Alison Rheingold

Enhancing Fidelity in Adventure Education and Adventure Therapy.

Although the importance of addressing and evaluating treatment and program fidelity is clearly emphasized in the literature on psychology, education, and health, little attention has been given to fidelity in adventure literature or research. Program fidelity refers to whether or not, and how well, a specific intervention or program was implemented as planned. This article provides a background on fidelity, including program adherence and competence, factors that affect fidelity, and ways that adventure practitioners as well as evaluators can be intentional in addressing and measuring fidelity in adventure programming and research.

Circle talks as situated experiential learning: Context, identity, and knowledgeability in 'learning from reflection'

This article presents research that used ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods to study ways participants learn through reflection when carried out as a “circle talk.” The data indicate that participants in the event (a) invoked different contextual frames that (b) implicated them in various identity positions, which (c) affected how they could express their knowledge. These features worked together to generate socially shared meanings that enabled participants to jointly achieve conceptualization—the ideational role “reflection” is presumed to play in the experiential learning process. The analysis supports the claim that participants generate new knowledge in reflection, but challenges individualistic and cognitive assumptions regarding how this occurs. The article builds on situated views of experiential learning by showing how knowledge can be understood as socially shared and how learning and identity formation are mutually entailing processes.

Engaging Students in Physical Fitness: A Case Study of an Adventure-Based Fitness Program

High-school students in the United States are not physically active at levels recommended by national guidelines (Robbins et al., 2008). School-based interventions aimed at increasing levels of physical activity need research to evaluate the efficacy of these programs, identify the psychosocial variables that are correlated with increased levels of physical activity (Dunton et al., 2007), and acknowledge the contextual factors in schools that support life-long fitness. The present study focuses on a public school district in Massachusetts that implemented an adventure-based approach to fitness as part of their physical education and wellness program. They adopted nontraditional pedagogical strategies by implementing Project Adventure Inc.’s curriculum, Achieving Fitness (see Panicucci et al., 2008). The purpose of this study was to: (a) explore the factors that constituted the implementation of Achieving Fitness in physical education, and (b) establish criteria for future research. The guiding question was: What are the salient features of an Achieving Fitness implementation and how do the qualities of these features contribute to an effective implementation?

Activity Settings as Contexts for Motivation: Reframing Classroom Motivation as Dilemmas Within and Between Activities

This chapter examines recent developments in motivational research that urge greater attention to social and relational factors in shaping children’s pursuit of school-related goals. An activity-theoretical framework is used to examine a small group of middle-school students progressing through a unit to illustrate how participation and learning were motivated by dilemmas within and between activities. These dilemmas were central in shaping children’s pursuit of school-related goals and their engagement with academic content. It is argued that goal structures are not only defined by surface features of the classroom environment but also constituted by activity elements that coordinate motives across activities and are leveraged by members to generate, understand, and resolve problems at hand.

Assessment Across Boundaries: How High-Quality Student Work Demonstrates Achievement, Shapes Practice, and Improves Communities

This chapter discusses ways in which high-quality, culminating products and performances that provide a tangible benefit to local communities can serve as enlarged indicators of school achievement. It centers on two exemplary cases of interdisciplinary, environmentally based science projects driven by student-led research, the results of which had a demonstrable impact on learners, decision-makers, and communities. These cases, from Expeditionary Learning schools, show how an expanded view of classroom assessment (rather than a narrow focus on test preparation) can permeate educational practices and foster production of meaningful and lasting student work that exceeds standard metrics. Notably, our focal cases come from current research on “ordinary” schools in the sense that they face many of the same challenges as others around the country, yet perform better than comparators on state-mandated tests. Our chapter uses several concepts from sociocultural theory that reframe assessment as a ubiquitous dimension of educational practice. Our aim is to widen notions of “assessment” and “evidence” and to locate high-stakes testing in a constellation of other possibilities. By doing so, we seek to present an expanded view of educational evaluation that emphasizes other criteria beyond norm-referenced tests as indicators of educational quality.