Early childhood environments can offer valuable opportunities for student collaboration. Social interactions allow students to practice listening to each other and learn how to work together. This study focused on the roles and perspectives of early childhood educators related to student collaboration in the classroom. Six educators from one elementary school in New Hampshire participated in two focus group discussions, the first of which included a presentation on student collaboration with first graders. Participants also completed four concept maps highlighting their perspectives about student collaboration and one written reflection comparing their perspectives before and after engaging in the focus group discussions. Participants’ awareness of strategies for student collaboration grew through these discussions among peers. Implications of the study include providing opportunities for educators to engage in discussions that examine their approaches for planning, preparing, and offering a variety of collaborative activities throughout the day.

The benefits of undergraduate student research are vast and have been well documented by the literature (Lopatto, 2003, 2010; O’Donnell, Botelho, Brown, Gonzalez, & Head, 2015; Russell, Hancock, & McCullough, 2007) despite barriers that have withstood the test of time (Wayment & Dickson, 2008). The current workshop will be led by a faculty-student duo, both with extensive experience in undergraduate research. Using evidence-based research, presenters will provide an overview of the benefits and barriers to undergraduate research and will present a logic model used for successful faculty-student collaboration. An interactive component of this workshop will prompt audience members to construct personal logic models to specifically explore their goals and feasibility in undergraduate research programming.

This study sought to identify factors that optimize individual and collaborative cognitive processing in complex learning environments. Across two laboratory sessions, the effects of manipulating instructional sequence delivery (high cognitive load vs. low cognitive load) of a simulation-based game and learning condition (individual vs. collaborative) were examined on retention and transfer of instructional content. The instruction was a set of tutorials for preparing novice students to use Aspire, a simulation-based game, developed by Cisco, that teaches entrepreneurial and computer networking skills within the industry of information technology. An instructional sequence by learning condition interaction was found on transfer, but not retention, measures. For delayed transfer performance, individuals who received high load instruction experienced cognitive overload that exceeded their cognitive capacity. Collaborative students were able to collaborate with each other in a way that reduced the high cognitive load imposed by the instructional sequence; thus, they were able to process the instructional content across their collective working memory. Individual students were not able to reduce the cognitive load imposed by the instructional sequence; thus, they had less working memory capacity for processing the instructional content. Collaborative students who received the low load instruction also demonstrated lower motivation than those who received high load instruction. Taken together, these findings support the notions of individual and collective working memory processing differences. This study holds implications for leveraging technology to design learning environments that aid students in attaining collaborative skills and knowledge needed for the 21st century. / text

Creating a community of learners with and among students in a collaborativeclassroom environment provides the keystone for developing the skills necessary forsuccess in the 21st century. Some preservice teachers envision that community building can enhance the learning experience for them and their students and want to learn and employ the necessary strategies. This study examined whether such a desirous group of novice teachers could identify the key factors they believed comprise community building and could successfully establish a community of learners during their first full year of teaching, supported by participation in a collaborative inquiry group. Four novice teachers met monthly throughout their first year for two-hoursessions during which they discussed and examined various aspects involved inestablishing their classroom communities. They created and shared artifacts designed to promote a caring, respectful relationship between them and their students as well as among the students themselves. These novice teachers discussed the challenges inherent in helping students with differing sociocultural, language, and behavioral needs bond with one another. They also supported each other in dealing with the myriad of necessities and constraints involved in implementing a start-up classroom. During the final session, group members synthesized what they believed constituted the essence of community building. They also elaborated regarding the areas of success they had achieved during their initial year of teaching. Finally, the members identified that participation in a collaborative inquiry group had supported their first-year experience. The group judged their overall experience as productive and successful. The researcher’s perspective was somewhat different from the other groupmembers. Difficulties identified in the process were using collaborative inquiry as themethod to gather data for a dissertation while endeavoring to act as an equal groupmember, requiring in-depth analysis of novice teachers who had not previouslyparticipated in action research and were still in the early stages of developing theirpractice as well as the tendency of novice teachers who had experienced the samepreservice program to employ groupthink rather than to challenge one another’sstatements. Further research should study collaborative inquiry as a method employed throughout preservice programs.

Professional competencies are explicitly identified in the primary learning outcomes for science and engineering degrees at many tertiary institutions.  Fulfillment of the requirements to equip our students with these skills, while formally acknowledged as important by all stakeholders, can be hard to demonstrate in practice.  Most degree awarding institutions would have difficulties if asked to document where in degree programs such competencies are developed. The work in this thesis addresses the issue of professional competencies from several angles.  The Open-Ended Group Project (OEGP) concept is introduced and proposed as an approach to constructing learning environments in which students’ development of professional competencies can be stimulated and assessed.  Scholarly, research-based development of the IT in Society course unit (ITiS) is described and analyzed in order to present ideas for tailoring OEGP-based course units towards meeting learning objectives related to professional competence.  Work in this thesis includes an examination of both the meanings attributed to the term professional competencies, and methods which can be used to assess the competencies once they are agreed on. The empirical work on developing ITiS is based on a framework for educational research, which has been both refined and extended as an integral part of my research.  The action research methodology is presented and concrete examples of implementations of different pedagogical interventions, based on the methodology, are given.  The framework provides support for relating a theoretical foundation to studies, or development, of learning environments.  The particular theoretical foundation for the examples in this thesis includes, apart from the action research methodology, constructivism, conceptual change, threshold concepts, communities of practice, ill-structured problem solving, the reflective practicum, and problem based learning. The key finding in this thesis is that development and assessment of professional competencies is not a pipe dream.  Assessment can be accomplished, and the OEGP concept provides a flexible base for creating an appropriate learning environment for this purpose. / <p>Felaktigt tryckt som Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology 738</p>