Using Action Research to Transform a Traditional Reading Practicum

This chapter describes how faculty from the University of Central Florida collaboratively worked to transform an undergraduate reading practicum course utilizing action research and case study methodology. Seeking to develop preservice educators as teacher researchers, the reading faculty responded by developing and implementing the Action Research Case Study Project. This semester-long project required faculty to redesign the course to reflect this emphasis. This chapter includes the modifications made to the course content, the creation of rubrics for evaluating the project, and feedback mechanisms employed to facilitate student success. The project has been implemented for two semesters; various data sources are shared to document the effectiveness of the project including faculty input, survey data, student work examples, and student reflections.

Seeking Justice in Your Own Backyard

This chapter analyzes a summer workshop that invited middle and high school students to create digital public service announcements (PSAs) about a social justice topic of their choice. In this chapter, the author investigates the concepts of media literacy, critical literacy, and critical media literacy, then describes in detail the two-week workshop, ending with examples of student work as well as student reflections and instructor recommendations for future workshops. Detailed lesson plans are included to encourage teachers to replicate this workshop in their own classrooms as part of a unit on critical media literacy.

Rolling With the Flow

COVID-19 created a paradigm shift in higher education (HE), speeding up a process that was already underway and forcing institutions and instructors to develop the competencies necessary to offer effective delivery and resources online. Student reflections on Spring 2020 suggested that institutions were not always successful in their transitions. Students saw gaps in crucial areas, including online instructor presence, social presence for instructors and peers, and instructor immediacy. The purpose of this chapter is to propose best practices for instructional practice and technology in the online virtual education space to increase student engagement, instructor immediacy, and online social presence. HE institutions must embrace or enhance a variety of techniques that will improve the student experience. HE continues its shift toward cutting-edge technology to scale, streamline, and improve student engagement and interaction while creating new ways of establishing instructor presence and immediacy.

Can Developing Virtues Improve Dialogue Across Political Difference?

After the polarizing 2016 presidential election, I heard from many distressed students who felt they lacked the skills or confidence to have difficult conversations with those who disagreed with them politically. In response, I developed a course that aims to help students grow in the virtues and skills necessary for listening and dialogue, putting these to use discussing controversial issues including abortion, gun rights and regulations, cancel culture, speech on campus, immigration, environmental policy, and kneeling for the national anthem. In this article, I make the case for foregrounding virtues such as attentiveness, curiosity, intellectual humility, and empathy to promote good dialogue and prepare students to engage productively across difference. Then, I describe the course design, share qualitative results from student reflections, and highlight insights that are applicable across disciplines. Finally, I address practical obstacles and ethical concerns that have arisen when teaching polarizing topics and offer responses to these challenges.

Wikis as a Tool for Co-constructed Learning in Higher Education – An Exploratory Study in an Albanian Higher Education

This study explores the effectiveness of wikis in a teaching course in teacher formation and its pedagogical implications with the aim of determining whether wikis will influence the learning experiences and the learning out-comes of the students in a middle-income, post-communist country as Albania. For this, we implemented student-generated wikis into a master’s course on teaching and examined student reflections on their learning outcomes and other pedagogical effects. A mixed method methodology was employed. The findings of the study were informed by triangulating data from the analysis of the student-generated wikis, students’ reflections on the experience, as well as a comparison of the learning outcomes based on the exit exams of this group of students and the group of the prior academic year. Our data suggest that wikis help support collaborative learning, but at the same time they also encourage independent thinking. Teachers’ authority is minimized, empowering students’ ownership and authorship, leading to a continuous process of modification and improvement through interactions among group members via wikis. The data present compelling evidence in favor of wikis, as an organic tool to facilitate co-constructed learning which students seem to enjoy.

Innovative Pedagogy to Overcome Student Struggles with Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a problem that affects English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner all over the world. Rather than simply labelling students who plagiarize as “offenders,” finding solutions to guide them away from it is of primary importance. Ten instructors teaching a 30-week EFL academic writing course at a large urban university in Japan were interviewed about their methodologies to do so. Two academic writing classes (N=40) were asked to write reflections on what they were learning and how it was being taught to them. The student reflections and instructor interview transcripts were coded and analysed, instructor strategies to deal with plagiarism proactively in this context identified, and student responses to these strategies explored. The strategies were largely found to be a combination of existing methods with one notable exception, which is introduced in detail here. It is based on Rubin’s Four Tendencies personality framework, which is a method that relies on instructors recognizing learners as responding to expectations in one of four ways and harnessing this to help them achieve. This personalized instruction can be seen as one of the modern approaches to facilitate learning and engagement outlined by Owens and Kadakia (2016). Student responses to it were positive, and the instructor using it felt that it both reduced stress and improved relationships with students. As such, the method has been added to the departmental pedagogy for the next intake of students.

Intergenerational Communication as Intervention: Social Isolation in Older Adults During COVID-19

Social isolation and loneliness are prevalent and impactful in the lives of older adult across care settings, and the emergence of a deadly global pandemic requiring social distancing and quarantining exacerbated these experiences significantly in 2020. A semester-long communication-focused clinical project was developed and piloted for sophomore bachelor of nursing science (BSN) students during fall 2020. Affording preclinical nursing students the opportunity to develop communication skills early in their program of study holds potential, and learning the story of older adults appears to be mutually beneficial; older adults serve as mentors and share their story, and preclinical nursing students have an opportunity to learn about their mentor’s life, challenging some prevalent stereotypes about aging. A pre- post-clinical survey of student attitudes toward older adults suggests a dramatic positive shift in perspective, and unsolicited, anecdotal comments in student reflections support this finding: “...it helped me feel much more open to working with older adults in the future”; “This conversation taught me that my assumptions about the older generation are not always correct”. Of older adult participants, 96% reported the experience enriched and enhanced their social connectedness, with 88% requesting to participate in the program again. Narrative comments from residents indicated that their involvement enabled them to feel engaged and purposeful: “I was a mentor”; “Conversations were so alive. Connections with curious young people fill my heart and soul.” Intergenerational sharing of life stories has the potential for both healing and growth and may provide an antidote to ageism.

Exploring Visualisation as a Strategy for Improving Year 4 & 5 Student Achievement on Mathematics Word Problems

<p>Solving mathematics word problems is more difficult for many students than solving comparable number only problems. Given the wide use of word problems in class teaching and in assessments there is potential for students not to achieve to their full ability. This study aimed to investigate if students’ comprehension of mathematics word problems, their accuracy in choosing the correct operation, and the number of word problems solved correctly could be increased through using drawings and mental visualisation. This mixed method intervention study involved 10 Year 4 and 5 students in an inner city New Zealand school. Two separate interventions were used with different groups of five students identified as being at risk of low achievement in mathematics. Each group was involved in three intervention sessions to help with solving mathematics word problems. The first included instruction in creating drawings, and the second using mental visualisation. The study data included pre- and post-tests, verbal student reflections, and student drawings. Results showed that both groups made improvements during their interventions in the number of problems solved, the number of operations chosen correctly, and in their ability to identify and write the equation described in the word problems. Both groups also increased their achievement in number only problems. There were no significant differences between the results gained by students in the different interventions. The findings suggest that visualising word problems is an effective strategy for solving mathematics word problems and is an important step as a part of a mathematics word problem solving process. Implications for teachers include that creating representations is important for students’ understanding in mathematics and crucially, that creating both internal representations (visualisations) and external representations (drawings) can and needs to be taught for maximising achievement.</p>

Exploring Visualisation as a Strategy for Improving Year 4 & 5 Student Achievement on Mathematics Word Problems

<p>Solving mathematics word problems is more difficult for many students than solving comparable number only problems. Given the wide use of word problems in class teaching and in assessments there is potential for students not to achieve to their full ability. This study aimed to investigate if students’ comprehension of mathematics word problems, their accuracy in choosing the correct operation, and the number of word problems solved correctly could be increased through using drawings and mental visualisation. This mixed method intervention study involved 10 Year 4 and 5 students in an inner city New Zealand school. Two separate interventions were used with different groups of five students identified as being at risk of low achievement in mathematics. Each group was involved in three intervention sessions to help with solving mathematics word problems. The first included instruction in creating drawings, and the second using mental visualisation. The study data included pre- and post-tests, verbal student reflections, and student drawings. Results showed that both groups made improvements during their interventions in the number of problems solved, the number of operations chosen correctly, and in their ability to identify and write the equation described in the word problems. Both groups also increased their achievement in number only problems. There were no significant differences between the results gained by students in the different interventions. The findings suggest that visualising word problems is an effective strategy for solving mathematics word problems and is an important step as a part of a mathematics word problem solving process. Implications for teachers include that creating representations is important for students’ understanding in mathematics and crucially, that creating both internal representations (visualisations) and external representations (drawings) can and needs to be taught for maximising achievement.</p>