Search Results for
"Teaching"

In the framework of the Performance Agreement UCO2013, between the Ministry of Education and the University of Concepción (Chile), named "UdeC Teachers: Protagonists of change in the society of knowledge", a study has been carried out to determine the needs for improvement and requirements for the continuous formation of technical high-school teachers from four provinces of the Bio-Bio region in Chile: Concepción, Arauco, Biobío and Ñuble. The research type was exploratory, applying a quantitative methodology with a questionnaire survey design. The studied universe covered 116 educational centers and 3.623 teachers of all four provinces of the Bio-Bio region. The random sample was made up of 80% of the already mentioned educational centers, whose teaching staff constituted a homogeneous group with similar professional interests and motivations. Of outstanding relevance among these common interests is the need for continuing education programs in the areas of teacher training management and internship.

Peer assessment (PA) can provide a new experience for students, but less attention is given in the process of teaching and learning. Previous studies found that students have a positive perception of the validity of PA methods despite doubts about their ability to assess friends’ work or progress. Students with high integrity will apply professional ethics during PA. In conclusion, PA can lead to an increase in the efficiency of cognitive and metacognitive processes, acquisition of professional skills, attainment of a student’s achievement and improvement in a lecturer’s teaching method. Although a peer assessment exercise takes more time to be conducted in the teaching and learning process, it is beneficial to both students and lecturers. After the previous review, further research should be carried out in order to raise the level of student integrity in peer assessment for the new generation. © 2017 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved.

Background: Communication skills are important when discussing goals of care and resuscitation. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of standardized patients for teaching medical trainees to communicate about goals of care. Objective: To determine whether standardized patient simulation offers benefit over didactic sessions alone for improving skill and comfort discussing goals of care. Design and intervention: Single-blind, randomized, controlled trial of didactic teaching plus standardized patient simulation versus didactic teaching alone. Participants: First-year internal medicine residents. Main measures: Changes in communication comfort and skill between baseline and 2 months post-training assessed using the Consultation and Relational Empathy measure. Key results: We enrolled 94 residents over a 2-year period. Both groups reported a significant improvement in comfort when discussing goals of care with patients. There was no difference in Consultation and Relational Empathy scores following the workshop (p = 0.79). The intervention group showed a significant increase in Consultation and Relational Empathy scores post-workshop compared with pre-workshop (35.0 vs 31.7, respectively; p = 0.048), whereas there was no improvement in Consultation and Relational Empathy scores in the control group (35.6 vs 36.0; p = 0.4). However, when the results were adjusted for baseline differences in Consultation and Relational Empathy scores in a multivariable regression analysis, group assignment was not associated with an improvement in Consultation and Relational Empathy score. Improvement in comfort scores and perception of benefit were not associated with improvements in Consultation and Relational Empathy scores. Conclusion: Simulation training may improve communication skill and comfort more than didactic training alone, but there were important confounders in this study and further studies are needed to determine whether simulation is better than didactic training for this purpose. © The Author(s) 2016.

Biology and Environmental education are increasingly important disciplines to be taught in rural settings, where indigenous communities frequently hold ownership of invaluable natural resources. However, the Mexican science curriculum does not cater for the specific educational needs of the country's numerous ethnic groups. Situated learning is a pedagogical alternative that affords the possibility of integrating the pupils' culture and ways of interpreting the world within the curricular aims. Nevertheless, there are no reports of its usage in indigenous schools. This paper analyses two 90-minute classes as examples of how situated learning can be used to introduce the concepts of biodiversity and ecosystems in indigenous Zapoteca tele-secondary science classes. The results suggest that using situated learning for these topics helped students understand the concepts, see the importance of what they were learning, and motivated them to learn further. © 2018 by IGI Global.

Much has been written about the promise and peril of technology in education. This paper presents an empirical study that explores how technology can play a pivotal role in student learning and how teaching staff can adopt innovative technology-based approaches in the creation of interactive online problem-based learning (PBL) resources, allowing students to interact with authentic, complex and realistic problems designed within a framework of PBL methodology. The application of PBL approaches within authentic situated learning contexts has been shown in the literature to deepen student learning outcomes. This paper demonstrates how innovative authoring tools that promote problem-solving skills and the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge were introduced as part of a University-wide elearning strategic blueprint. Overall, student feedback is very positive, with many students commenting on the realism, and even the enjoyment of the online problem simulations. However, major challenges were met in the implementation requiring several support activities across the organisation. © 2016, Association for Educational Communications and Technology.

School-enterprise cooperation has become an important guiding ideology for developing vocational education in China. This paper introduces a successful experience to build a lifelong learning system for employees. The developed lifelong learning platform has worked in the following way. Senior engineers of the enterprises train college teachers. Using rich teaching experience, the teachers can transform complex new theories and knowledge into detailed skills, and then teach skilled workers. Seven years of practice and perfection show that lifelong learning system constructed by senior engineers, teachers and employees works well. The proposed school-enterprise-cooperation-based learning platform overcomes the enterprise limitation of contradiction between expansion domestic market and lack of skilled workers. Lifelong learning practices with many enterprises show that the proposed system is effective. © 2017 IEEE.

Research into and practice of Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) have been increasing during the last two decades. These have focused on providing sustainability education to future generations of professionals. In this context, there has been considerable progress in the incorporation of SD in universities' curricula. Most of these efforts have focussed on the design and delivery of sustainability-oriented competences. Some peer-reviewed articles have proposed different pedagogical approaches to better deliver SD in these courses; however, there has been limited research on the connection between how courses are delivered (pedagogical approaches) and how they may affect sustainability competences. This paper analyses competences and pedagogical approaches, using hermeneutics to connect these in a framework based on twelve competences and twelve pedagogical approaches found in the literature. The framework connects the course aims to delivery in HESD by highlighting the connections between pedagogical approaches and competences in a matrix structure. The framework is aimed at helping educators in creating and updating their courses to provide a more complete, holistic, and systemic sustainability education to future leaders, decision makers, educators, and change agents. To better develop mind-sets and actions of future generations, we must provide students with a complete set of sustainability competences. © 2017 by the authors.

This chapter examines the rationale for TVET in Uganda, identifying the challenges it faces and suggesting possible solutions. It is premised on the assumption that education; especially TVET, is the supply side of the economy in Uganda; whereas the labor market and job enterprises are its demand side. For effective and sustainable employability of graduates, there should be a balance between them. But despite its potential, TVET in Uganda still faces a variety of challenges; including stigma, low esteem and parity of status with its academic counterpart, policy inconsistency, endemic public corruption, philosophical dis-orientation, as well as historical, socio-economic and cultural prejudices. The authors proffer several possible solutions, including demand driven TVET, integrating creativity and innovation into the learning processes, life-long learning, Public-Private Training Partnerships (PPTPs), flexible teaching and learning, work-tasks as the curricula; inclusive and affordable learning technologies and the workplace rather than the classroom as delivery venue. © 2017 by IGI Global. All rights reserved.

In large classes, there is typically a clear separation between content delivery in lectures on the one hand and content deepening in practical exercises on the other hand. This temporal and spatial separation has several disadvantages. In particular, it separates students' hearing about a new concept from being able to actually practice and apply it, which may decrease knowledge retention. To closely integrate lectures and practical exercises, we propose an approach which we call interactive learning: it is based on active, computer based and experiential learning, includes immediate feedback and learning from the reection on experience. It decreases the time between content delivery and content deepening to a few minutes and allows for exible and more efficient learning. Shorter exercise cycles allow students to apply and practice multiple concepts per teaching unit directly after they first heard about them. We applied interactive learning in two large software engineering classes with 300 students each and evaluated its use qualitatively and quantitatively. The students' participation increases compared to traditional classes: until the end of the course, around 50% of the students attend class and participate in exercises. Our evaluations show that students' learning experience and exam grades correlate with the increased participation. While educators need more time to prepare the class and the exercises, they need less time to review exercise submissions. The overall teaching effort for instructors and teaching assistants does not increase. © 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

Lab courses are an integral part of higher education in engineering sciences. In this paper, we report about a blended learning approach for such courses in computer science education. We show how the project method for co-located learning can be translated into a blended CSCL setting for a lab course on distributed software development, and how the resulting learning scenario can be supported with the collaborative virtual learning environment CURE. Experiences from the application of the educational approach in two courses indicate benefits but also highlight the need for further technical support. © 2005 International Society of the Learning Sciences. All rights reserved.