Search

The Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT-2) and Engineering Ethical Reasoning Instrument (EERI) are designed to measure ethical reasoning of general (DIT-2) and engineering-student (EERI) populations. These tools—and the DIT-2 especially—have gained wide usage for assessing the ethical reasoning of undergraduate students. This paper reports on a research study in which the ethical reasoning of first-year undergraduate engineering students at multiple universities was assessed with both of these tools. In addition to these two instruments, students were also asked to create personal concept maps of the phrase “ethical decision-making.” It was hypothesized that students whose instrument scores reflected more postconventional levels of moral development and more sophisticated ethical reasoning skills would likewise have richer, more detailed concept maps of ethical decision-making, reflecting their deeper levels of understanding of this topic and the complex of related concepts. In fact, there was no significant correlation between the instrument scores and concept map scoring, suggesting that the way first-year students conceptualize ethical decision making does not predict the way they behave when performing scenario-based ethical reasoning (perhaps more situated). This disparity indicates a need to more precisely quantify engineering ethical reasoning and decision making, if we wish to inform assessment outcomes using the results of such quantitative analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an empirical study of digital plagiarism. Under two experimental conditions, undergraduate writers were guided by different achievement goals to write an essay with or without the copy-and-paste function on a website. The study focused on two possible influences on digital plagiarism, a) instructional goals for writing, and b) the affordances of digital learning environments specifically the availability of a copy-paste function. A 2 × 2 factorial design was used to analyze the effects of these contextual variables on digital plagiarism. Results indicated that overall 79.5% of the writers engaged in digital plagiarism. There was a significant interaction in which instructional performance goals lead to more plagiarism when copy-paste is available. Findings highlight individual-environment interactions, including a writer's adopted goals for writing as set by writing prompt instructions (learning goals vs. performance goals) and the affordances of the writing environment including the ease of copy-paste or precautions taken to protect text (such as using jpegs of text). Rather than being principally directed by student's beliefs prior to, or when they begin a writing task, the on-the-fly interactions they have during the writing task may best explain their tendency toward plagiarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In large measure the authors agree with Tobias and Fletcher’s (2012) comments stating that clearer operational definitions of game features are needed to enable research on games and learning. The authors cannot accept that games are a subset of simulations, preferring to identify instances when games and simulations overlap and when they do not. The authors caution that research focused solely on cognitive processes risks missing fundamental environmental dynamics and their rich interactions with the intentional dynamics of situated cognition. The authors point out that their specific review of games and academic achievement is complemented by the broader survey of dependent variables reviewed by Tobias and Fletcher. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Do video games show demonstrable relationships to academic achievement gains when used to support the K-12 curriculum? In a review of literature, we identified 300+ articles whose descriptions related to video games and academic achievement. We found some evidence for the effects of video games on language learning, history, and physical education (specifically exergames), but little support for the academic value of video games in science and math. We summarize the trends for each subject area and supply recommendations for the nascent field of video games research. Many educationally interesting games exist, yet evidence for their impact on student achievement is slim. We recommend separating simulations from games and refocusing the question onto the situated nature of game-player-context interactions, including meta-game social collaborative elements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyzes the user chat logs and other artifacts of a virtual world, Quest Atlantis (QA), and proposes the concept of Negotiation for Action (NfA) to explain how interaction, specifically, avatar-embodied collaboration between native English speakers and nonnative English speakers, provided resources for English language acquisition. Iterative multilayered analyses revealed several affordances of QA for language acquisition at both utterance and discourse levels. Through intercultural collaboration on solving content-based problems, participants successfully reached quest goals during which emergent identity formation and meaning making take place. The study also demonstrates that it is in this intercultural interaction that pragmatics, syntax, semantics, and discourse practices arose and were enacted. The findings are consistent with our ecological psychology framework, in that meaning emerges when language is used to coordinate in-the-moment actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We attempt to describe what a methodology for situated action should do for students given problem solving in school settings. Working from an ecological account of perception-action, we propose that a methodology for understanding situated action should afford the instructional designer (often the classroom teacher), the methodologist, and the problem solver opportunities to co-construct coupling dynamics that operate on multiple space and time scales including "real time." With this goal in mind, we propose the use of the Jasper Planning Assistant (JPA), an online learning and assessment system that becomes part of the design-learning-research situation and serves as a scaffold for the learner. Through analysis of log-file data produced by the JPA, we illustrate that a methodology for situated action should be neither a purely quantitative nor qualitative account, but rather an inscription-an emergent visualization of the coupling dynamics between a student and his or her environment. We conclude that ideally this emergent inscription should reveal the multiple space times in which problem solving is occurring, yet be reductive in such a way as to create affordances for future action: Methodology should have functional value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to that of Moore and Muller 'The Discourse of Voice and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Education', which appeared in Volume 20 of this journal. It starts by summarising and endorsing their criticisms of 'voice discourses' but argues that their case is weakened by their failure to distinguish clearly between the 'debunking of knowledge' associated with the postmodernist theories that underpin 'voice discourses' and the general propositions of a social theory of knowledge. The idea that knowledge has a social as well as an epistemological basis is now widely accepted in philosophy as well as sociology. The paper draws on a paper by Stephen Toulmin and makes a distinction between anthropological and sociological approaches to the idea of knowledge having a social basis. It goes on to use some ideas from the author's recent work on the issue of knowledge specialisation to suggest the kind of contribution that a sociological approach to knowledge can make to current curriculum issues as well as to educational policy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues related to reenvisioning of instructional practices in graduate medical education.

Examines the learning capabilities of students mentally exposed to linear and navigational hypertext systems. Effects of generative activities on problem-solving and reading comprehension; Impact of computerized systems on self-determination of students; Instructional designs on learning processes; Interaction between hypermedia usage and goal orientation.

This article presents opinion on information technology and the sociology of education. My own interest in what might be called a sociology or politics of technology relates to earlier attempts to develop a sociological analysis of school science. We started the Technology and Education Project, recognizing on the one hand the need to explore the problems and possibilities of the so-called new technologies and also to remain aware that the issues were not new or specific to particular technologies, but part of those more general processes of specialization, the hierarchies and forms of power relation associated with industrialization. Many teachers are aware of the shortages of available software, of the constraints imposed by local authority funding policies, and by the inappropriateness of the available programming languages for educational purposes. All these are important issues for both teachers and sociological research, but a concentration of them would in my view pre-empt discussion about more basic issues that have yet to be considered at least within education. Again it is important to stress that this is not an argument against the possible use of expert systems in education, which might broaden pupils' access to opportunities to realize their own purposes. It is rather to cause us to be much more explicit about those purposes and the extent to which particular divisions of labor and particular dependencies may become enshrined and mystified in software even more than in people.

Applying Communicative Project theory (Linell, 2009), we identify and distinguish between the different coordination and language activities that emerged during an episode of World of Warcraft (WoW) gameplay involving English Language learners (ELLs). We further investigate ELLs’ coordinations between killing and caring, self and others, in which language and action arise. Using multimodal analysis, we found: 1) a diverse tapestry of communicative activities unlikely to match what would be found in a classroom environment; 2) that the values realizing involved in killing (a typical action in WoW) demonstrates a strong covariate tie with caring; and 3) that players’ values realizing is multi-layered, heterarchical and dynamic at a given time and space of situated interaction. We conclude by making suggestions for 1) the design of learning environments based on affordances for coaction and rich communicative activities and 2) the reconceiving of language learning as skilled linguistic action (Cowley, in press) grounded in situated learning and participation in intercultural, technology-mediated L2 networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]