Professional development to enhance teachers' practices in using information and communication technologies (ICTs) as cognitive tools: Lessons learned from a design-based research study

Technology integration in K-12 classrooms is usually overly teacher-centered and has insufficient impact on students' learning, especially in enhancing students' higher-order cognitive skills. The purpose of this project is to facilitate science teachers' use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as cognitive tools to shift their practices from traditional teacher-centered methods to constructivist, student-centered ones. This paper describes the outcomes and lessons learned from an application of design-based research (DBR) in the implementation and refinement of a teacher professional development (PD) program that is a key component of the overall project. This DBR study involved 25 middle-school science teachers from 24 schools whose implementation of cognitive tools with their students in science classrooms and virtually through a social networking site were observed over four years. A mixed-methodology was utilized to examine the impact of the cognitive tools intervention on teachers' classroom practices and students' development of new literacy skills. Identifying reusable design principles related to technology integration was another focus of the DBR study. The results revealed teachers' positive changes in their classroom practices by gradually allowing students to take control over the use of technology, and positive impact on students' ICT skills and science learning. Design principles for future professional development programs aimed at preparing teachers to adopt a cognitive tools approach are described.     

An introduction to CFEtools

Many engineering analysis problems that have the greatest value to customers fall outside the scope of existing off-the-shelf analysis tools. Typical reasons for existing tools not solving an engineering problem include:

• •not being able to model the problems in physics;
• •a coupled multidisciplinary problem;
• •assembly level physics;
• •a need to control the solution strategy;
• •a need to integrate disparate existing applications.

Enter CFEtools. CFEtools is a tool for the development of CAE applications and the enhancement of existing CAE applications. CFEtools enables the development of CAE capabilities two orders of magnitude faster than would be possible with traditional tools. For the first time, CFEtools makes custom tailored analysis solutions economically feasible. Implemented as a C++ object oriented library, CFEtools offers all the advantages of high level, plug and play models with the flexibility of a modern programming language.     

Enacting a technology-based science curriculum across a grade level: The journey of teachers' appropriation

Studying teacher enactment of an innovation helps us understand the process of effective spread of a curricular innovation to teachers who have differing levels of content readiness, pedagogical orientations, teaching competency, different student profiles, and professional development experiences. Towards this, we explore how different teachers in the same grade level appropriated a common science curriculum enabled by mobile technologies in their classrooms. The innovative science curriculum: Mobilized 5E (Engage–Explore–Explain–Elaborate–Evaluate) Science Curriculum was developed through an iterative cycle of design-based research. As curriculum designs were not self-sufficient by themselves, the enactments of the teachers differed in how they leveraged on students' artifacts, how they integrated the technology into the class, the ways in which they interacted with the students, and how they scaffolded students' activities in a mobile learning setting. In this study, the teachers' enactments of mobilized 5E lessons were observed, analyzed and compared, with the aim of exploring the differences of lesson enactment amongst them. The results showed that teachers' different pedagogical orientations affected their instructions, especially their ways of technology integration in the class, and their patterns of interactions with the students. Based on the exploration of the teacher enactment of the mobilized 5E curriculum, implications are drawn concerning the implementation of innovative curricula implementation and the supports for teacher professional development of such innovation with the ultimate purpose of sustaining and scaling.     

Revisiting cyberbullying: Perspectives from Taiwanese teachers

Cyberbullying among students has received extensive attention from researchers and educators. Most research is, however, based on student reports while teachers' perceptions of this aggressive behavior among students have rarely been studied. We surveyed 2821 Taiwanese teachers on their perceptions of cyberbullying among students, including the types and tools, the ability to remain anonymous, students' responses, and their own practices of handling cyberbullying incidents at school. The results showed that teachers believed that the circulation of embarrassing pictures and videos was the most prevalent type of cyberbullying but that instant messaging was the most frequently used tool. Our findings also revealed teachers' tendency of overestimating students' willingness to report cyberbullying. The students' grade level that the teachers taught and whether they take on administrative duties were found to influence their perceptions of student cyberbullying. We found that teachers were not confident to handle cyberbullying incidents and we suggest that anti-cyberbullying training be included in teacher education.     

Constructing images of science: people,technologies, and practices

Project SEARCH (Science Education and Research for CHildren) is an outreach program designed to bring the science resources of a large research university to classrooms and community centers. University science students share activities, materials, and content expertise with local classrooms and after-school programs. Using observations, surveys, and interviews, we examined the experiences of these students as teachers and role models for the children, with a particular focus on after-school programs. We found that there was often a tension between the students' notions of formal science learning, and the demands of the after-school settings for lively and entertaining activities. But community agencies and schools uniformly valued the enthusiasm and the resources provided by the SEARCH students. Children were engaged in the activities and looked forward to the students' visits. Most importantly, they saw the students as positive and diverse models for the role of scientist. The SEARCH experience highlights both the value of providing diverse and challenging experiences for children, and the need for dialog and reflection on those experiences.     

Students' attitudes toward playing games and using games in education: Comparing Scotland and the Netherlands

Games-based learning has captured the interest of educationalists and industrialists who seek to exploit the characteristics of computer games as they are perceived by some to be a potentially effective approach for teaching and learning. Despite this interest in using games-based learning there is a dearth of empirical evidence supporting the validity of the approach covering the wider context of gaming and education. This study presents a large scale gaming survey, involving 887 students from 13 different Higher Education (HE) institutes in Scotland and the Netherlands, which examines students' characteristics related to their gaming preferences, game playing habits, and their perceptions and thoughts on the use of games in education. It presents a comparison of three separate groups of students: a group in regular education in a Scottish university, a group in regular education in universities in the Netherlands and a distance learning group from a university in the Netherlands. This study addresses an overall research question of: Can computer games be used for educational purposes at HE level in regular and distance education in different countries? The study then addresses four sub-research questions related to the overall research question:

• •What are the different game playing habits of the three groups?
• •What are the different motivations for playing games across the three groups?
• •What are the different reasons for using games in HE across the three groups?
• •What are the different attitudes towards games across the three groups?

To our knowledge this is the first in-depth cross-national survey on gaming and education. We found that a large number of participants believed that computer games could be used at HE level for educational purposes and that further research in the area of game playing habits, motivations for playing computer games and motivations for playing computer games in education are worthy of extensive further investigation. We also found a clear distinction between the views of students in regular education and those in distance education. Regular education students in both countries rated all motivations for playing computer games as significantly more important than distance education students. Also the results suggest that Scottish students aim to enhance their social experience with regards to competition and cooperation, while Dutch students aim to enhance their leisurely experience with regards to leisure, feeling good, preventing boredom and excitement.     

Towards an analysis framework for investigating students' engagement and learning in educational blogs

Educational blogs are currently gaining in popularity in schools and higher education institutions, and they are widely promoted as collaborative tools supporting students' active learning. However, literature review on educational blogging revealed a lack of a complete and consistent framework for studying and assessing students' engagement and the impact of blogging on students' learning. This study reports on the application of an analysis framework for evaluating blogging learning activities, based on two well‐documented models, those of Community of Inquiry (CoI) and Social Network Analysis. The framework proposed is examined through an empirical study involving 21 K‐9 students, coming from two classes, in Greece. This investigation shed light into the different ways of students' engagement in a blog‐based project, namely their social and cognitive presence that supported the development of a CoI and learning. The results suggest that the students, through their different roles in the blog, achieved higher thinking and cognitive levels.     

Teacher regulation of cognitive activities during student collaboration: Effects of learning analytics

By collaboratively solving a task, students are challenged to share ideas, express their thoughts, and engage in discussion. Collaborating groups of students may encounter problems concerning cognitive activities (such as a misunderstanding of the task material). If these problems are not addressed and resolved in time, the collaborative process is hindered. The teacher plays an important role in monitoring and solving the occurrence of problems. To provide adaptive support, teachers continuously have to be aware of students' activities in order to identify relevant events, including those that require intervention. Because the amount of available information is high, teachers may be supported by learning analytics. The present experimental study (n = 40) explored the effect of two learning analytics tools (the Concept Trail and Progress Statistics) that give information about students' cognitive activities. The results showed that when teachers had access to learning analytics, they were not better at detecting problematic groups, but they did offer more support in general, and more specifically targeted groups that experienced problems. This could indicate that learning analytics increase teachers' confidence to act, which in turn means students could benefit more from the teacher's presence.     

Unpacking students' conceptualizations through haptic feedback

While it is clear that the use of computer simulations has a beneficial effect on learning when compared to instruction without computer simulations, there is still room for improvement to fully realize their benefits for learning. Haptic technologies can fulfill the educational potential of computer simulations by adding the sense of touch. Visuohaptic simulations may not only help students visualize these concepts, but they may also have the capability of enriching the learning experience and enhancing retention. To provide additional insights about how students conceptualize abstract and difficult concepts in science, this study proposes a sequencing approach. The research questions are: (1) what are undergraduate students' ways of conceptualizing electric fields through haptic feedback? And (2) what are undergraduate students' perceptions of using visuohaptic simulations for their learning of electric force concepts? Participants included nine undergraduate students who participated in a think aloud procedure. Data were analysed qualitatively using open coding followed by axial coding. The results suggest that students' conceptualized electric force concepts through embodied haptic experiences by inferring force–distance relationship, sign inference, shape of field and indirectly inferring the concept of electric potential. Students also perceived the value of using visual plus haptic simulations to help them understand and retain concepts.     

Social Representations of High School Students About Mathematics Assessment

The perceptions of students about assessment in mathematics classes have been sparsely investigated. In order to fill this gap, this qualitative study aims to identify the social representations (understood as the system of values, ideas, and practices about a social object) of high school students regarding assessment in mathematics. We used semistructured focus group interviews to obtain data (N = 50). The data were examined using theoretical thematic analysis with the assistance of the specialized ATLAS.ti software. Eight themes or social representations emerged (e.g., assessment that measures the students' learning or assessment that measures the advances or what has been acquired). The results are consistent with literature that shows that students' representations about assessment in mathematics are closely linked to their representations of mathematics itself and the learning of it and also to their representation of what is fair and what is not.     

Networking,Storytelling and Knowledge Production in First-Year Writing

As writing teachers, we seek to validate the knowledge that students bring to the classroom while introducing and cultivating new methods, strategies, techniques and technologies that may serve them now and in the future. In this article we describe an approach we take that integrates curricular and extracurricular co-apprenticeship strategies using public writing models in conjunction with social networking tools. With publication as a final goal, we urge students to move from expressing personal problems to addressing social issues, using a private, non-commercial learning network NoDiff <http://NoDiff.com> as a safe zone for skills development, knowledge production and social inquiry. In taking this approach, we resist dichotomies that place professional skills training in strict opposition to critical pedagogy. We argue that many of the so-called “extracurricular” composing activities that most of today's students engage in lay the groundwork for both professional and civic participation. Acknowledging that we as composition teachers are also beginners in the world of 21^st century communication, we emphasize both (1) the continual transference of skills and knowledge among teachers and learners; and (2) the importance of providing what is often lacking in skills-based ‘new literacy’ training, namely a critical pedagogical approach to learning as social engagement and critical intervention.     

Casting shadows in the science classroom

Abstract

Research in mathematics and science education frequently directs one's attention to the limited content knowledge of elementary pre‐service teachers. It is believed, however, that research of this nature leads to a deficit approach to understanding more about the teaching and learning of these subjects. In addition to focusing on the knowers of school mathematics and science, there is a call to acknowledge the problematic nature of knowing (in) mathematics and science. In this paper, the metaphor of shadows is used in a critical exploration of what it means to know and how the cultures of classrooms have shaped these images of knowing. Through the voices of pre‐service teachers, this paper directs one's attention to objects that cast shadows on the learning and knowing of mathematics and science. Three such shadow‐casting objects discussed in this paper are textbooks, teachers, and gendered ideology. The paper seeks to critically illuminate the problematic nature of what it means to know (in) mathematics and science by examining the shadowy texture of unquestioned ideologies.     

Instructing students on effective sequences of examples and problems: Does self-regulated learning improve from knowing what works and why?

Nowadays, students often practice problem-solving skills in online learning environments with the help of examples and problems. This requires them to self-regulate their learning. It is questionable how novices self-regulate their learning from examples and problems and whether they need support. The present study investigated the open questions (1) to what extent students' (novices) task selections align with instructional design principles and (2) whether informing them about these principles would improve their task selections, learning outcomes, and motivation. Higher education students (N = 150) learned a problem-solving procedure by fixed sequences of examples and problems (FS-condition), or by self-regulated learning (SRL). The SRL participants selected tasks from a database, varying in format, complexity, and cover story, either with (ISRL-condition) or without (SRL-condition) watching a video detailing the instructional design principles. Students' task-selection patterns in both SRL conditions largely corresponded to the principles, although tasks were built up in complexity more often in the ISRL-condition than in the SRL-condition. Moreover, there was still room for improvement in students' task selections after solving practice problems. The video instruction helped students to better apply certain principles, but did not enhance learning and motivation. Finally, there were no test performance or motivational differences among conditions. Although these findings might suggest it is relatively ‘safe’ to allow students to independently start learning new problems-solving tasks using examples and problems, caution is warranted: It is unclear whether these findings generalize to other student populations, as the students participating in this study have had some experience with similar tasks or learning with examples. Moreover, as there was still room for improvement in students' task selections, follow-up research should investigate how we can further improve self-regulated learning from examples and practice problems.     

Use of blogs in pre-service teacher education to improve student engagement

Web 2.0 technologies allow average computer users to be able to publish on the Internet without having to know complex computer technical knowledge, which gives these technologies powerful potential to facilitate student engagement in various learning environments. However, a knowledge gap exists in the literature related to factors affecting student engagement with Web 2.0 technologies. The purpose of this study is to understand factors affecting student engagement in a pre-service teacher education program that uses blogs to expand in-class discussions about technology integration. First year pre-service teachers in a mathematics education department participated in the study. Data were collected with a survey that was developed to measure student engagement with blog use. Results show that student motivation, reasons to use blog in the course, and level of challenge perceived by the students affect students' engagement with blog use. Gender and technical ability of students do not impact students' engagement. As a result, blogs can be utilized to expand in-class discussions equally well for all students.     

An inverse analysis of unobserved trigger factor for slope stability evaluation

This paper presents an inverse analysis of unobserved trigger factors for slope failures and landslides, based on structural equation modeling (SEM). Quantitative prediction models generally elucidate the relationship between past slope failures and causal factors (e.g. lithology, soil, slope, aspect, etc.), but do not consider trigger factors (e.g. rail fall, earthquake, weathering, etc.), due to difficulties in pixel-by-pixel observation of trigger factors. To overcome these, an inverse analysis algorithm on trigger factors is proposed, according to the following steps:

• •Step 1: The relationship between past slope failures (i.e. the endogenous variables), causal factors and trigger factors (i.e. the exogenous variables) are delineated on the path diagram used in SEM.
• •Step 2: The regression weights in the path diagram are estimated to minimize errors between the observed and reemerged ‘variance–covariance matrix’ by the model.
• •Step 3: As an inverse estimation, through the measurement equation in SEM between causal and trigger factors, a trigger factor influence (TFI) map is proposed.

As an application, TFI maps are produced with respect to ‘slope failures’ and ‘landslides’, separately. As a final outcome, the differences in these TFI maps are delineated on a ‘difference’ (DIF) map. The DIF map and its interpretation are useful, not only for assessing danger areas affected by trigger factors, but also for ‘heuristic information’ in locating field measuring systems.     

Preface: Volume 59, Issue 3

QAPL'01This volume contains the Post-Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming Languages (QAPL'01). The workshop was held in Firenze, Italy on Friday 7th September 2001, as satellite event to Principles, Logics, and Implementations of high-level programming languages, PLI'01.The majority of approaches in program semantics and analysis are arguably concentrated on qualitative investigations of various computational properties. As a result, some aspects of computation are neglected, which are of a quantitative nature. Such aspects are nevertheless important and sometimes essential in determining the behaviour of systems. As an example, issues related to resource consumption (storage, time, bandwidth, etc.) cannot be ignored when systems of interacting, competing or cooperating processes are considered.The aim of this workshop was to discuss appropriate models of programming languages, which are able to capture quantitative aspects of computation. Such models are good candidates to provide the base of new approaches in semantics and program analysis. Their investigation will hopefully not just allow for a better understanding of program behaviour (e.g. how agents compete for a limited resource), but also help to establish better connections with related complexity theoretic questions.Probabilistic languages and real-time languages constitute two important prototypical examples of quantitative models. But we encouraged the contributions covering other and/or more general quantitative aspects in the design, analysis and implementation of programming languages, with particular emphasis on the functional and declarative paradigms.The papers presented at the workshop were selected by the program committee consisting of

• •Luca de Alfaro, University of California at Berkeley, USA
• •Frank de Boer, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
• •Alessandra Di Pierro, University of Pisa, Italy
• •Maurizio Gabbrielli, University of Udine, Italy
• •Marta Z. Kwiatkowska, University of Birmingham, UK
• •Herbert Wiklicky, Imperial College, UK.

At the workshop there was one invited talk by

• •David Sands: Asymptotic Reasoning Meets Programming Language Semantics

as well as eight contributed talks:

• •Keye Martin: Powerdomains and Zero Finding
• •Thom Frühwirth: As Time Goes By: Complexity Analysis of Simplification Rule
• •Antonio Brogi, Alessandra Di Pierro and Herbert Wiklicky: On Language Expressiveness and Dimension
• •David Clark, Sebastian Hunt and Pasquale Malacaria: Quantitative Analysis of the Leakage of Confidential Data
• •Marius C. Bujorianu and Manuela L. Bujorianu: On the Hilbert Machine Quantitative Computational Model
• •Frank S. de Boer, Maurizio Gabbrielli and Maria Chiara Meo: Proving Correctness of Timed Concurrent Constraint Programs
• •Nicos Angelopoulos and David R. Gilbert: A Statistical View of Probabilistic Finite Domains
• •Richard Kieburtz: Real-time Reactive Programming for Embedded Controllers

These Post-Proceedings contain the reviewed and revised versions of the first four of these presentations.October 2002 Alessandra di Pierro Herbert Wiklicky     

An intelligent system for monitoring students' engagement in large classroom teaching through facial expression recognition

Students' disengagement problem has become critical in the modern scenario due to various distractions and lack of student-teacher interactions. This problem is exacerbated with large offline classrooms, where it becomes challenging for teachers to monitor students' engagement and maintain the right-level of interactions. Traditional ways of monitoring students' engagement rely on self-reporting or using physical devices, which have limitations for offline classroom use. Student's academic affective states (e.g., moods and emotions) analysis has potential for creating intelligent classrooms, which can autonomously monitor and analyse students' engagement and behaviours in real-time. In recent literature, a few computer vision based methods have been proposed, but they either work only in the e-learning domain or have limitations in real-time processing and scalability for large offline classes. This paper presents a real-time system for student group engagement monitoring by analysing their facial expressions and recognizing academic affective states: ‘boredom,’ ‘confuse,’ ‘focus,’ ‘frustrated,’ ‘yawning,’ and ‘sleepy,’ which are pertinent in the learning environment. The methodology includes certain pre-processing steps like face detection, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based facial expression recognition model, and post-processing steps like frame-wise group engagement estimation. For training the CNN model, we created a dataset of the aforementioned facial expressions from classroom lecture videos and added related samples from three publicly available datasets, BAUM-1, DAiSEE, and YawDD, to generalize the model predictions. The trained model has achieved train and test accuracy of 78.70% and 76.90%, respectively. The proposed methodology gave promising results when compared with self-reported engagement levels by students.     

Designer®—Intelligent expert system for intelligent manufacturing systems design

This survey on expert systems activities and trends in Yugoslavia offers some results already obtained in the domain of manufacturing science and technology. In the scope of a long-term research project “Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS)—Theory and Application” a Designer® Intelligent Expert System for mafacturing engineering has been proposed and partially developed. Designer® IES is based on new developed knowledge automata theory enhanced with cellular automata concept. Induction learning by analogy and Quasimorphism knowledge mapping from real world to model world is used to generate a reasoning structure. The Intelligent Expert System is divided into three main subsystems, with a very large knowledge base:

• •Product designer
• •Process Designer, and
• •Production Planning and Control Designer.

All these segments were developed in pilot versions of expert systems for specific groups of activities inside each of these three domains.     

Enhancing middle school students' scientific learning and motivation through agent‐based learning

Facing students' decreasing motivation to pursue scientific study, schools and educators need to coordinate new technologies with pedagogical agents to effectively sustain or promote students' scientific learning and motivation to learn. Although the provision of pedagogical agents in student learning has been studied previously, it is not clear what benefits the strategy might offer with regard to student motivation. This study proposes an agent‐based mechanism that integrates problem‐solving and inquiry‐based instructions to help students better understand complex scientific concepts and to sustain their motivation to learn science. In this study, a quasi‐experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance and feasibility of our proposed mechanism. The results revealed that the agent‐based mechanism was effective and feasible for enhancing students' learning and motivation to learn. The mechanism was associated with increases in the acquisition of knowledge when compared with the control group. Its effect in promoting and sustaining students' motivation was also statistically significant. Detailed discussions of the findings are provided in this study.