Mira Peter

Getting Stuck in Analogue Electronics: Threshold Concepts as an Explanatory Model.

Could the challenge of mastering threshold concepts be a potential factor that influences a students decision to continue in electronics engineering? This was the question that led to a collaborative research project between educational researchers and the Faculty of Engineering in a New Zealand university. This paper deals exclusively with the qualitative data from this project, which was designed to investigate the high attrition rate of students taking introductory electronics in a New Zealand university. The affordances of the various teaching opportunities and the barriers that students perceived are examined in the light of recent international research in the area of threshold concepts and transformational learning. Suggestions are made to help students move forward in their thinking, without compromising the need for maintaining the element of intellectual uncertainty that is crucial for tertiary teaching. The issue of the timing of assessments as a measure of conceptual development or the crossing of thresholds is raised.

Gestures and Phases: The Dynamics of Speech-Hand Communication

We investigated how a listeners perceived meaning of a spoken sentence is influenced by the relative timing between a speakers speech and accompanying hand gestures. Participants viewed a computer-animated character who uttered the phrase, “Put the book there now.” while executing a simple right-handed beat gesture whose location relative to the utterance was precisely controlled in a frame-by-frame fashion. The participants task consisted of making a judgment about two related aspects of the actors perceived speech: (a) Which word was emphasized? and (b) How clear was the emphasis? That is, did it make sense? The results revealed that the perceived emphasis was determined by the timing (phasing) of the speakers hand gesture. Furthermore, the clarity of the perceived emphasis (i.e., meaningfulness) was influenced by the affordances in the immediate environment of the speaker. Discussion addresses the primacy of ostensive specification and gesture in communicative events, the dynamics of speech-hand coordination during both actual and virtual dialogue, and the role of environmental affordances in grounding informative communicative acts in the ecology of organism-environment dynamics.

An electronics Threshold-Concept Inventory

The Theory of Threshold Concepts (TCs), first articulated by Land and Meyer in 2003, provides educators in many disciplines with a tool to identify those special ideas that both define the characteristic ways of thinking of expert practitioners, and cause the greatest learning difficulties for students. Concept inventories are popular assessment tools, epitomized by the widely-accepted Force Concept Inventory of Hestenes et al., introduced circa 1992. It is a natural marriage to bring these two thrusts together to produce “Threshold-Concept Inventories.” We report ongoing work to develop and verify such a TC-inspired inventory assessment tool in the field of electronics and simple circuit theory. We identify the difficulty in the development of questions targeted at assessing understanding of single threshold concepts and present results in support of a strategy to deal with this.

Threshold Concept Theory as an Enabling Constraint: A Facilitated Practitioner Action Research Study.

Abstract International interest is growing in how threshold concept theory can transform tertiary teaching and learning. A facilitated practitioner action research project investigating the potential of threshold concepts across several disciplines offers a practical contribution and helps to consolidate this international field of research. In this article we show how a focus on threshold concept theory enabled tertiary teachers to work collaboratively to investigate tertiary pedagogical practices. The purpose of the article is to argue that threshold concept theory can serve as a guiding principle of pedagogical design. The article draws on findings from a research study conducted over two years by a team consisting of five practitioner researchers in four disciplines and two educational researchers who facilitated the inquiry. The act of constraining the research to thresholds, both in and across different fields, enabled the team to intensify discipline-specific insights and to explore wider cross-disciplinary links and differences. A threshold-constrained focus entailed making specific discipline, knowledge management, and pedagogic practices explicit to ourselves as individual practitioners and comprehensible enough to enable conversations with colleagues from other disciplines. As a result of the research, we argue that threshold-concept thinking enables three processes: usefully unsettling the meaning of being a disciplinary expert; providing a structured framework for both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary knowledge and learning; and intensifying insight into curricular content and teaching methods. We also provide an account of how the collaborative action research sparked fresh experiments, searches for new data, and reflections on the impact of threshold concepts on individual disciplines and beyond.

First-year practicum experiences for preservice early childhood education teachers working with birth-to-3-year-olds: An Australasian experience

ABSTRACT This article reports on a project, “Collaboration of Universities Pedagogies of Infants’ and Toddlers’ Development—‘down under’ (CUPID),” in which the practicum experiences of 1st-year preservice initial teacher education (ITE) students at five universities across Australia and New Zealand (NZ) engaging in early childhood education (ECE) teacher programs were evaluated as part of a larger longitudinal project. The results from year 1 of their qualification experiences highlight the diverse and complex approaches to practicum experiences, ranging from specialized events with birth-to-3-year-olds to generic practicum with a wider age group. The implications of the practicum experience, in its many iterations, are explored in terms of the treatment of infant and toddler pedagogy as a specialization, and as an integrated component of the curriculum. While an assumption appears to exist that infant and toddler specialization is optimum, the early results of this study, at end of year 1 of the qualification, suggest that associated practicum experiences are not consistently offered to 1st-year students in this domain nor is a pedagogy specialism for this age group promoted. This article speculates on the reasons why this phenomenon occurs, the limitations and potentialities such a view upholds, and the implications for teachers in their work with birth-to-3-year-olds in the current policy context of both countries.

Students achieve more when teachers have time to do what they know works best

Abstract Literacy skills acquired during the first years of schooling have been recognised as the key to students’ learning success. However, despite the continuing efforts by the New Zealand government and teachers there is still a large proportion of students who struggle to become literate. To address this issue the Ministry of Education funded selected New Zealand schools to take part in 10-week programmes designed to provide an intensive intervention in literacy (i.e. reading and writing) and numeracy. This article summarises the results from the part of the programme which focused on reading. The findings indicate that Year 1 and Year 2 students significantly increased their reading ability over the 10 weeks. The survey data, interviews and teachers’ journals revealed that the critical aspect of this success was teachers having time to meet individual students’ specific learning needs. At the school level the programme was lauded as successful. Importantly, these findings have implications not only for how principals allocate teacher time but also for policy-makers when considering how to support schools in addressing the needs of those students who have not made the expected progress in their literacy development in their first years of education.

Research as a Catalyst for Crossdisciplinary Partnerships Amongst University Lecturers

This chapter presents a reflective discussion of ideas related to ‘partnership’ at the tertiary level. We examine the nature and enactment of successful crossdisciplinary partnerships in two Ministry of Education funded research projects involving university-based education researchers and lecturer-practitioners from a number of other disciplines. Ideas about the structure, issues and rewards of research partnerships will be explored.