Embracing Ambiguity: The intersection of biology, music, and art in secondary school teaching for student creativity

In these conversational field notes, two teachers reveal their experiences with creativity in contexts where students are encouraged to dwell in spaces of ambiguity and vulnerability in learning. Using anatomy to inform music pedagogy empowers students to work through metaphor-rich instruction in order to develop a grounded approach to artistic interpretation, while using fine art in the science classroom allows students of anatomy to explore the artistic possibilities of imagination in relation to the human body. In both cases, the crisscrossing of pedagogical lines from biology into music and music into art helped to transform students’ relationships with ambiguity from being negative and closed-off, to positive and constructive.

The Challenge of Rich Vocabulary Instruction for Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose The aims of the study were to explore responses of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to rich vocabulary instruction and to identify potential factors that contribute to outcomes. Method Children with DLD participated in a language intervention embedded within a science camp. Using parent and clinician reports, standardized tests, probes, notes, and video, we derived descriptions of seven of the campers who received a vocabulary intervention that incorporated principles of rich instruction. We present them here as a case series. Results Five cases responded to the intervention with modest gains in Tier 2 science vocabulary and science knowledge. One case demonstrated no response, and another was unable to complete the intervention. The latter two cases presented with triple risks: DLD, executive function deficits, and stressors associated with poverty. In comparison, the best responder also lived in poverty and had DLD, but he had intact executive function, strengths in extant vocabulary, stronger knowledge of science, better engagement in the science and language intervention activities, and was older. Other factors that seemed to contribute to outcomes included the complexity of the word forms and dosage. Conclusions Translating research on rich instruction to clinical practice is challenging. This case series motivated hypotheses about the nature of the challenge and what to do about it, the primary one being that the modest success of rich vocabulary instruction for children with DLD is not a limitation of the approach itself but rather a reflection of the difficulty of delivering the intervention while tailoring the targets, approach, and dosage to the needs of individual children with DLD. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13667699

Measuring the impact of incorporating systems thinking into general chemistry on affective components of student learning

Recently, there has been increased interest in incorporating systems thinking content into various chemistry classrooms. One promise of systems thinking is that students will be able to connect typical chemistry concepts learned in lectures with real-life situations through context-rich instruction. Such experiences may impact affective factors related to learning such as motivation and attitude of students. These factors have often revealed negative orientation for students in chemistry courses, where the majority of students are externally motivated while intrinsic motivation is positively correlated with students’ course performance. A modified Situational Motivation Scale (SIMS) and the short version of the Attitude towards the Subject of Chemistry Inventory (ASCIv2) were used to assess whether a systems-thinking instructional approach resulted in changes in students’ motivation and attitudes in general chemistry. Pre- and post-survey data suggest that a first-semester chemistry course that incorporates systems thinking does not induce significant positive changes in students’ motivation. End-of-the-semester motivation and attitude levels were correlated with students’ ACS exam scores, where students with higher levels of intrinsic motivation showed better performance on the ACS exam. While the results obtained in this study were not optimistic, they suggest several areas of study within systems thinking instruction as potential areas to improve both instruction and student reception of the systems thinking components of instruction.

The Challenge of Rich Vocabulary Instruction for Children with Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose: To explore responses of children with developmental language disorders (DLD) to rich vocabulary instruction and to identify potential factors that contribute to outcomes.Method: Children with DLD participated in a language intervention embedded within a science camp. Using parent and clinician reports, standardized tests, probes, notes, and video, we derived descriptions of seven of the campers who received a vocabulary intervention that incorporated principles of rich instruction. We present them here as a case series.Results: Five cases responded to the intervention with modest gains in Tier 2 science vocabulary and science knowledge. One case demonstrated no response and another was unable to complete the intervention. The latter two cases presented with triple risks: DLD, executive function deficits, and stressors associated with poverty. In comparison, the best responder also lived in poverty and had DLD but he had intact executive function, strengths in extant vocabulary, stronger knowledge of science, better engagement in the science and language intervention activities, and he was older. Other factors that seemed to contribute to outcomes included the complexity of the word forms and dosage.Conclusions: Translating research on rich instruction to clinical practice is challenging. This case series motivated hypotheses about the nature of the challenge and what to do about it, the primary one being that the modest success of rich vocabulary instruction for children with DLD is not a limitation of the approach itself but, rather a reflection of the difficulty of delivering the intervention while tailoring the targets, approach, and dosage to the needs of individual children with DLD.

Implementation of hyyrö’s bit-vector algorithm using advanced vector extensions 2

The Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) instruction set architecture was introduced by Intel’s Haswell microarchitecture that features improved processing power, wider vector registers, and a rich instruction set. This study presents an implementation of the Hyyrö’s bit-vector algorithm for pairwise Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) sequence alignment that takes advantage of Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) computing capabilities of AVX2 on modern processors. It investigated the effects of the length of the query and reference sequences to the I/O load time, computation time, and memory consumption. The result reveals that the experiment has achieved an I/O load time of ϴ(n), computation time of ϴ(n*⌈m/64⌉), and memory consumption of ϴ(n). The implementation computed more extended time complexity than the expected ϴ(n) due to instructional and architectural limitations. Nonetheless, it was par with other experiments, in terms of computation time complexity and memory consumption.

The Efficacy of the Concept-Rich Instruction with University Pre-Service Teachers in a Tanzanian Context Using Vygotskian Perspective

This paper presents the findings of a pilot study on concept-rich instruction with university pre-service teachers in a Tanzanian context. The concept-rich instruction is an instructional approach which is used to develop students’ understanding of a mathematical concept (Ben-Hur, 2006). I conducted a pilot study to determine the efficacy of the concept-rich instruction to university pre-service teachers in Tanzania using Vygotskian perspective. I used a reflective journal and pre-test questionnaire to collect data while implementing the CRI in a daylong research meeting. After the pilot study, it was found that the concept-rich instruction helped preservice teachers to develop their understanding of a concept taught at schools in different ways, including defining a concept in multiple ways and relating a concept with local materials available in their daily environment. The findings have implications in the teaching and learning of the mathematical concepts that are taught at schools to the university pre-service teachers.

Tech-Rich Instruction: Raising Students’ Awareness against Plagiarism in Academic Writing

Plagiarism is an intolerant action in the circumstances of education; it is stealing or cheating any papers, ideas, and things related to someone’s works. This is a harmful offence with academic, professional, legal, and monetary consequences when someone is proved as a plagiarist. Students can be expelled from the class when they cheat colleagues’ works; the worst is that the university can retract their certificate of graduation when their manuscripts are investigated and proved as result of copying other works. Regarding to its danger, pla-giarism has to be avoided trough establishing curriculum in higher level of education. Teacher and lecturer should provide their lessons, especially in language skills, with awareness of the plagiarism danger to the students. A skill of language that most easily susceptible and detected in plagiarism is writing. Since writing is not a gift skill as listening, students need to learn how to write properly. Simply, when they are not able to rewrite someone’s statements with their own wording, students are doing plagiarism. This article reporting at a descriptive qualitative research aimed at describing the teaching method to raise students’ awareness toward the danger of plagiarism which is applied by a lecturer in Academic Writing Class of EED - UNS for the academic year 2016. She believes that when the students have awareness in the risks or consequences of plagiarism, they will act for not doing plagiarism in their works. She supports her conventional way of teach-ing with technology of plagiarism checker. The method of enrichment traditional teaching with technology is known as Tech-Rich Instruction (not blended learning). This Tech-Rich Instruction she applied is successful-ly raising her students’ awareness in the danger of plagiarism and leads to the efforts of avoiding plagiarism in academic writing.

Pengaruh Concept-Rich Instruction terhadap Kemampuan Pemecahan Masalah Matematis

Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengetahui pengaruh penerapan pendekatan Concept-Rich Instruction terhadap kemampuan pemecahan masalah matematis siswa pada pembelajaran Matematika siswa kelas III Sekolah Dasar. Penelitian ini dilakukan di SDIT Segar Amanah Klender Jakarta Timur dengan sampel siswa kelas III-A 20 orang sebagai kelas eksperimen dan kelas III-B dengan sampel siswa 20 orang sebagai kelas kontrol yang dilaksanakan pada semester I tahun ajaran 2017/2018. Sampel yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini menggunakan random sampling. Teknik penelitian menggunakan metode eksperimen dengan desain quasi eksperimen. Teknik pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan menggunakan lembar tes dan lembar observasi untuk mengetahui kemampuan pemecahan masalah matematis pada pembelajaran Matematika, dengan terlebih dahulu dilakukan pengujian validitas dan reliabilitas serta expert judgement. Selain itu juga dilakukan uji normalitas dan homogenitas baik kelas eksperimen yang menggunakan pendekatan pembelajaran concept-rich instruction ataupun kelas kontrol yang menggunakan pendekatan konvensional. Hasil pengujian menunjukan bahwa kedua kelas berdistribusi normal dan homogen. Hasil penelitian menunjukan kenaikan rata-rata kemampuan pemecahan masalah matematis kelas eksperimen dari 47,5 menjadi 84,5 sedangkan kelas Kontrol dari 53,5 menjadi 61,5, serta keefektifan proses pembelajaran apabila melihat rata-rata normal Gain kelas eksperimen lebih tinggi dibandingkan dengan kelas kontrol. Untuk kelas eksperimen mendapatkan nilai 0,68 dengan kategori cukup efektif, sementara kelas kontrol mendapatkan kategori tidak efektif dengan nilai 0,24.Berdasarkan hasil penelitian tersebut, dapat disimpulkan kemampuan pemecahan masalah matematis pada pembelajaran Matematika kelas eksperimen lebih baik daripada kemampuan pemecahan masalah matematis siswa pada pembelajaran Matematika kelas kontrol.