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"learning"

Transformative learning theory is a dominant approach to understanding adult learning. The theory addresses the way our perspectives on the world, others and ourselves can be challenged and transformed in our ongoing efforts to make sense of the world. It is a conception of learning that does not focus on the measurable acquisition of knowledge and skills, but looks rather to the dynamics of self-questioning and upheaval as the key to adult learning. In this article, transformative learning theory is used as a lens for studying learning in a competency-based, entry-level management course. Instead of asking which knowledge and skills were developed and how effectively, the research enquired into deeper changes wrought by the learning experiences. The research found that for some learners the course contributed to significant discontent as they discovered that management practices they took to represent the norm fell dramatically short of the model promoted in the training.

In recent decades, education at all levels has been seriously impoverished by a growing obsession with standards, targets, skills and competences. According to this model, only a circumscribed range of basic cognitive skills and competences are the business of education, whose main role is to provide employability credentials for people competing for jobs in the global economy. The result is a one-dimensional, economistic and bleakly utilitarian conception of the educational task. In Mindfulness and learning: Celebrating the Affective Dimension of Education, Terry Hyland advances the thesis that education stands in need of a rejuvenation of its affective function - the impact it has on the emotional, social, moral and personal development of learners. Drawing on the Buddhist conception of mindfulness, he advances a powerful argument for redressing this imbalance by enhancing the affective domain of learning. Mindfulness and learning: Celebrating the Affective Dimension of Education shows how the concept and practice of ‘mindfulness’ - non-judgmental, present moment awareness and experience - can enrich learning at all levels. Mindfulness thus contributes to the enhanced achievement of general educational goals, and helps remedy the gross deficiency of the affective/emotional aspects of contemporary theory and practice. The author outlines a mindfulness-based affective education (MBAE) programme and shows how it might be introduced into educational provision from the early years to adult education with a view to harmonising the cognitive-affective balance across the system. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011.

Accepting that human understanding of learning inevitably employs metaphor, this chapter argues that the idea of professional learning is most fruitfully illuminated by employing the metaphor of becoming. The argument has two strands. Firstly, we show that becoming enjoys significant advantages over common alternative metaphors, such as, acquisition and transfer, participation and construction, which are still favoured by various policy makers and industry bodies. Secondly, we outline and discuss several examples of profession learning, derived from various research projects, to illustrate the value of the becoming metaphor for analysing and enhancing professional learning. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011.

Clinical learning experiences have always been considered a hallmark of nursing education. Introduced in 2004, the ten-week paid internship is a fourth year summer course offered to select students who have demonstrated strong academic and clinical performance. The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study designed to explore student and staff perceptions about extrinsic factors that promote or impede learning during a nursing internship course. A descriptive exploratory design was used to conduct this research. Findings have been grouped into two main themes: extrinsic factors that promote interns' learning and extrinsic factors that impede interns' learning. The sub-themes under extrinsic factors that promote interns' learning are: staff making themselves available, having knowledge of policy, and units setting the tone for success. The sub-themes under extrinsic factors that impede interns' learning are: difficulty accessing staff, lack of knowledge of policy, and units not setting the tone for success. It is apparent that the factors identified in this study are similar to those found in the literature. It is striking that research findings of multiple studies examining factors that affect clinical learning converge regardless of the context or clinical learning models examined. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.

Advocates of PBL have explored ways to create meaningful understandings of STEM ideas and skills in students by having them solve problems and projects, including design tasks, that range from the well- to the ill-defined, are set within contexts that students consider authentic and sometimes cross disciplinary boundaries. Two learning outcomes are relevant to doing informed design and contain elements of both scientific inquiry and engineering design are described in this chapter. Design rules-of-thumb are contextualized generalizations that link the effects of varying product features with performance outcomes, and lie somewhere in the middle of a continuum that on one end holds abstractions of science and engineering science (e.g., Newton’s Laws of Motion; Hook’s Law), and on the other end craft-like recipes for effective practice. Their use can complement the case-based reasoning and deductive thinking that designers employ when making informed design decisions. Diagnositic troubleshooting is a critical design strategy that is essential for designers to use in order to improve ideas and prototypes over multiple iterations. The dilemma of using constructivist or direct instruction approaches (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) to achieve will likely inspire debate long into the future, and may only be resolved when researchers and teachers can place “thinking caps” on learners and get real-time imaging of actual neural activity to reveal differential impacts of different instructional interventions. Until that time comes, educators who want to use design projects to teach STEM subjects should weigh the benefits and tradeoffs of each approach (see Matrix Pattern E) before making their instruction choices, and as well should look to future research to inform this longstanding debate. Such research should clearly articulate the operational definitions and “vector of instructional components” for all approaches being considered, as Klahr has recently suggested (2010), and assess their impacts on gains in students’ STEM learning and capacity to do “informed designing.” I would add that testing with “impoverished” forms of any instructional approach should be avoided. Asking students to design without scaffolding, where in essence students would need to invent the mechanical elements needed to construct a device, or discover laws of physics and engineering based on experiments they run, has little chance for success or value as research that can inform classroom practice. The smart use of scaffolding is a must when doing and testing design-based project work, as it has been with other flavors of PBL (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007). The direct instruction treatment in this proposed study might include strategies like simply reading about the engineering design process (Atman and Bursic, 1996), cognitive tutoring, providing subjects finished models of designed products and worked examples showing the thinking of experts doing design tasks. The constructivist treatment in the proposed research might use materials developed in line with the three curriculum design principles that Kanter (2010) describes for building meaningful science understandings with design projects. These include: (a) motivating students with a need to learn key STEM concepts, (b) helping students construct these ideas via first-hand experiences, and (c) helping students structure their new knowledge for successful retrieval when designing. The pedagogical recommendations associated with re-introducing design courses into undergraduate engineering programs that were made by a small group of engineering educators in the early 1960s in effect identified an Achilles heel of direct instruction of the day and attempted to redress it. The flaw may relate to a problem of a certain type of transfer – a review of the transfer literature as it relates to ETE can be found in chapter No. four in this volume, contributed by Johnson, Dixon, Daugherty and Oenardi. Students in the 1960s who developed proficiency in solving well-defined problems did mainly tasks involving analysis (e.g., solving end-of-chapter problems in a heat transfer course), but very little synthesis, which is a central component to design thinking (Jones, 1984, p. 63). What the Committee on Engineering Design (1961) described as lacking in engineering undergraduates whose training mainly involved solving well-defined engineering science problems was that they had not developing intellectually and attitudinally to deal with the risks, uncertainties and challenges of solving ill-defined design problems and projects. What they recommended was not to replace engineering science with design, nor to continue with the engineering science status quo, but to employ a hybrid approach that involved the scheduling and coordination of both kinds of courses and instruction. The constructivist versus direct instruction dilemma and debate has ignored this third pedagogical option and potential treatment for the proposed study – the use of a hybrid approach that combines the two instructional methods. The research being proposed here should therefore also test a “multi-attribute” hybrid instructional treatment, one that blends constructivist and direct instruction approaches. Subjects in the hybrid group at times might explore materials to build connections with prior knowledge and face the challenge of proposing and constructing new ideas. At other times, they would experience direct instruction to build relevant science and engineering science ideas in long-term memory so that they could produce meaningful explanations regarding how their devices do and do not work. Among the teaching strategies that might be included in this third treatment would be approaches that bridge inquiry and design and support students in developing and using design rules-of-thumb and doing effective diagnostic troubleshooting. The proposed research study would report on the degree to which each of the three instructional approaches – constructivist, direct instruction and hybrid – helped students in schools learn STEM disciplinary knowledge and skills, and gain confidence and self-efficacy in addressing and completing design projects. Such research would be critical to ETE practitioners because it could help them better prepare students to engage in similar enterprises with competence in the workplaces of the future. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

In our continuously changing society, a need for updating one's skills and knowledge puts pressure on safeguarding the labour market position of low-qualified employees. However, prior research and official statistics show that employees with a lower level of education tend to participate less in training than highly-educated individuals. This limited participation is associated with employers offering fewer opportunities to low-qualified employees, but also with the fact that low-qualified employees themselves might be less willing to participate. In other words, their learning intentions are assumed to be weaker and more restricted than the learning intentions of highly-educated employees. The article reports on a quantitative survey research on the learning intentions of 406 low-qualified employees. The results showed that employees who participated in formal job-related learning activities during the last 5 years had a stronger learning intention than those who did not. Next, the results of the stepwise regression showed that self-directedness, financial benefits, self-efficacy, and autonomy were significant positive predictors of the learning intentions of low-qualified employees. Also, the limited number of possibilities or opportunities to learn was not significant. The results indicated that a learning intention can lead towards the participation in learning activities, but participation is not merely initiated by offering opportunities for learning. Organisational aspects such as job autonomy and financial benefits can stimulate the learning intention of an employee. Finally, regarding the socio-demographic variables, only limited differences were found. In short, employees with no educational qualifications and a full-time contract had the lowest intention to learn. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

This article is concerned with the transition from school to the workplace for pupils with special educational needs in Germany. First, an outline of the standard system of professional training in Germany shall be given. Then, the initial conditions that adolescents are confronted with at the end of their time in school shall be examined. This review will then focus on studies and surveys of students with special educational needs who have graduated from school in Germany. It quickly becomes apparent that, after school, adolescents with special educational needs (SEN) most times visited a one-year school-based pre-vocational programme, and afterwards a state-funded school-based vocational programme; therefore the standard German dual-educational apprenticeship system generally doesn't apply. Looking at segregated schoolbased vocational training for students with SEN, it can be observed that the placement rate into the general labour market is not sufficient. Inclusive models play a minor role here, even if the analyses at hand suggest promising perspectives. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

This paper discusses the findings from a one-year ethnographic study of young people attending Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in two local authorities in the north of England. The paper locates E2E within the broader context of provision for low-achieving young people and of UK government policy on reducing the proportion of young people who are not in education, employment or training. Although discourses associated with these categories of young people often present them in negative terms, the paper shows that this type of conceptualisation is inadequate to understand the lives of young people on the margins of education and employment. The paper also finds that the success of E2E in improving employability is mixed. The programme helps young people to improve their confidence, basic skills and personal effectiveness, as well as provides opportunities to acquire qualifications. However, employability is also linked to broader social and economic factors. Although E2E can help young people gain employment, particularly in relatively low-skill areas of work, in adverse economic conditions, the programme is unlikely to offer participants a labour market advantage. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

With the improvement of network environment, learning concept under network environment become more and more popular and many teaching method reforms have also been stimulated. Drawing on the experience of German project instruction and combining years of teaching experiences, the authors introduced an open-ended project instruction mode based on network. This article demonstrates its contents, characteristics and practical results in detail. We pay particular attention to the sources, organization, and effectiveness of instruction. We come to the conclusion that the characteristics of projects lies in its openness which makes it be free to choose teachers, partners, projects and high quality learning environment. This instruction mode has achieved fruitful results and good social effects. © 2011 IEEE.

Science-Based Technology School (SBTS) is a pilot project which was established under a co-operative agreement between the National Science and Technology Development (NSTDA) and The Vocational Education Commission (VEC) in 2008. The main purpose of the project is to provide information to new inventors or new technologists in order to support the growth of the domestic economy and industries. Project Based learning (PBL) and teaching is an approach for classroom activity and is integrated within the basic science curriculum and vocational training for the students in the school. The aim of this paper is to study the current state and existing problems in educational management of the Science-Based Technology School project and provide possible improvements. The teaching and learning process were examined and efficient mechanisms to support and improve academic knowledge for new inventors were considered. Results from this study will be applied to future designs and used to develop the educational management model for the Science-Based Technology School. © 2011 IEEE.