Cognition and Student Learning through the Arts

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have suggested connections among cognition, social and emotional development, and the arts. Some of this research indicates that students in schools where the arts are an integral part of the academic program tend to have an academic advantage over students for whom that is not the case. This study examines factors in schools and at home that contribute most to the variance in student learning and achievement, particularly as they relate to the arts, using a sample of more than 8,000 students in grade 5. The findings suggest that in-school arts programs alone may have less of an impact on student achievement than previous research has proposed. Parental influences likely have more of an effect than school on most children, and efforts to involve parents in the arts with their children may be more productive than simply providing arts programs in schools.     

课堂教学有效生成的3个环节

新课程理念突出强调教学生成,那么教师如何才能应对教学生成,使教学生成有效并展现其蕴含的价值？笔者认为教师需要把握3个环节：预设是教学生成的基础;接纳是教学生成的保证;反思使教学生成得到有效积累。     

Teaching and Learning in Japan.

Teaching and Learning in Japan. Thomas Rohlen and Gerald Le Tendre, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 399 pp.     

How to Create and Use Analogies Effectively in the Teaching of Science Concepts

Effective teaching is the art of getting information to the students' memory in an organized manner to facilitate later retrieval. Thanks to advances in cognitive science, one can talk of the science of teaching. A metaphor that captures the work of effective teachers is "teachers as knowledge engineers," which connotes that effective teachers understand the nature of knowledge and, by extrapolation, the nature of teaching and learning. When teachers take charge of knowledge, view it as a process, and understand how to work with it, they take charge of the knowledge-construction process and better help their students. This article discusses how science teachers use analogies as a means of organizing knowledge in their students' memory.     

Teaching Elsewhere: Anthropological Pedagogy,Racism and Indifference in a Hong Kong Classroom

This essay is concerned with the political, historical and cultural contexts of teaching and learning in Hong Kong, focusing on my recent experiences of tertiary teaching there. Although an emphasis on rote learning driven by an exam oriented educational trajectory is now widely criticised, strong institutional and social forces still operate to produce a student body highly resistant to radicalising discourses. I argue that cultural indifference, chauvinism and racism pervade the classroom, posing particular challenges for anthropological pedagogy.     

Teaching Biologists the Philosophy of Their Time

Acta Biotheoretica -     

Science Classroom Inquiry (SCI) Simulations: A Novel Method to Scaffold Science Learning

Science education is progressively more focused on employing inquiry-based learning methods in the classroom and increasing scientific literacy among students. However, due to time and resource constraints, many classroom science activities and laboratory experiments focus on simple inquiry, with a step-by-step approach to reach predetermined outcomes. The science classroom inquiry (SCI) simulations were designed to give students real life, authentic science experiences within the confines of a typical classroom. The SCI simulations allow students to engage with a science problem in a meaningful, inquiry-based manner. Three discrete SCI simulations were created as website applications for use with middle school and high school students. For each simulation, students were tasked with solving a scientific problem through investigation and hypothesis testing. After completion of the simulation, 67% of students reported a change in how they perceived authentic science practices, specifically related to the complex and dynamic nature of scientific research and how scientists approach problems. Moreover, 80% of the students who did not report a change in how they viewed the practice of science indicated that the simulation confirmed or strengthened their prior understanding. Additionally, we found a statistically significant positive correlation between students’ self-reported changes in understanding of authentic science practices and the degree to which each simulation benefitted learning. Since SCI simulations were effective in promoting both student learning and student understanding of authentic science practices with both middle and high school students, we propose that SCI simulations are a valuable and versatile technology that can be used to educate and inspire a wide range of science students on the real-world complexities inherent in scientific study.     

Developmental Teaching and Learning Activity

In presenting this material, I shall rely on the works of a large group of psychologists under the leadership of D. B. El'konin and V. V. Davydov. These works led to the formulation of certain theoretical concepts of learning activity—of its content as a special form of the personality's learning activeness, of its structure, and of the laws and conditions under which it is produced in the teaching process.     

The Power of Contexts: Teaching and Learning in Recently Desegregated Schools

The following critical ethnography interrogates what it means for urban students to learn in multicultural ways, given the oppressive historical and present contexts of their newly desegregated urban district. By retelling events that occurred in the district and the classroom, I present a picture of urban students who are willing to learn and engage in classroom activities when the activities do not threaten their emotional safety. Although their actions are understandable, the students' conscious decisions to disengage from school stifles learning opportunities that would allow them to empathize and connect with other students as a move toward individual and group empowerment. Using critical race theory, I problematize the possibilities for successful multicultural classrooms in urban districts with complex legacies of injustice and racial hostility.     

《细胞生物学》课堂教学模式改革的探索与实践

为了更好地培养学生的能力,必须对传统的教学模式进行改革。针对传统教学模式下生物工程专业细胞生物学教学中学生积极性和主动性不强、缺少综合能力训练内容、作业抄袭、新知识与新进展反映不理想等问题,通过设定合理题目、规定格式和内容、单独报告、择优讲演等方式,利用学生的好胜心理、竞争性和成就感等,提出了新的教学模式。教学实践证明,新的教学模式能够充分调动学生学习的积极性和主动性,提高学生对专业知识的综合与归纳能力、表达演讲能力和电脑使用技能,同时也避免了作业抄袭现象的发生,强化了学生的自信心。另外,也对新模式中存在的问题进行了思考与建议。     

A Unique Teaching Experience: Medical Student Care of Northern Isolated Native Communities

To explore the benefits that students may derive from assuming responsibility for the medical care of people in isolated communities under a minimum of supervision, two volunteer third-year medical students spent the summer of 1964 caring for 1600 Indians and Metis at Wabasca, Alberta. They worked closely with the local public health nurse and a Catholic nursing sister who maintained a small hospital. Considerable experience was gained in preventive medicine and in the diagnosis and management of a wide variety of illnesses, using basic clinical skills and minimal laboratory facilities. The pressure of responsibility was particularly beneficial. It provided a potent impetus to learn and perfect skills in clinical medicine and basic therapeutics. Visits by an interested clinician every two to three weeks provided the optimum combination of responsibility and supervision. The existence of some local health organization was considered helpful.     

Doing with less: Hominin brain atrophy

In contrast to hominin encephalization, the final Pleistocene and Holocene reduction in cranial volume has attracted very little attention and remains unexplained. Here it is examined in the light of current neuroscientific and archaeological understanding, and it is shown that the most parsimonious explanation is via the domestication hypothesis of recent humans. Accordingly, rapid atrophy of the brain is partly explained by the culturally based process of sexual selection, first detectable in late robust Homo sapiens perhaps 40,000 years ago. Furthermore it is suggested that this deleterious process of neotenization and brain atrophy was compensated for by the concurrent development of exograms, i.e. means of storing memory outside the brain. Consequently most of human memory and cultural information is now stored external to the brain, which has altered that organ significantly and facilitated a cultural complexity that would be impossible to maintain by biological memory alone. The escalating use of exograms, neotenization and reduction in cranial volume all appear to co-occur with numerous other changes to the human genome.     

Teaching the Fundamentals of Biological Data Integration Using Classroom Games

This article aims to introduce the nature of data integration to life scientists. Generally, the subject of data integration is not discussed outside the field of computational science and is not covered in any detail, or even neglected, when teaching/training trainees. End users (hereby defined as wet-lab trainees, clinicians, lab researchers) will mostly interact with bioinformatics resources and tools through web interfaces that mask the user from the data integration processes. However, the lack of formal training or acquaintance with even simple database concepts and terminology often results in a real obstacle to the full comprehension of the resources and tools the end users wish to access. Understanding how data integration works is fundamental to empowering trainees to see the limitations as well as the possibilities when exploring, retrieving, and analysing biological data from databases. Here we introduce a game-based learning activity for training/teaching the topic of data integration that trainers/educators can adopt and adapt for their classroom. In particular we provide an example using DAS (Distributed Annotation Systems) as a method for data integration.