creating the type of education in which creativity is emphasized over rote learning" is a top education goal for his government.
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  • In fact, some emerging research seems to point to two critical aspects of creativity that can be hard to teach: the willingness to take risks and learn from failure, and the ability to transfer ways of solving problems between seemingly unrelated situations
  • they are keenly aware of the dangers of crafting an oversimplified index that fails to adequately reflect opportunities for creativity, or that fosters the wrong incentives
  • In California, the bill passed in January to develop a creativity index is similar to the Massachusetts measure, but is explicitly identified as a voluntary index. Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed a version without that stipulation, included in a broader bill, last year
anonymous

Sociocultural Theories of Motivation | Education.com - 2 views

  • instructional environments found in the home and in the classroom. These studies provided detailed accounts of the way that students' regulation of their own thinking processes originated in the negotiation of goals and norms among students, teacher, and families. These studies were important because they identified the source of motivation as the relationships that students developed. This included relationships with school activities and relationships with the many other participants in school learning. Therefore, motivating classroom learners meant helping them coordinate the goals implied by a range of different relationships, and recognizing that some of the goals will conflict with other goals. This implies that before searching for strategies to motivate individual learners, teachers need to help students learn to negotiate worthwhile goals for themselves and their classmates. In doing so, teachers need to acknowledging the influence of other goals which might interfere with classroom learning, but which have real value for students.
  • “motivation in context” had emerged as an important theme among motivation researchers.
  • According to Gee (2004), the abstract generalizations that are taken for granted in modern cognitive perspectives come at the end of a long process of socially situated activity—if they come at all. Because of this, situative theorists believe that students' learning is strongly attached to their participation in the construction of situated knowledge in socially meaningful activity.
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  • While continuing to give ample treatment to motivational strategies that focus on individual learners, many also point out that teachers need to help the classroom community negotiate worthwhile goals, acknowledging that the students themselves help create and change these very goals.
  • the widely held distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation was too crude to be of much use in developing intentional learning environments. Both of these seminal considerations of situated learning suggested that the motivational strategies from earlier individually oriented theories of motivation might actually interfere with efforts to motivate engagement in situated learning. Given that situative theorists consider all learning to be socially situated, situative perspectives on learning seemed to have profound implications for motivating classroom learning.
  • Hickey and McCaslin (2001) also described the basic tension between earlier behavioral and cognitive views of motivation. As illustrated by the seemingly intractable debate over extrinsic incentives (e.g., prizes, competition, and grades), they argued that these tensions were a major obstacle to educational reform. Reflecting their very different views of learning, cognitive theorists have long argued that incentives interfere with natural learning processes, while behavioral theorists have long argued that incentive are useful for encouraging learning. Hickey and McCaslin argued that a relatively neutral situative view of motivation might offer a more useful lens for studying and comparing behavioral and cognitive strategies for motivating engagement. From a situative perspective, incentives and competition are not inherently good or bad. Rather, all motivational practices should first be analyzed in terms of their impact on students' success at negotiating meaningfulness of the language and concepts of the particular academic domain. Importantly, a situative theory of motivation assumes that the success of these negotiations is the primary source of individual motivation towards the domain. Therefore it is the collective success of these negotiations that predicts whether or not those individuals will be motivated to engage in the practices of the domain in the future.
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    Dan Hickey's article on different models of motivation - proposing that socio-cultural and situative approaches are more appropriate than individual-based models.
anonymous

Education Week: Public Gets Glimpse of Science Standards - 0 views

  • Other top priorities in the document are promoting depth over breadth in science education, ensuring greater coherence in learning across grade levels, and helping students understand the cross-cutting nature of crucial concepts, such as energy and matter, that span scientific disciplines
  • “First of all, it’s not just about what kids know; it’s about what they know and are able to do,” said Mr. McLaren, who also is the president of the Council of State Science Supervisors, an organization for science education officials. “It’s about using the practices of an engineer, a scientist, to gain a deeper understanding of the core knowledge.”
  • “One huge shift is moving away from covering everything, and instead doing what is essential and doing it very well,” she said.
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  • The standards target four disciplines: the physical sciences; life sciences; earth and space sciences; and engineering, technology, and
  • Echoing the NRC framework, the standards document includes evolution as a core principle for understanding the life sciences. The draft is also explicit about the role humans play in climate change.
  • “Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (‘global warming’).”
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    New science Standards for the "Common Core" are available for review through a link in this article.
anonymous

Why women leave academia and why universities should be worried | Higher Education Netw... - 0 views

  • Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as PhD candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great.
  • Men and women show radically different developments regarding their intended future careers. At the beginning of their studies, 72% of women express an intention to pursue careers as researchers, either in industry or academia. Among men, 61% express the same intention.By the third year, the proportion of men planning careers in research had dropped from 61% to 59%. But for the women, the number had plummeted from 72% in the first year to 37% as they finish their studies.
  • the constant hunt for funding for research projects is a significant impediment for both men and women.
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  • But women in greater numbers than men see academic careers as all-consuming, solitary and as unnecessarily competitive.
  • Successful female professors are perceived by female PhD candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless.
anonymous

Education Week: 'Digital Badges' Would Represent Students' Skill Acquisition - 2 views

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    skeptics argue that introducing digital badges into informal education settings-where most agree they would have the greatest impact initially-could bring too much structure and hierarchy to the very places students go to seek refuge from formal achievement tracking. And many point to research that suggests rewarding students, with a badge for instance, for activities they would have otherwise completed out of personal interest or intellectual curiosity actually decreases their motivation to do those tasks.
anonymous

Education Week: Bringing STEM Into Focus - 2 views

  • For example, the K-12 framework effectively turns attention away from a content-specific definition of STEM to a more epistemic one—the sources, strategies, or practices from which science and, by extension, STEM knowledge comes and, in turn, is shared. It may well be that this long-standing inability to come up with an appropriate definition for STEM is an outgrowth of framing STEM as a fixed entity, an "it" instead of an assemblage of practices and processes that transcend disciplinary lines and from which knowledge and learning of a particular kind emerges.
  • ogether with shared practices, these three dimensions of the NRC framework—practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas—reflect the realities of contemporary science and engineering, inclusive of mathematics, where concepts and practices, often very dependent on technologies, create productive bridges across STEM disciplines. Such bridges make interdisciplinary collaboration possible and, most importantly, provide a set of strategies and tools unique to the process of STEM learning and teaching.
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    Talks about defining STEM and the NRC Framework for Science nad Engineering.
anonymous

Public Debates "Personalized Learning" in Race to the Top - Digital Education - Educati... - 2 views

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    Describes the support for "Personalized Learning" that was exhibited during the comment period for the Race to the Top legislation.
Virginia Glatzer

Arts & Bots - 0 views

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    Use art supplies, a circuit board, lights, motors and sensors to design, build and program robots that tell stories and express emotions. Robot Diaries development began in the summer of 2006 in a series of participatory design workshops with middle school girls. We set out to find a way to keep middle school girls engaged with robotics and authoring technology - at an age when many girls get away from such activities - perceiving them as activities for boys. The program has since developed to include both boys and girls - drawing upon students' interests in arts, crafts, communication, and storytelling while providing them with technical and design knowledge which enables them to build and utilize their own personal robots. Robot Diaries is currently in various stages of implementation in middle and elementary schools, kindergartens and after school programs.
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    This was shared on the CFF Coach listserv as something for elementary gifted - if you can get funding.
Virginia Glatzer

EGFI - engineering go for it - 1 views

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    STEM magazine for kids with teacher lesson plans and activities
Virginia Glatzer

tarapark - NASA- BEST Program - 0 views

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    From a PETE&C presentation on a Virtual STEM lab for the PA Virtual Charter School
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    From a PETE&C presentation on a Virtual STEM lab for the PA Virtual Charter School
Virginia Glatzer

NASA - NASA's BEST - Home - 0 views

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    From a PETE&C presentation on a Virtual STEM lab for the PA Virtual Charter School
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    From a PETE&C presentation on a Virtual STEM lab for the PA Virtual Charter School
anonymous

Kevin Carey: The Higher Education Monopoly Is Crumbling As We Speak | The New Republic - 0 views

  • The predominant higher education business model of the future may be one where the education itself costs students nothing—the availability of free open educational resources is constantly growing—and students only pay small fees to cover the cost of assessing their learning.
  • “badges”
  • The Mozilla Foundation, funded by the people who developed the Firefox web browser, are sponsoring a competition for the creation of badge systems that will help students organize the credentials they receive from different providers.
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  • Traditional degrees have the great advantage of being simple and universally understood. The problem is that they provide little information about what students actually know and are becoming more expensive all the time.
  • There will always be a market for boutique educational models that only the wealthy can afford. But for hundreds of other colleges and universities that lack such advantages or foresight, the future may not look anything like the past.
Virginia Glatzer

Explore Your Future - STEM - 0 views

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    STEM Career Match, videos about a variety of STEM careers, programs outside of school for exploring STEM careers, shares earnings, outlook, tech skills, how do I get there, etc. on STEM careers
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    Shared by instructional technology coaches in response to a plea for online career planning/personal assessments
Virginia Glatzer

Math in Daily Life - 0 views

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    Shared by instructional technology coaches in response to a plea for online career planning/personal assessments
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    Shared by instructional technology coaches in response to a plea for online career planning/personal assessments
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    Shared by instructional technology coaches in response to a plea for online career planning/personal assessments
Virginia Glatzer

NOVA | Making Vaccines - 0 views

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    Shared by instructional technology coaches in response to a plea for online career planning/personal assessments
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    Shared by instructional technology coaches in response to a plea for online career planning/personal assessments
anonymous

Three female engineers build toys to inspire young girls to love science | VentureBeat - 1 views

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    Love the first line... "When Alice Brooks was a little girl, she asked her father for a Barbie doll. He gave her a saw, which she used to hack a dollhouse."
aybüke gül Türker

Evidence Persists of STEM Achievement Gap for Girls - 2 views

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    With the 40th anniversary of Title IX just days away, one key area where questions about gender equity persist is STEM education and the under-representation of women in those professions. In researching this subject for a forthcoming EdWeek story, I discovered some evidence that a STEM achievement gap persists for girls at the K-12 level, especially in science.
Virginia Glatzer

Ideas for teaching STEM-subject merit badges - Scouting magazine - 1 views

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    STEM merit badges in Boy Scouts
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    STEM merit badges in Boy Scouts
Virginia Glatzer

ROBOTC.net - 0 views

shared by Virginia Glatzer on 07 May 12 - Cached
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    OBOTC is the premiere robotics programming language for educational robotics and competitions. ROBOTC is a C-Based Programming Language with an Easy-to-Use Development Environment.
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