Ten Trees a Day: How learning science and a story of multilingual buffalo help students learn syntax

This paper describes an activity designed to help students improve skills in drawing syntax tree structures without significantly increasing instructor grading time. In this formative exercise, students draw ten trees prior to each class period, correct their own work, and reflect on their mistakes. This assignment incorporates many practices that research on learning suggests are essential for understanding and retention of material. In addition, this exercise incorporates some best practices on effective feedback. The activity works best when students understand the science behind it, so discussion of the pedagogical reasons for the exercise is essential. Further, overt discussion of how to learn helps students develop effective skills for learning linguistics. Self-correct homework assignments like this can be applied to many courses that involve learning skills or terminology.

Using Mindfulness/Contemplative Practices to Help Students Focus in Mathematics Classrooms

Can using mindfulness/contemplative practices help students become mindful, focused, and present in the mathematics classroom? In this study, mindfulness/contemplative practices were used in the mathematics classroom to determine if students were encouraged to be mindful, focused, and present or engaged in problem solving. During class time, students engaged in the following 2 contemplative practices: a “Mindful Minute of Deep Breathing” and “Beholding the Mathematics”. The one minute of mindful Deep Breathing took place usually at the beginning of class. Then, during a regular class period, students used Beholding to look more deeply at topics, probe questions, and investigate answers to questions. The survey responses indicated that the mindfulness/contemplative practices were very useful in the mathematics classroom to help students to be mindful (both inside and outside of the classroom), focus on the mathematics taught, and be present or engaged in the problem solving.

Do High School Students With a Same-Race Teacher Attend Class More Often?

Teachers of color increase school success for students of color. Yet, little attention has been paid to whether school attendance behaviors also increase from same race and ethnicity matches. To address this, our study used administrative data provided by a California high school district for the school years 2014 to 2018. We explored student absenteeism at the date and class period levels. Using this rich, longitudinal data set, we employed grade, school, class period, student, and date fixed effects models to examine the association between student–teacher matches and student absenteeism. Student–teacher race and ethnicity matches were associated with fewer unexcused absences for Latinx students. The results also indicate that associations were strongest for Latinx students in 11th and 12th grades—the age group in K–12 that has the most individual agency when it comes to getting to school. Furthermore, we found no evidence of declines in excused absences, which reflect health.

Experiment, model, and simulation of the pedestrian flow around a training school classroom during the after-class period

In China, training schools are ubiquitous, where heterogeneous pedestrian flow (which consists of adults and children) widely occurs during the after-class period. In this paper, we develop a fine grid cellular CA model to describe the pedestrian behaviors (e.g., pick-up behavior, searching behavior, matching behavior, waiting behavior, leading behavior, and following behavior) at a training school during the after-class period and explore the effects of the special behaviors on each pedestrian’s movement in and around a classroom. To describe the heterogeneous pedestrian flow accurately, (i) some questionnaire surveys are designed to extract some features of adult’s and child’s movement, and (ii) some video experiments are conducted to estimate/calibrate some parameters of interest in the proposed model. Finally, some strategies are designed to enhance the evacuation efficiency and the operational efficiency of training school. The numerical results indicate that the proposed model can reasonably match with reality, and the proposed strategies can enhance the evacuation efficiency and the operational efficiency of training school. The results can help the administrators to effectively manage the pedestrian evacuation at training school during the after-class period.

Flipped learning as a tool to enhance digital citizenship: How teachers’ experiences of online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic can encourage participatory and justice-oriented citizenship

In Ireland, civic, social and political education (CSPE) is a compulsory subject for all students in the first three years of post-primary education. CSPE is generally taught for one class period per week, which limits the ability to develop participatory or justice-oriented citizenship – it gives time for exposure to, but perhaps not practice of, these types of citizenship. Digital citizenship is a recently developed dimension of citizenship and is often focused only on safety and ethical elements. The changed teaching practices resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have provided a unique opportunity to use flipped learning to develop participatory and justice-oriented digital citizenship. This article outlines examples of how two topics, promoting media literacy and conducting a survey of young people, can be taught moving from a personally responsible to a participatory and justice-oriented focus. Challenges are discussed and future research areas are suggested.

Changing Perceptions of Marketing Ethics and Social Responsibility in Principles of Marketing

The principles of marketing course usually includes coverage of marketing ethics and social responsibility. This study attempts to gain an understanding of students’ perceptions of the importance of marketing ethics and social responsibility and to see if these perceptions can be enhanced. Students were provided one class period lecture on the topics with prelecture and postlecture evaluation. The study addressed marketing ethics and social responsibility as distinct constructs. Postlecture there was an improvement in marketing ethics perceptions for all majors, with nonmarketing business majors showing the most improvement. Postlecture perceptions of the importance of social responsibility increased significantly with nonbusiness majors showing the lowest level of improvement. Changing perceptions of importance can motivate long-term engagement in beliefs about the significance and value of business ethics and social responsibility.

Young Adult Literature as a Means for Developing and Supporting Socio-Emotional Learning

Addressing the social and emotional needs of students is not only vital, but it should be a priority for all teachers. Teaching social and emotional skills directly influences students' academic ability. Yet, many schools and classrooms do not see the connection between their instruction and curriculum with SEL. Often, schools have set aside a portion of the school day, or a few minutes at the end of the class period, to check in with students or teach specific skills. One way that students can explore their own identities and build a sense of agency is through the use of young adult literature. There are many ways that teachers can incorporate YA in the classroom to build SEL. This chapter focuses on how three current in-service teachers use YAL to address SEL in their classrooms. They each provide a brief background of who they are, their beliefs about using YAL to address SEL in their classrooms, and authentic examples from their instruction. Using these descriptions, the authors hope this chapter will help promote using YAL to address SEL in classrooms.

Explicit Writing Instruction in Synthesis: Combining In-Class Discussion and an Online Tutorial

Identifying effective and time-efficient approaches to teaching students how to write from scholarly sources benefits students and instructors. Students in a general psychology course learned a concrete method to improve this type of synthesis writing. The intervention was brief, consisting of viewing an online tutorial outside of class and spending a single class period on instructor-guided practice with writing samples. Students used this method to write literature reviews for a poster assignment debunking psychological myths. Compared to a previous semester that did not learn this concrete technique, students’ writing scored significantly higher on most measures of synthesis. This suggests that a short tutorial teaching a concrete application, paired with limited in-class instruction, can help improve this important aspect of writing.

User-Centered Design for an Online Learning

Online learning has been studied for a long time. It has many benefits and challenges. In the period of COVID-19 spreading, many universities and schools have more concerns for their students of the virus infection. Thus, the online classroom has been set to be a teaching method for students. However, it is quite a new normal practice, especially in Thailand, to have an online instead of a face-to-face classroom. Therefore, this study is a path for preparing to conduct online learning. This study aims to provide guidelines to design effective online learning based on students' opinions. By analyzing the open-end questionnaires with 37 participants, the results reveal that blended learning is the most preferred learning pedagogical approach. Moreover, the metaphor factors, including subjects' characteristic, class period, class size, activities and assessment that were suitable for online learning according to the students' opinion, were suggested. Finally, some obstacles that students have faced in online learning were presented, and some solutions were proposed.

Open-Inquiry Course Design in the Public Policy Classroom

ABSTRACTThis article describes a variant of experiential course design—open inquiry—that has learning-how-to-learn (or metacognition about learning) as a primary course goal. In open-inquiry designs, students first choose the problems that they will study during the course. They then co-create each class period as the semester progresses. They recognize deficiencies in their own content knowledge, skills, and learning processes and take actions to remedy them. By reflecting on their successes and failures, students practice the skill of self-directed learning. This process of metacognitive reflection is a crucial skill that they will need when they face novel problems after graduation. In open-inquiry courses, students have produced high-quality work by learning about substantive policy areas that they choose to study, developing the policy skills that they deem important, and growing in their understanding about how they learn effectively.