Orit Herscovitz

Case-Based Long-Term Professional Development of Science Teachers.

Reform efforts are often unsuccessful because they failed to understand that teachers play a key role in making educational reforms successful. This paper describes a long‐term teacher professional development (PD) program aimed at educating and training teachers to teach interdisciplinary topics using case‐based method in science. The research objective was to identify, follow and document the processes that science teachers went through as they assimilated the interdisciplinary, case‐based science teaching approach. The research accompanied the PD program throughout its 3‐year period. About 50 teachers, who took part in the PD program, were exposed to an interdisciplinary case‐based teaching method. The research instruments included teacher portfolios, which contained projects and reflection questionnaires, classroom observations, teacher interviews, and student feedback questionnaires. The portfolios contained the projects that the teachers had carried out during the PD program, which included case studies and accompanying student activities. We found that the teachers gradually moved from exposure to new teaching methods and subject matter, through active learning and preparing case‐based team projects, to interdisciplinary, active classroom teaching using the case studies they developed.

The Relationship Between Metacognition and the Ability to Pose Questions in Chemical Education

Development of independent learners is an important science education objective. To achieve this, learners need to know what they know and what they should know, so they can be in control of their learning process. Question posing is a higher-order thinking skill, and as such it is linked to metacognitive knowledge. This chapter describes two related studies which investigate the effect of exposing high school chemistry students to a metacognitive tool for posing complex questions and developing reading strategies aimed at understanding adapted scientific articles. Our specially designed tool was found to improve students’ knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. The ability to pose complex questions, assisted by metacognitive knowledge, contributes to improvement of students’ understanding of chemical phenomena and scientific research. Combining our two studies and the metacognitive tool, we have developed and introduced a question complexity model that students and teachers alike can use for both generating and classifying questions. We also found relationship between a student’s high metacognitive knowledge and her/his ability to pose complex questions. The notion of metacognition applied in this chapter refers to students’ “knowledge of cognition” in the sense of their ability to identify the strategies they apply and to provide justifications for asking the questions they had posed. In addition, the chapter addresses three components of regulation of cognition: planning in advance how to approach future question-posing tasks, evaluating the questions students generated, and regulating/controlling future questions posing processes.

Peer-led team learning in a college of engineering: First-year students’ achievements and peer leaders’ gains

Abstract Due to high dropout rates (30%) among first-year students, our college of engineering operates programmes for promoting students’ retention and learning. The peer-led team learning (PLTL) programme accompanies Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics introductory courses with a high rate of failures, and incorporates workshops of small groups of students for developing active-learning and problem-solving skills. The workshops are led by outstanding students from advanced years; the peer leaders (PL). This study focused on the effects of the PLTL programme (40 workshops, 26 PLs) on the achievements of students who participated in the workshops compared with those who did not, and on its impact on the PLs. Findings reveal that workshops advance students of all levels and improve their achievements in several courses, while contributing more to students with higher academic capabilities. PLs felt satisfaction and believe they have gained self-confidence, and mentoring and communication skills for their future careers.

Integrating Online Assignments Checking in Introductory Courses

Web technology offers lecturers the option of checking students’ assignments online. Several sys-tems have evolved to deliver personal assignments to each student in a multi-participant course. These systems provide students with immediate feedback, allowing them to correct erroneous answers and referring them to relevant literary sources that can assist them with their assign-ments. These strategies influence the lecturers’ teaching and their ability to respond to students’ difficulties in real-time. The study examines student attitudes concerning the integration of the WebAssign (WA) Online Assignment Checker (OAC) in the teaching of academic courses. An on-line questionnaire investigated attitudes of 75 engineering students studying introductory aca-demic courses assisted by OAC. The questionnaire included the following six dimensions: in-volvement and interest, understanding the studied material, lecturers’ consideration of students’ difficulties, importance of the course, tutorial methods and dishonest assignment submission. Significant findings emerged for attitudes in three dimensions. The students think that OAC assist lecturers to relate to their difficulties, contribute to their success in the course, and do not encour-age cheating such as copying. No preference was found between submitting homework in hard-copy or online.