Motivation and Textbooks
July 31st, 2009
Who uses textbooks? Do students actually read the text? A study out in Teaching Educational Psychology by Derryberry & Wininger looked at the relationship between student motivation and textbook selection and use.
The authors combine a group of measures to create a group of “internal motivation” measures, including need for cognition (enjoying effortful thinking), mastery goal [...]
Tags: motivation, reading, textbooks
Posted in Curriculum and Materials, Students | Comments (0)
Describing Schools in Research
July 29th, 2009
So often in research, we describe schools generally as public or private, charter or traditional district-run, etc. However, the variation within these categories are huge. Is there some way we could better describe characteristics of schools so that after we complete our research, we really know what elements of the school are related to what [...]
Tags: taxonomy of schools
Posted in Schools | Comments (0)
Influences on Peer Review: Authors as Reviewers
July 27th, 2009
I usually stick to education research topics, but part of what influences what I see there is what actually gets published. And that is influenced by peer review. Peer review is a hotly debated topic in academia. This is probably not surprising since so much of professors’ evaluation, both formal (within the university) and informal (prestige [...]
Tags: peer review
Posted in Publication | Comments (0)
Collaborative Learning and Cognitive Load
July 24th, 2009
Although many educators have probably accepted that collaborative learning is a good thing for learning. The research is, in fact, mixed. This is one of those clear examples where we need to move past the research question of, “Is collaborative learning better than individual work?” and get into when collaborative learning is the best strategy [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)
High School Writing Practices
July 22nd, 2009
If you have spent time around college professors talking about students, you have surely heard complaints about writing skills (more specifically, lack thereof). The majority opinion is that students do not express themselves well in written form. So, what are high school teachers doing in the way of teaching writing?
Kiuhara, Graham, & Hawken conducted a survey [...]
Tags: high school, writing practices
Posted in Students, Teachers | Comments (0)
What’s that Checkmark?
July 21st, 2009
In the post I made earlier today, you’ll see a checkmark icon. I have joined ResearchBlogging.org. If you haven’t checked out this site, it is essentially an aggregator for blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Very cool!
I often have references at the end of my posts, but the site provides a specific format, which is actually [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)
Requiring Discussion Board Responses
July 21st, 2009
If you’ve ever taught an online course, or used a discussion board feature in any class, you may have wondered as I did whether to require students to respond to other students. Also, should I, as the instructor, respond to all the students’ posts or does that inhibit other students from responding? An article by [...]
Tags: discussion board facilitation
Posted in Teachers, Technology | Comments (1)
Formative Automated Essay Scoring
July 19th, 2009
I usually think of automated essay scoring as something used for the big national and international tests (SAT, NAEP, etc.) However, an article by Scharber, Dexter, & Riedel looked at student responses to automated scorers a little differently; the automated essay scorer was used in a formative fashion. This is interesting as I think about [...]
Tags: automated essay scorer, formative assessment
Posted in Assessment | Comments (0)
Effectiveness of After-School Tutoring
July 17th, 2009
After school tutoring programs have been widely implemented in the past few years and we are now beginning to get some research results from them.
Debbie Viadero over at Inside School Research reviews some of these studies and the end result isn’t very positive. Most indicate the participating students show little or no gain. Chicago’s implementation [...]
Posted in Students | Comments (0)
Research on Learning with Mobile Devices
July 15th, 2009
Arne Duncan recently called for more use of cell phones in learning. I wondered what the state of research was on cell phone use for learning applications and came across a nice article in the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology (seriously, if you’ve never checked it out, there are some good articles there).
Cheung & Hew [...]
Posted in Research Methods, Technology | Comments (0)
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