text:
SwisTrack/Developers/Setting up a development environment

If you want to implement your own components, or if you want to actively participate in the development of SwisTrack, you need to set up a development environment:

 * Setting up a development environment on Linux
 * Setting up a development environment on Mac OS X
 * Setting up a development environment on Windows


text:
Java Persistence/Tables

=Tables=

A table is the basic persist structure of a relational database. A table contains a list of columns which define the table's structure, and a list of rows that define the table's data. Each column has a specific type and generally size. The standard set of relational types are limited to basic types including numeric, character, date-time, and binary (although most modern databases have additional types and typing systems). Tables can also have constraints that define the rules which restrict the row data, such as primary key, foreign key, and unique constraints. Tables also have other artifacts such as indexes, partitions and triggers.

A typical mapping of a persist class will map the class to a single table. In JPA this is defined through the  annotation or   XML element. If no table annotation is present, the JPA implementation will auto assign a table for the class. The JPA default table name is the name of the class (minus the package) with the first letter capitalized. Each attribute of the class will be stored in a column in the table.

Example mapping XML for an entity with a single table
=Advanced=

Although in the ideal case each class would map to a single table, this is not always possible. Other scenarios include:
 * Multiple tables : One class maps to 2 or multiple tables.
 * Sharing tables : 2 or multiple classes are stored in the same table.
 * Inheritance : A class is involved in inheritance and has an inherited and local table.
 * Views : A class maps to a view.
 * Stored procedures : A class maps to a set of stored procedures.
 * Partitioning : Some instances of a class map to one table, and other instances to another table.
 * Replication : A class's data is replicated to multiple tables.
 * History : A class has historical data.

These are all advanced cases, some are handled by the JPA Spec and many are not. The following sections investigate each of these scenarios further and include what is supported by the JPA spec, what can be done to workaround the issue within the spec, and how to use some JPA implementations extensions to handle the scenario.

Multiple tables
Sometimes a class maps to multiple tables. This typically occurs on legacy or existing data models where the object model and data model do not match. It can also occur in inheritance when subclass data is stored in additional tables. Multiple tables may also be used for performance, partitioning or security reasons.

JPA allows multiple tables to be assigned to a single class. The  and SecondaryTables annotations or   elements can be used. By default the  column(s) are assumed to be in both tables, such that the secondary table's   column(s) are the primary key of the secondary table and a foreign key to the first table. If the first table's  column(s) are not named the same the   or   can be used to define the foreign key join condition.

In a multiple table entity, each mapping must define which table the mapping's columns are from. This is done using the  attribute of the   or   annotations or XML elements. By default the primary table of the class is used, so you only need to set the table for secondary tables. For inheritance the default table is the primary table of the subclass being mapped.

Example mapping XML for an entity with multiple tables
With the  the name refers to the foreign key column in the secondary table and the referencedColumnName refers to the primary key column in the first table. If you have multiple secondary tables, they must always refer to the first table. When defining the table's schema typically you will define the join columns in the secondary table as the primary key of the table, and a foreign key to the first table. Depending how you have defined your foreign key constraints, the order of the tables can be important, the order will typically match the order that the JPA implementation will insert into the tables, so ensure the table order matches your constraint dependencies.

For relationships to a class that has multiple tables the foreign key (join column) always maps to the primary table of the target. JPA does not allow having a foreign key map to a table other than the target object's primary table. Normally this is not an issue as foreign keys almost always map to the id/primary key of the primary table, but in some advanced scenarios this may be an issue. Some JPA products allow the column or join column to use the qualified name of the column (i.e., to allow this type of relationship.  Some JPA products may also support this through their own API, annotations or XML.

Multiple tables with foreign keys
Sometimes you may have a secondary table that is referenced through a foreign key from the primary table to the secondary table instead of a foreign key from the secondary table to the primary table. You may even have a foreign key between two of the secondary tables. Consider having an  and   table where   refers to   through an   foreign key, and (for some strange reason) you only want a single Employee class that has the data from both tables. The JPA spec does not cover this directly, so if you have this scenario the first thing to consider, if you have the flexibility, is to change your data model to stay within the confines of the spec. You could also change your object model to define a class for each table, in this case an Employee class and an Address class, which is typically the best solution. You should also check with you JPA implementation to see what extensions it supports in this area.

One way to solve the issue is simply to swap your primary and secondary tables. This will result in having the secondary table referencing the primary tables primary key and is within the spec. This however will have side-effects, one being that you now changed the primary key of your object from  to , and may have other mapping and querying implications. If you have more than 2 tables this also may not work.

Another option is to just use the foreign key column in the, this will technically be backward, and perhaps not supported by the spec, but may work for some JPA implementations. However this will result in the table insert order not matching the foreign key constraints, so the constraints will need to be removed, or deferred.

It is also possible to map the scenario through a database view. A view could be defined joining the two tables and the class could be mapped to the view instead of the tables. Views are read-only on some databases, but many also allow writes, or allow triggers to be used to handle writes.

Some JPA implementations provide extensions to handle this scenarios.

 * TopLink, EclipseLink : Provides a proprietary API for its mapping model  that allows for arbitrary complex foreign keys relationships to be defined among the secondary tables.  This can be configured through using a   annotation and   class.

Multiple table joins
Occasionally the data model and object model do not get along very well at all. The database could be a legacy model and not fit very well with the new application model, or the DBA or object architect may be a little crazy. In these cases you may require advanced multiple table joins.

Examples of these include having two tables related not by their primary or foreign keys, but through some constant or computation. Consider having an  table and an   table, the   table has an   foreign key to the   table, but there are several addresses for each employee and only the address with the   of   is desired. In this case data from both of the tables is desired to be mapped in the  object. A join expression is required where the foreign key matches and the constant matches.

Again this scenario could be handled through redesigning the data or object model, or through using a view. Some JPA implementations provide extensions to handle this scenarios.

 * TopLink, EclipseLink : Provides a proprietary API for its mapping model  that allows for arbitrary complex multiple table joins to be defined.  This can be configured through using a   annotation and   class.

Multiple table outer joins
Another perversion of multiple table mapping is to desire to outer join the secondary table. This may be desired if the secondary may or may not have a row defined for the object. Typically the object should be read-only if this is to be attempted, as writing to a row that may or may not be there can be tricky.

This is not directly supported by JPA, and it is best to reconsider the data model or object model design if faced with this scenario. Again it is possible to map this through a database view, where an outer join is used to join the tables in the view.

Some JPA implementation support using outer joins for multiple tables.

 * Hibernate : This can be accomplished through using the Hibernate  annotation and set its   attribute to  .  This will configure Hibernate to use an outer join to read the table, and will not write to the table if all of the attributes mapping to the table are null.

 * TopLink, EclipseLink : If the database supports usage of outer join syntax in the where clause (Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server), then the multiple table join expression could be used to configure an outer join to be used to read the table.

Tables with special characters and mixed case
Some JPA providers may have issues with table and column names with special characters, such as spaces. In general it is best to use standard characters, no spaces, and all uppercase names. International languages should be ok, as long as the database and JDBC driver supports the character set.

It may be required to "quote" table and column names with special characters or in some cases with mixed case. For example if the table name had a space it could be defined as the following:

Some databases support mixed case table and column names, and others are case insensitive. If your database is case insensitive, or you wish your data model to be portable, it is best to use all uppercase names. This is normally not a big deal with JPA where you rarely use the table and column names directly from your application, but can be an issue in certain cases if using native SQL queries.

Table qualifiers, schemas, or creators
A database table may require to be prefixed with a table qualifier, such as the table's creator, or its' namespace, schema, or catalog. Some databases also support linking a table on other database, so the link name can also be a table qualifier.

In JPA a table qualifier can be set on a table through the  or   attribute. Generally it does not matter which attribute is used as both just result in prefixing the table name. Technically you could even include the full name "schema.table" as the table's name and it would work. The benefit of setting the prefix in the schema or catalog is a default table qualifier can be set for the entire persistence unit, also not setting the real table name may impact native SQL queries.

If all of your tables require the same table qualifier, you can set the default in the orm.xml.

Example mapping XML for default (orm file) table qualifier
/Mapping

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Java Persistence/Tables


text:
User:Damian Yerrick

Damian Yerrick has contributed to English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and now English Wikibooks.

What Mr. Yerrick is not
He is not a sockpuppet of Damien Karras, despite the fact that they both work on Sound Synthesis Theory.

title: User:Damian Yerrick


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 8: Instructional Strategies/Mastery Learning

Mastery Learning
This term refers to an instructional approach in which all students learn material to an identical, high level, even if some students require more time than others to do so (Gentile, 2004). In mastery learning the teacher directs learning, though sometimes only in the indirect sense of finding, writing, and orchestrating specific modules or units for students to learn. In one typical mastery learning program, the teacher introduces a few new concepts or topics through a brief lecture or teacher-led demonstration. Then she might give an ungraded assignment or test immediately in order to assess how well students have learned the material, and which children still need help with it. The students who have already learned the unit are given enrichment activities. Those needing more help are provided with individual tutoring or with additional self-guiding materials that clarify the initial content; they work until they have in fact mastered the content (hence the name mastery learning). At that point students take another test or do another assignment to show that they have in fact learned the material to the expected, high standard. When the system is working well, therefore, all students can in principle end up with the highest scores or grades, although some usually take longer to do so than others.

As you might suspect, mastery learning poses two challenges. The first is ethical: is it really fair to give enrichment only to faster students and remediation only to slower students? This practice could deteriorate into continually rewarding the fast with interesting enrichment material, while continually punishing the slow with repetitious material. In using the approach, therefore, it is important to make all materials interesting, whether enrichment or remedial. It is also important to make sure that the basic learning goals of each unit are truly important—even crucial—for everyone to learn, so that even slower individuals spend their time well.

The other challenge of mastery learning is more practical: the approach makes strong demands for detailed, highly organized curriculum. If the approach is to work, the teacher must either find such a curriculum, write one herself, or assemble a suitable mixture of published and self-authored materials. However it is created, the end result has be a program filled with small units of study as well as ample enrichment and remedial materials. Sometimes these practical requirements can be challenging to provide. But not always; some subjects (like mathematics) lend themselves to detailed, sequential organization especially well. In many cases, too, commercial publishers have produced curricula already organized for use as a mastery learning program (Fox, 2004).

Direct Instruction
Sometimes this term serves as a synonym for teacher-directed instruction, but more often direct instruction refers to a relatively scripted version of mastery learning, meaning that it not only organizes the curriculum into small modules or units, but it also dictates how teachers should teach, including even the words they should speak while teaching (Adams & Engelmann, 1996; Magliaro, Lockee, & Burton, 2005). The organization and teaching scripts are based on a mix of ideas from behaviorism and cognitive theories of learning. In keeping with behaviorism, for example, the teacher is supposed to praise students immediately and explicitly when they give a correct answer. In keeping with cognitive theory, on the other hand, she is supposed to state learning objectives in advance of teaching them (providing a sort of mini-advance organizer), and provide frequent reviews of materials and checks on how well students are learning. The teacher is also supposed to introduce material in small, logical steps, giving individuals plenty of time to practice.

Direct instruction programs share one of the challenges of other mastery learning programs: because they hold all students to the same high standard of achievement, they must deal with differences in how long students require to reach the standard. But direct instruction has another challenge of its own. Such programs often rely on small-group interaction more heavily than do other mastery learning programs, and use self-guiding materials comparatively less. The good news about this difference is that direct instruction works especially well with younger students (especially kindergarten through third-grade), who may have limited literacy skills. The challenge is that heavy use of face-to-face group interaction makes it impractical to use direct instruction with an entire class, or for the entire school day. Nevertheless, within these limits, research has found direct instruction to be very effective in teaching basic skills such as early reading and arithmetic (Adams & Engelmann, 1996).

Madeline Hunter’s Effective Teaching Model
Many teacher-directed strategies have been combined by Madeline Hunter into a single, relatively comprehensive approach that she calls mastery teaching (not to be confused with the related term mastery learning) or the effective teaching model (M. Hunter, 1982; R. Hunter, 2004). Important features of the model are summarized in Table 8-X. As you can see, its features span all phases of contact with students—before, during, and after lessons or activities.

What happens before a lesson actually begins? Like many other forms of teacher-directed instruction, the effective teaching model requires curricula and learning goals that are tightly organized and inter-related, yet divisible into small parts, ideas, or skills. In teaching about photosynthesis, for example, the teacher (or at least her curriculum) needs to identify the basic elements that contribute to this process, and how they relate to each other. With photosynthesis, the elements include the sun, plants, animals, chlorophyll, oxygen produced by plants and consumed by animals, and carbon dioxide that produced by animals and consumed by plants. The roles of these elements also need to be identified and expressed at a level appropriate for the students. With advanced science students, oxygen, chlorophyll, and carbon dioxide may be expressed as part of a complex chemical reaction; with first-grade students, though, they may be expressed simply as parts of a process akin to breathing, called respiration.

Once this analysis of the curriculum has been done, teachers using the effective teaching model make the most of the lesson time by creating an anticipatory set, which is an activity that focuses or orients the attention of students to the upcoming content. Creating an anticipatory set may consist, for example, of posing one or more questions drawing on students’ everyday knowledge or on knowledge of prior lessons. In teaching about differences between fruits and vegetables, the teacher could start by asking, “If you are making a salad strictly of fruit, which of these would be OK to use: apple, tomato, cucumber, or orange?” (Answer: all of them!) As the lesson proceeds, information needs to be offered in short, logical pieces, using language as familiar as possible to the students. Examples should be plentiful and varied: if the purpose is to define and distinguish fruits and vegetables, for example, then defining features should be presented singly or at most just a few at a time, with several clear-cut examples presented of each feature. Sometimes models or analogies also help in explaining examples, and can be used. A teacher can say, “Think of a fruit as a sort of ‘decoration’ on the plant, because if you pick it, the plant will go on living.” Models can also mislead students, however, if they are not used thoughtfully, since they may contain features that differ from the original concepts. In likening a fruit to a decoration, for example, students may overlook the essential role of fruit in plant reproduction, or think that lettuce qualifies as a fruit, since picking a few lettuce leaves does not usually kill a lettuce plant.

Throughout a lesson, the teacher repeatedly checks for understanding by asking questions that call for active thinking on the part of students. One way is to require all students to respond somehow, either with an actual choral response (speaking in unison together) or with a non-verbal signal like raising hands to indicate answers to questions. In teaching about fruits and vegetables, for example, a teacher can ask, “Here’s a list of fruits and vegetables. As I point to each one, raise your hand if it’s a fruit, but not if it’s a vegetable.” Or she can ask, “Here’s a list of fruits and vegetables. Say together what each one is as I point to it; you say ‘fruit’ or ‘vegetable’, whichever applies.” Even though some students may hide their ignorance by letting more knowledgeable classmates do the responding, the general level or quality of response can still give a rough idea of how well students as a group are understanding. General checks can be supplemented, of course, with questions addressed to individuals, or with questions to which individuals must respond briefly in writing. A teacher can ask everyone, “Give me an example of one fruit and one vegetable,” and then call on individuals to answer. Or she can say, “I want everyone to make a list with two columns, one listing all the fruits you can think of and the other listing all the vegetables you can think of.”

As a lesson draws to a close, the teacher arranges students to engage in further independent practice. The point of this practice is not primarily to explore new material or ideas, but to consolidate or strengthen the recent learning. At the end of a lesson about long division, for example, the teacher can make a transition to independent practice by introducing a set of additional problems similar to the ones she explained during the lesson. After working one or two with the students, she can turn the rest of the task over to the students to practice on their own. But note a proviso. For students to be fully focused and motivated, such practice has to be organized into small, meaningful amounts and students’ understanding has be checked by the teacher frequently. Even when students need a lot of practice, therefore, a long set of practice problems needs to be broken up initially into small subsets of problems, and either written or oral feedback offered in between subsets.

What Are the Limits of Teacher-Directed Instruction?
Whatever the grade level, most of the subjects usually taught in schools have at least some features or parts that benefit from direct instruction. Even activities or skills intended to foster creativity can benefit from a direct approach at certain times: learning to draw, paint, or write a poem, for example, requires learning techniques that may be easier to learn if presented sequentially in relatively small units. Research supports the usefulness of teacher-directed instruction, when it is designed well and implemented as intended, for a variety of educational contexts (Rosenshine & Mesister,1995; Good & Brophy, 2004), and teachers themselves tend to support the approach in principle (Demant & Yates, 2003).

But there are limits to its usefulness. Some are the practical ones that we have pointed out already. Teacher-directed instruction, whatever the form, requires a well-organized curriculum, or at least requires well-organized units of instruction, in advance of when students are to learn. Such curricula or units may not always be available, and it may not always be realistic to expect busy teachers to devise their own. Other limits of teacher direction, however, have more to do with the very nature of learning. Some critics argue, for example, that organizing material on behalf of students encourages students to be passive—an ironic, but clearly undesirable side effect (Kohn, 2000, 2006). According to this criticism, the mere fact that a curriculum or unit of study is constructed by a teacher (or by a curriculum writer) implies to some students that they should not seek information actively on their own, but wait for it to arrive from elsewhere. In support of this argument, critics point to the fact that teacher-directed instructional approaches sometimes contradict their own premises by including tasks requiring students to do a bit of conceptual organization of their own. This happens, for example, when a Mastery Learning program provides enrichment material to faster students to work on independently; in that case the teacher may be involved in the enrichment activities only minimally.

Considerations like these have led to additional instructional approaches that are rely more explicitly on students themselves to seek and organize their own learning. In the next section of Chapter 8, we discuss some of these options. As you will see, student-centered models of learning do tend to solve certain problems of teacher-directed instruction, but they also can have problems of their own.

(back to Chapter 8...)


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User talk:Ekell014

Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or contact me personally. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 14:49, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

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User talk:MaryDaly

Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or contact me personally.

geology text
"Reading_room/Assistance" Thank you for volunteering. Please do upload your geology text without any rewriting. --DavidCary 04:55, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

title: User talk:MaryDaly


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 8: Instructional Strategies/Student-Centered Models of Learning

Student-centered models of learning shift some of the responsibility for directing and organizing learning from the teacher to the student. Being student-centered does not mean, however, that a teacher gives up organizational and leadership responsibilities completely. It only means a relative shift in the teacher’s role, toward one with more emphasis on guiding students’ self-chosen directions. As we explained earlier in this chapter, teacher-directed strategies do not making taking over responsibility for students’ learning completely; no matter how much a teacher structures or directs learning, the students still have responsibility for working and expending effort to comprehend new material. By the same token, student-centered models of learning do not mean handing over all organizational work of instruction to students. The teacher is still the most knowledgeable member of the class, and still has both the opportunity and the responsibility to guide learning in directions that are productive.

As you might suspect, therefore, teacher-directed and student-centered approaches to instruction may overlap in practice. You can see the overlap clearly, for example, in two instructional strategies commonly thought of as student-centered, independent study and self-reflection. In independent study, as the name implies, a student works alone a good deal of the time, consulting with a teacher only occasionally. Independent study may be student-centered in the sense that the student may be learning a topic or skill—an exotic foreign language, for example—that is personally interesting. But the opposite may also be true: the student may be learning a topic or skill that a teacher or an official school curriculum has directed the student to learn—a basic subject for which the student is missing a credit, for example. Either way, though, the student will probably need guidance, support, and help from a teacher. In this sense even independent study always contains elements of teacher-direction.

Similarly, self-reflection refers to thinking about beliefs and experiences in order to clarify their personal meaning and importance. In school it can be practiced in a number of ways: for example by keeping diaries or logs of learning or reading, or by retelling stories of important experiences or incidents in a student’s life, or by creating concept maps like the ones described earlier in this chapter. Whatever form it takes, self-reflection by definition happens inside a single student’s mind, and in this sense is always directed by the student. Yet most research on self-reflection finds that self-reflection only works well when it involves and generates responses and interaction with other students or with a teacher (Seifert, 1999; Kuit, Reay, & Freeman, 2001). To be fully self-reflective, students need to have access to more than their existing base of knowledge and ideas—more than what they know already. In one study about students’ self-reflections about cultural and racial prejudices (Gay & Kirkland, 2003), for example, the researchers found that students tended to reflect on these problems in relatively shallow ways if they worked on their own. It was not particularly effective to write about prejudice in a journal than no one read except themselves, or to describe beliefs in a class discussion in which neither the teacher nor classmates commented or challenged the beliefs. Much more effective in both cases was for the teacher to respond thoughtfully to students’ reflective comments. In this sense the use of self-reflection, like independent study, required elements of teacher-direction to be successful.

How might a teacher emphasize students’ responsibility for directing and organizing their own learning? The alternatives are numerous, as they are for teacher-directed strategies, so we can only sample some of them here. We concentrate on ones that are relatively well known and used most widely, and especially on two: inquiry learning and cooperative learning.

Inquiry Learning
Inquiry learning stands the usual advice about expository (lecture-style) teaching on its head: instead of presenting well-organized knowledge to students, the teacher (or sometimes fellow students) pose thoughtful questions intended to stimulate discussion and investigation by students. The approach has been described, used, and discussed by educators literally for decades, though sometimes under other names, including inquiry method (Postman & Weingartner, 1969), discovery learning (Bruner, 1960/2006) , or progressive education (Dewey, 1933; Martin, 2003). For convenience, we will stay with the term inquiry learning.

The questions that begin a cycle of inquiry learning may be posed either by the teacher or by students themselves. Their content depends not only on the general subject area being studied, but also on the interests which students themselves have expressed. In elementary-level science, for example, a question might be “Why do leaves fall off trees when winter comes?” In high-school-level social studies, it might be “Why do nations get into conflict?” The teacher avoids answering such questions directly, even if asked to do so. Instead she encourages students to investigate the questions themselves, for example by elaborating on students’ ideas and by asking further questions based on students’ initial comments. Since students’ comments can not be predicted precisely, the approach is by nature flexible. The initial questioning helps students to create and clarify questions which they consider worthy of further investigation. Discussing questions about leaves falling off trees, for example, can prompt students to observe trees in the autumn or to locate books and references that discuss or explain the biology of trees and leaves.

But inquiry is not limited to particular grade levels or topics. If initial questions in a high school social studies class have been about why nations get into conflict, for example, the resulting discussions can lead to investigating the history of past wars and the history peace-keeping efforts around the world. Whether the topic is high school social studies or elementary school biology, the specific direction of investigations is influenced heavily by students, but with assistance from the teacher to insure that the students’ initiatives are productive. When all goes well, the inquiry and resulting investigations benefit students in two ways. The first is that students (perhaps obviously) learn new knowledge from their investigations. The second is that students practice a constructive, motivating way of learning, one applicable to a variety of problems and tasks, both in school and out.

Cooperative Learning
Even though inquiry-oriented discussion and investigation benefits when it involves the teacher, it can also be useful for students to work together somewhat independently, relying on a teacher’s guidance only indirectly. Working with peers is a major feature of cooperative learning (sometimes also called collaborative learning). In this approach, students work on a task in groups and often are rewarded either partially or completely for the success of the group as a whole. Aspects of cooperative learning have been part of education for a long time; some form of cooperation has always been necessary to participate on school sports teams, for example, or to produce a student-run school newspaper. What is a bit newer is using cooperative or collaborative activities systematically to facilitate the learning of a range of educational goals central to the academic curriculum (Prince, 2004).

Even though teachers usually value cooperation in students, circumstances at school can sometimes reduce students’ incentives to show it. The traditional practice of assessing students individually, for example, can set the stage for competition over grades, and cultural and other forms of diversity can sometimes inhibit individuals from helping each other spontaneously. Strategies exist, however, for reducing such barriers so that students truly benefit from each other’s presence, and are more likely to feel like sharing their skills and knowledge. Here, for example, are several key features that make cooperative learning work well (Johnson & Johnson, 1998; Smith, et al., 2005) :

 * Students need time and a place to talk and work together. This may sound obvious, but it can be overlooked if time in class becomes crowded with other tasks and activities, or with interruptions related to school (like assemblies) but not to the classroom. It is never enough simply to tell students to work together, only to leave them wondering how or when they are to do so.

 * Students need skills at working together. As an adult, you may feel relatively able to work with a variety of partners on a group task. The same assumption cannot be made, however, about younger individuals, whether teenagers or children. Some students may get along with a variety of partners, but others may not. Many will benefit from advice and coaching about how to focus on the tasks at hand, rather than on the personalities of their partners.

 * Assessment of activities should hold both the group and the individuals accountable for success. If a final mark for a project goes only to the group as a whole, then freeloading is possible: some members may not do their share of the work and may be rewarded more than they deserve. Others may be rewarded less than they deserve. If, on the other hand, a final grade for a group project goes only to each member’s individual contribution to a group project, then overspecialization can occur: individuals have no real incentive to work together, and a cooperative may deteriorate into a set of smaller individual projects (Slavin, 1994).

 * Students need to believe in the value and necessity of cooperation. Collaboration will not occur if students privately assume that their partners have little to contribute to their personal success. Social prejudices from the wider society—like racial bias or gender sexism, for example—can creep into the operations of cooperative groups, causing some members to be ignored unfairly while others are overvalued. Teachers can help reduce these problems in two ways: first by pointing out and explaining that a diversity of talents necessary for success on a group project, and second by pointing out to the group how undervalued individuals are contributing to the overall project (Cohen, Brody, & Sapon-Shevin, 2004).

As these comments imply, cooperative learning does not happen automatically, and requires monitoring and support by the teacher. Some activities may not lend themselves to cooperative work, particularly if every member of the group is doing essentially the same task. Giving everyone in a group the same set of arithmetic problems to work on collaboratively, for example, is a formula for cooperative failure: either the most skilled students do the work for others (freeloading) or else members simply divide up the problems among themselves in order to reduce their overall work (overspecialization). A better choice for cooperative task is one that clearly requires a diversity of skills, what some educators call a rich group work task (Cohen, Brody, & Sapon-Shevin, 2004). Preparing a presentation about medieval castles, for example, might require
 * writing skill to create a report,
 * dramatic skill to put on a skit, and
 * artistic talent to create a poster.

Although a few students may have all of these skills, more are likely to have only one, and they are therefore likely to need and want their fellow group members’ participation.

Examples of Cooperative and Collaborative Learning
Although this description may make the requirements for cooperative learning sound somewhat precise, there are actually a variety of ways to implement it in practice. Table 8-3 summarizes several of them. As you can see, the strategies vary in the number of many students they involve, the prior organization or planning provided by the teacher, and the amount of class time they normally require.

(back to Chapter 8...)


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text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 9: Instructional Planning/Formulating Learning Objectives

Given the somewhat general nature of curriculum frameworks and guides, how do you choose and formulate actual learning objectives? Basically there are two approaches: either start by selecting content or topics that what you want students to know (the cognitive approach) or start with what you want students to do (the behavioral approach). In effect the cognitive approach moves from the general to the specific, and the behavioral approach does the opposite. Each approach has advocates, as well as inherent strengths and problems. In practice teachers often combine or alternate between them in order to give students some of the advantages of each.

From General to Specific: Selecting Content Topics
The cognitive approach assumes that teachers normally have a number of long-term, general goals for students, and it begins with those goals. It also assumes that each student work toward long-term, general goals along different pathways and using different styles of learning. Because of these assumptions, it is necessary to name indicators, which are examples of specific behaviors by which students might show success at reaching a general learning goal. But it is neither desirable nor possible for a list of indicators to be complete—only for it to be representative (Gronlund, 2004). Consider this example from teaching middle-school biology. For this subject you might have a general goal like the following, with accompanying indicators:

 * Goal:
 * The student will understand the nature and purpose of photosynthesis.
 * Indicators:
 * 1) Explains the purpose of photosynthesis and steps in the process
 * 2) Diagrams steps in the chemical process
 * 3) Describes how plant photosynthesis affects the animal world
 * 4) Writes a plan for how to test leaves for presence of photosynthesis
 * 5) Makes an oral presentation explaining the experiment in #4.

Using a strictly cognitive approach to planning, therefore, a teacher’s job has two parts. First she must identify, find, or choose a manageable number of general goals—perhaps just a half dozen or so. (Sometimes these can be taken or adapted from a curriculum framework document such as discussed earlier.) Then the teacher must think of a handful of specific examples or behavioral indicators for each goal—just a half dozen or so of these as well. The behavioral indicators clarify the meaning of the general goal, but are not meant to be the only way that students might show success at learning. Then, at last, thoughtful planning for individual lessons or activities can begin. This approach works especially well for learning goals that are relatively long-term—goals that take many lessons, days, or weeks to reach. During such long periods of teaching, it is impossible to specify the exact, detailed behaviors that every student can or should display to prove that he or she has reached a general goal. It is possible, however, to specify general directions toward which all students should focus their learning, and to explain the nature of the goals with a sample of well-chosen indicators or examples (Popham, 2002).

The cognitive, general-to-specific approach is reasonable on the face of it, and in fact probably describes how many teachers think about their instructional planning. But critics have argued that indicators used as examples may not in fact clarify the general goal enough; students therefore end up unexpectedly—as Casey Stengel said at the start of this chapter—“someplace else.” Given the general goal of understanding photosynthesis described above, for example, how are we to know whether the five indicators that are listed really allow a teacher to grasp the full meaning of the goal? Put differently, how else might a student show understanding of photosynthesis, and how is a teacher to know if that student’s achievement is s a legitimate display of understanding? To some educators, grasping the meaning of goals from indicators is not as obvious as it should be, and in any case is prone to misunderstanding. The solution, they say, is not to start planning with general goals, but with specific behaviors that identify students’ success.

From Specific to General: Behavioral Objectives
Compared to the cognitive approach, the behavioral approach to instructional planning reverses the steps in planning. Instead of starting with general goal statements accompanied by indicator examples, it starts with the identification of specific behaviors—concrete actions or words—that students should perform or display as a result of instruction (Mager, 2005). Collectively, the specific behaviors may describe a more general educational goal, but unlike the indicators used in the cognitive approach, they are not a mere sampling of the possible specific outcomes. Instead they represent all the intended specific outcomes. Consider this sampling of behavioral objectives:

 * Objectives: Learning to use in-line roller blade skates (beginning level)
 * 1. Student ties boots on correctly.
 * 2. Student puts on safety gear correctly, including helmet, knee and elbow pads.
 * 3. Student skates 50 feet on level ground without falling.
 * 4. Student stops on demand within a ten-foot distance, without falling.

The objectives listed are not merely a representative sample of how students can demonstrate success with roller-blading. Instead they are behaviors that every student should acquire in order to meet the goal of using roller blades as a beginner. There simply are no other ways to display learning of this goal; getting 100% on a written test about roller blading, for example, would not qualify as success with this goal, though it might show success at some other goal, such as verbal knowledge about roller blading. Even adding other skating behaviors (like “Student skates backwards” or “Student skates in circles”) might not qualify as success with this particular goal, because it could reasonably argued that the additional skating behaviors are about skating at an advanced level, not a beginning level.

In the most commonly used version of this approach, originated by Robert Mager (2005), a good behavioral objective should have three features. First, it should specify a behavior that can in fact be observed. In practice this usually means identifying something that a student does or says, not something a student thinks or feels. Compare the following examples; one names a behavior to be performed, but the other names a thinking process that cannot, in principle, be seen:

 * Behavioral Objective:
 * ''The student will make a list of animal species that live in the water but breathe air, and a separate list of species that live in the water but do not require air to breathe.
 * Not Behavioral Objective:
 * The student will understand the differences between fish and mammals that live in the water.

The second feature of a good behavioral objective is that it describes conditions of performance of the behavior. What are the special circumstances to be provided when the student performs the objective? Consider these two examples:

 * Special Condition of Performance Is Specified:
 * Given a list of 50 species, the student will circle those that live in water but breathe air, and underline those that live in water but do not breathe air.
 * A Special Condition of Performance Is Not Specified:
 * After three days of instruction, the student will identify species that live in water but breathe air, as well as species that live in water but do not breathe air.

The first objective names a special condition of performance—that the student will be given a particular kind of list to work from—which is not part of the instruction itself. The second objective appears to name a condition—“three days of instruction.” But the condition is really simply what the teacher will do (she will instruct), not something specific to students’ performance.

The third feature of a good behavioral objective is that it specifies a minimum level or degree of acceptable performance. Consider these two example:

 * Specifies Minimum Level:
 * Given a list of 50 species, the student will circle all of those that live in water but breathe air, and underline all of those that live in water but do not breathe air. The student will do so within fifteen minutes.
 * Does Not Specify Minimum Level:
 * The student will circle names of species that live in water but breathe air, and underline those that live in water but do not breathe air.

The first objective specifies a level of performance—100% accuracy within 15 minutes. The second objective leaves this information out (and incidentally it also omits the condition of performance mentioned on the left).

Behavioral objectives have obvious advantages because of their clarity and precision. They seem especially well suited for learning that by nature can be spelled out explicitly and fully, such as when a student is learning to drive a car, to use safety equipment in a science laboratory, or install and run a particular computer program. Most of these goals, as it happens, also tend to have relatively short learning cycles, meaning that they can be learned as a result of just one lesson or activity, or of just a short series of them at most. Such goals tend not to include the larger, more abstract goals of education. In practice, both kinds of goals—both the general and the specific—form a large part of education at all grade levels.

Finding the Best in Both Approaches
When it comes to teaching and learning the large or major goals, then, behavioral objectives can seem unwieldy. How, a teacher might ask, can you spell out all of the behaviors involved in a general goal like becoming a good citizen? And how could you name in advance the numerous conditions under which good citizenship might be displayed, or the minimum acceptable level of good citizenship expected in each condition? Specifying these features seems impractical at best, and at times even undesirable ethically or philosophically. (Would we really want any students to become “minimum citizens”?) Because of these considerations, many teachers find it sensible to a compromise between the cognitive and behavioral approaches. Here are some features that are often part of a compromise:

 * 1) When planning, think about BOTH long-term, general goals AND short-term, immediate objectives. A thorough, balanced look at most school curricula shows that they are concerned with the general as well as the specific. In teaching elementary math, for example, you may want students to learn general problem solving strategies (a general goal), but you may also want them to learn specific math facts (a specific objective). In teaching Shakespeare’s plays in high school, you may want students to be able to compare the plays critically (a general goal), but doing so may require that they learn details about the characters and plots of the major plays (a specific objective). Since general goals usually take longer to reach than specific objectives, instructional planning has to include both time frames.
 * 2) Plan for what students do, not what the teacher does. This idea may seem obvious, but it is easy to overlook it when devising lesson plans. Consider that example again about teaching Shakespeare. If you want students to learn the details about Shakespeare’s plays, it is tempting to plan objectives like “Summarize the plot of each play to students, or “Write and hand out to students an outline of the plays.” Unfortunately these objectives describe only what the teacher does, and makes the assumption (often unwarranted) that students will remember what the teacher says or puts in writing for them. A better version of the same objective should focus on the actions of students, not of teachers—for example, “Students will write a summary, from memory, of each of the major plays of Shakespeare.” This version focuses on what students do instead of what the teacher does. (Of course you may still have to devise activities that help students to reach the objective, such as providing guided practice in writing summaries of plays.)
 * 3) To insure diversity of goals and objectives when planning, consider organizing goals and objectives by using a systematic classification scheme of educational objectives. At the beginning of this section we stated that there is a need, when devising goals and objectives, for both the specific and the general. Actually a more accurate statement is that there is a need for goals and objectives that refer to a variety of cognitive processes and that have varying degrees of specificity or generality. One widely used classification scheme that does so, for example, is one proposed fifty years ago by Benjamin Bloom (1956) and revised recently by his associates (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001).

(back to Chapter 9...)


text:
Guitar/Singing and Playing

There are some people who are blessed with a perfect singing voice and excellent coordination, and they sing and play the guitar like breathing. For other people, attempting to sing a single note causes them to immediately lose the rhythm.

This section is intended to help people who already play the guitar and gives advice on how to incorporate vocals into their performance.

General Tips
Just keep singing. The worst thing you can do is stop, because stopping teaches you to stop, and only singing teaches you to sing. Start simple. Pick a song with simple chord progressions and simple, on-beat strumming patterns. Start with a very slow tempo and gradually speed up after a successful try.

Other Artist's Songs
First learn to play the song really well. Listen and sing along with the song, over and over again. After you have a good handle on both the singing and guitar part, try putting them together. If this still proves too difficult having both parts memorized, you may try just playing the guitar while listening to the song, focusing your mind on listening to the words as closely as you can until you can think about the words while playing. This could take away some of the multitasking confusion prevalent in first attempts.

If multitasking is not the issue but certain songs are still a challenge, practice playing and singing the song without reference to the original, and when you are sure that you have memorised the lyrics and chord changes, practice along to the original version. Sometimes doing this will help you master the harder sections.

Be sure to keep a copy of the words nearby while you are learning, in case you forget a line or two. It is better to stumble through a few lines and keep the song going rather than stopping in mid verse to try to remember something.

Your Own Songs
After writing the first few lines of a song and with an idea of how you'd like the song to be (having the basic chords and lyrics ), the next step is to explore the possibilities. The idea is to try different tones and melodies. When singing we can stretch words to fill up some space. change any words and chords, or if creating a version of a known tune, add a chord (or word), later you can decide which one sounds better. Sometimes we subconsciously create music that is a copy of our favourite artist; there's nothing wrong with this. After all, some of the greatest names in music founded their early careers with covers of the music of their heroes. After some progress show it to your friends and ask them for some opinions. Sometimes we may also forget the melody or chords, so a good tip is to record it. You don't need a professional studio, just a normal microphone and a computer will suffice. In relation to lyrics during songwriting, if a word doesn't sit well, look for a synonym. Most of the time, it's the best solution.

title: Guitar/Singing and Playing


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 9: Instructional Planning/Taxonomies of Educational Objectives

Taxonomies of Educational Objectives
When educators have proposed taxonomies of educational objectives, they have tended to focus on one of three areas or domains of psychological functioning: either students’ cognition (thought), students’ feelings and emotions (affect), or students’ physical skills (psychomotor abilities). Of these three areas, they have tended to focus the most attention on cognition. The taxonomy originated by Benjamin Bloom, for example, deals entirely with cognitive outcomes of instruction.

Bloom’s Taxonomy
In its original form, Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives referred to forms of cognition or thinking, which were divided into the six levels (Bloom, 1956). Table 9-5 summarizes the levels, and offers two kinds of examples—simple ones based on the children’s story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” and complex ones more typical of goals and objectives used in classrooms. The levels form a loose hierarchy from simple to complex thinking, at least when applied to some subjects and topics. When planning for these subjects it can therefore be helpful not only for insuring diversity among learning objectives, but also for sequencing materials. In learning about geography, for example, it may sometimes make sense to begin with information about specific places or societies (knowledge and comprehension), and work gradually toward comparisons and assessments among the places or societies (analysis and synthesis).

Such a sequence does not work well, however, for all possible topics or subjects. To learn certain topics in mathematics, for example, students may sometimes need to start with general ideas (like “What does it mean to multiply?”) than with specific facts (like “How much is 4 x 6?”) (Egan,2005). At other times, though, the reverse sequence may be preferable. Whatever the case, a taxonomy of cognitive objectives, like Bloom’s, can help to remind teachers to set a variety of objectives and to avoid relying excessively on just one level, such as simple recall of factual knowledge (Notar, et al., 2004).

Bloom’s Taxonomy Revised
A few years ago two of Benjamin Bloom’s original colleagues, Linda Anderson and David Krathwohl, revised his taxonomy so as to clarify its terms and to make it more complete (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Marzano, 2006). The resulting categories are summarized and compared to the original categories in Table 9-6. As the chart shows, several categories of objectives have been renamed, and a second dimension added that describes the kind of thinking or cognitive processing that may occur. The result is a much richer taxonomy than before, since every level of objectives can now take four different forms. Remembering, for example, can refer to four different kinds of memory: memory for facts, for concepts, for procedures, or for metacognitive knowledge. Table 9-6 gives examples of each of these kinds of memory.

Taxonomies of Affective Objectives and Psychomotor Objectives
Although taxonomies related to affect, or the feelings and emotions of students, are used less commonly than cognitive taxonomies for planning instruction, various educators have constructed them. One of the most widely known was also published by colleagues of Benjamin Bloom and classifies affect according to how committed a student feels toward what he is learning (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964/1999). Table 9-7 summarizes the categories and gives brief examples. The lowest level, called receiving, simply involves willingness to experience new knowledge or activities. Higher levels involve embracing or adopting experiences in ways that are increasingly organized and that represent increasingly stable forms of commitment.

Taxonomies related to abilities and skills that are physical, or psychomotor, have also been used less widely than affective taxonomies, with the notable exception of one area of teaching where they are obviously relevant: physical education. As you might expect, taxonomic categories of motor skill extend from simple, brief actions to complex, extended action sequences that combine simpler, previously learned skills smoothly and automatically (Harrow, 1972). One such classification scheme is shown in Table 9-7. An example of a very basic psychomotor skill might be imitating the action of throwing a ball when modeled by someone else; an example of the latter might be performing a ten-minute gymnastics routine which the student has devised for himself or herself. Note, though, that many examples of psychomotor skills also exist outside the realm of physical education. In a science course, for example, a student might need to learn to operate laboratory equipment that requires using delicate, fine movements. In art classes, students might learn to draw, and in music they might learn to play an instrument (both are partly motor skills). Most first-graders are challenged by the motor skills of learning to write. For students with certain physical disabilities, furthermore, motor skill development is an important priority for the student’s entire education.

(back to Chapter 9...)


text: Template:Goodbook/Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 9: Instructional Planning/Students and Instructional Goals

Students as a Source of Instructional Goals
So far our discussion of instructional planning has described goals and objectives as if they are selected primarily by educators and teachers, and not by students themselves. The assumption may be correct in many cases, but there are problems with it. One problem is that choosing goals and objectives for students, rather than by students, places a major burden on everyone involved in education—curriculum writers, teachers, and students. The curriculum writers have to make sure that they specify standards, goals, and objectives are truly important for students to learn (what if it really does not matter, for example, whether a science student learns about the periodic table of the elements?). Teachers have to make sure that students actually become motivated to learn the specified goals and objectives, even if the students are not motivated initially. And students have to master pre-set goals and objectives even if they might not have chosen them personally. Some critics of education have argued that these requirements can be serious impediments to learning (Kohn, 2004). The problems are widespread and especially noticeable in two forms of teaching. One is with the youngest students, who may especially lack patience with an educational agenda set by others (Kohn, 1999; Seitz, 2006). The other is with culturally diverse classrooms, where students and their families may hold a variety of legitimate, but unconventional expectations about what they should learn (J. Banks & C. Banks, 2005).

In response to concerns like these, some educators advocate planning instruction around goals set or expressed either by students themselves or by the cultures or communities with which students identify. Their suggestions vary in detail, but can be organized into two broad categories: 1) emergent curriculum and 2) multicultural and anti-bias curriculum.

Emergent Curriculum
An emergent curriculum is one that explicitly builds on interests expressed by students, rather than goals set by curriculum writers, curriculum documents, or teachers. As you might suspect, therefore, instructional planning for an emergent curriculum does not have the same meaning that the term has had in the chapter up to now. Instead, since an emergent curriculum by definition unfolds spontaneously and flexibly, students’ interests may be predictable, but usually very far in advance (Peterson, 2002). Suppose, for example, that a first-grade teacher plans a unit around Halloween, and that as one of the activities for this unit she reads a book about Halloween. In listening to the book, however, the students turn out to be less interested in its Halloween content than in the fact that one of the illustrations in the book shows a picture of a full moon partially hidden by clouds. They begin asking about the moon: why it is full sometimes but not other times, why it rises in different places each month, and whether the moon really moves behind clouds or whether the clouds actually do the moving. The teacher encourages their questions and their interest in moon astronomy. Over the next days or weeks, she arranges further activities and experiences to encourage students’ interest: she sets aside her original plans about Halloween and finds books about the moon and about how the solar system works. She invites a local amateur astronomer to visit the group and talk about his observations of the moon. Several children build models of the moon out of papier-mâché. Some find books describing trips of the space shuttles to the moon. Others make a large mural depicting a moonscape, and so on; the original goals about Halloween are not so much rejected, as set aside or forgotten in favor of something more immediately interesting and motivating.

While these activities could in principle happen because of recommendations from a curriculum document, the key point about emergent curriculum is that they happen for a very different reason: they activities happen and the goals emerge because the children want them. A teacher’s challenge is therefore not planning activities that match predetermined curriculum goals or objectives, but to respond flexibly and sensitively as students’ interests become known and explicit. Teachers’ responsiveness is facilitated by two practices that are especially prominent when a teacher adopts an emergent approach to curriculum. The first is careful, continuous observation of students. The teacher watches and listens, and may keep informal written records of students’ comments and activities. The information allows her to respond more effectively to the interests they express, and at the same time it provides a type of assessment of students’ progress—information about what the students are actually learning.

A second strategy that facilitates teachers’ success is curriculum webbing, a process of brainstorming connections among initiatives suggested by students and ideas suggested by the teacher. In some cases webs can be created jointly with students by brainstorming with them about where their current interests may lead. In other cases they can be created independently by the teacher’s own reflections. In still others, when a classroom has more than one adult responsible for it, they can be created jointly with fellow teachers or teacher assistants. The latter approach works especially well in preschool, kindergartens, or special education classrooms, which often have more than one adult responsible for the class (Vartuli & Rohs, 2006). Figure 9-1 illustrates a curriculum web made jointly by two teachers who team-taught a double-size classroom of preschool and kindergarten students.

To some, emergent curriculum may seem like a formula for curriculum and management disasters. But the approach has often proved quite successful, particularly in early childhood education and the earliest grade levels of elementary school (Seitz, 2006; Wurm, 2005). Something akin to emergent curriculum is quite possible, in principle, even with older students. In Chapter 8, for example, we described a high school program in which students began with problems and experiences that were personally relevant, and discussed the problems with classmates to formulate research problems which they then studied more formally and systematically (Hawkins, 2006). In essence this strategy created an emergent curriculum analogous to the ones described above for young children. What the high school students studied was not predetermined, but emerged from their own expressed interests.

Multicultural and Anti-Bias Education
A culture is an all-encompassing set of values, beliefs, practices and customs of a group or community—its total way of life. Cultures may be shared widely, even by much if not all of an entire nation, or they may be shared by relatively few, such as a small community within a large city. Sometimes the term culture is even applied to the way of life of an individual family or of a specialized group in society; some might argue, for example, that there is a culture of schooling shared by teachers, though not necessarily by all students.

Because culture by definition touches on all aspects of living, it is likely to affect students’ perspectives about school, their ways of learning and their motivations to learn. The differences go beyond obvious differences in holidays, language, or food preferences. In some cultures, for example, individuals keep good eye contact with someone to whom they are speaking, and expect the same from others. In other cultures, such behavior is considered intrusive or overly aggressive, and avoiding eye contact while speaking is considered more respectful. Or another example: in some cultures it is expected that individuals will be punctual (or on time), whereas in others punctuality is considered overly compulsive, and a more casual approach to time is the norm. Students regularly bring differences like these to school, where they combine with expectations from teachers and other school staff, and contribute indirectly to differences in achievement and satisfaction among students.

To be fully effective, therefore, instructional planning has to take into account the diversity in students’ cultural backgrounds, whether the differences are observable or subtle. It also has to work deliberately to reduce the social biases and prejudices that sometimes develop about cultural differences. Multicultural education and anti-bias education are two terms referring to these purposes. Their meanings often overlap significantly, depending on the context or on who is using the terms. Generally, though, the first term—multicultural education—has somewhat more to do with understanding the differences among cultures. The latter term—anti-bias education—has more to do with on overcoming social prejudices and biases resulting from cultural differences. For convenience in this chapter, we will use the single term multicultural education to refer to both understanding differences and overcoming prejudices.

Fully effective multicultural education has several features. The most obvious and familiar one is content integration: the curriculum uses examples and information from different cultures to illustrate various concepts or ideas already contained in the curriculum (Vavrus, 2002). In studying holidays, for example, an elementary-school teacher includes activities and information about Kwanza as well as Christmas, Hanukah, or other holidays happening at about the same time. In studying the Civil War, for another example, a middle-years teacher includes material written from the perspective of African-American slaves as well as of Southern landowners. In teaching language arts, students learn basic vocabulary of any non-English languages spoken by some members of the class.

But there is more to multicultural education than integrating content from diverse cultures. Among other features, it also requires an equity pedagogy, which refers to the effort to allow or even encourage, a variety of learning styles—styles at which students may have become skillful because of their cultural backgrounds (Crow, 2005; C. Banks & J. Banks, 1995). In elementary language arts, for example, there may be more than one “best” way to tell a story. Should a student necessarily have to tell it alone and standing in front of the whole class, or might the student tell it jointly with a friend or in a smaller group? And in learning to write a story, is legitimate variety also possible there? Should a written story necessarily begin with a topic sentence that announces what the story is about, or can it save a statement of topic for the ending or even it leave it out altogether in order to stimulate readers to think? The best choice is related in part to the nature and purpose of the story, of course, but partly also to differences in cultural expectations about story telling. Choosing a story form also points toward another feature of multicultural education, the knowledge construction process, which is the unstated, unconscious process by which a cultural group creates knowledge or information. The popular media, for example, often portray Hispanic-Americans in ways that are stereotypical, either subtly or blatantly (Lester & Ross, 2003). A fully multicultural curriculum finds way to call these images to the attention of students and to engage them in thinking about how and why the images oversimplify reality.

Yet there is even more to a fully multicultural education. In addition to content integration, equity pedagogy, and knowledge construction, it fosters prejudice reduction--activities, discussions and readings that identify students’ negative evaluations of cultural groups (Jacobson, 2003). The activities and discussions can of course take a somewhat philosophical approach—examining how students feel in general, what experiences they remember having involving prejudice, and the like. But they can also take a more indirect and subtle form, as when a teacher periodically speaks in a student’s native language as a public sign of respect for the student. Gestures and discussions like these are especially effective if they contribute to the fifth element of multicultural education, empowering the school and social structure, in which all teachers and staff members find ways to convey respect for cultural differences, including even during extra-curricular and sports activities. A sports team or a debate club should not be limited to students from one cultural background and exclude those from another—or more subtly, accept everyone but give the more desirable roles only to individuals with particular social backgrounds. To the extent that cultural respect and inclusion are school-wide, teaching and learning both become easier and more successful, and instructional planning in particular becomes more relevant to students’ needs.

(back to Chapter 9...)


text:
Civ/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

This is a strategy guide for Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and its expansion pack, Alien Crossfire. Occasionally the game and its expansion are seen in a composite package called Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack; the software included in this package is identical to the original releases with all the patches applied.

As should be obvious, the guide still needs a lot of work. All SMACers are encouraged to help out. Of course, normal wiki etiquette applies: if you disagree with a non-factual statement, list your opinion along with it, and confer with others if you wish to make gargantuan changes. Have fun and welcome!

Table of Contents

 * The Basics1
 * /Understanding the game/
 * Understanding the Governor
 * Working with Cities
 * Understanding the Factions
 * The SMAC Factions
 * The Alien Crossfire Factions
 * Strategy
 * Early Game
 * Middle Game
 * Endgame
 * Diplomacy

Appendices

 * Social Engineering
 * Unit Construction
 * Tech Tree
 * Facility Index
 * Secret Project Index
 * Citizen Index
 * Patch History

[1] Chapter common to more than one guide

title: Civ/Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri


text:
Cookbook:Brown Sugar Brownies

| American cuisine | Dessert

Ingredients

 * 1 cup packed light brown sugar
 * ½ cup (1 stick) butter or margarine, softened
 * 2 eggs
 * 2 ounces (2 squares) unsweetened chocolate, melted
 * ½ cup all-purpose flour
 * 1 cup coarsely-chopped walnuts

Procedure

 * 1) Preheat oven to 325°F.
 * 2) Grease an 8 x 8 x 2-inch square baking pan.
 * 3) Cream sugar and butter until fluffy.
 * 4) Beat in eggs.
 * 5) Beat in melted chocolate.
 * 6) Mix in flour, then stir in nuts.
 * 7) Pour into prepared pan.
 * 8) Bake about 25 minutes.
 * 9) Cool in pan, and cut into squares.

Notes, tips, and variations

 * The brownies can also be baked in a Dutch oven at moderately slow heat instead of in the baking pan.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brownies, Brown Sugar]]

title: Cookbook:Brown Sugar Brownies


text:
User talk:199.79.10.118

Welcome!
Welcome to Wikibooks, a collection of open-content textbooks! You don't have to log in to read or edit articles on Wikibooks, but creating an account is quick, free and non-intrusive, requires no personal information, and gives you many benefits, including:
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We hope that you choose to become a Wikibookian and create an account. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have on my talk page. By the way, make sure to sign your posts and comments with four tildes (~~~~), which will let others know who left it.

 – Mike.lifeguard  | talk 19:18, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

title: User talk:199.79.10.118


text:
Contemporary Educational Psychology/Chapter 9: Instructional Planning/Enhancing Learning with Variety of Resources

Enhancing Student Learning through a Variety of Resources
Whether instructional goals originate from curriculum documents, students’ expressed interests, or a mixture of both, students are more likely to achieve the goals if teachers draw on a wide variety of resources. As a practical matter, this means looking for materials and experiences that supplement—or occasionally even replace—the most traditional forms of information, such as textbooks. Precisely what resources to use depend on factors unique to each class, school, or community, but they might include one or more of the following.

The Internet as a Learning Tool
The Internet has become a fixture of modern society, and it offers a huge variety of information on virtually any topic, including any school subject and any possible grade level from kindergarten through university. At the time of writing this book (2007), about two thirds of all households in the United States and Canada have at least some sort of Internet access, and virtually 100% of public and private schools have some access (Parsad & Jones, 2006). These circumstances make the Internet a potential major resource for teachers and students—a virtual library many times larger than even the largest physical (or “bricks and mortar”) libraries in the world.

But the vastness of the Internet is not entirely a blessing. A major problem is that the sheer volume of information available, which can sometimes make searching for a specific topic, article, or document overwhelming and inefficient. The newer search engines (such as Google can help with this problem, though they do not solve it completely. When searching the term photosynthesis, for example, Google and other similar search engines return over six million Web pages that discuss or refer this topic in some way! If a teacher is planning a unit about photosynthesis, or if a student is writing an essay about it, which of these Web pages will prove most helpful? Choosing among Web pages is a new, somewhat specialized form of computer literacy, one that can be learned partially by trial-and-error online, but that also benefits from assistance by a teacher or by more experienced peers (Ragains, 2006).

Another problem with the Internet is inequity of access. Even though, as we mentioned above, virtually all schools now have access of some sort, the access is distributed quite unevenly across communities and income groups (Skinner, Biscope, & Poland, 2003). For one thing, the large majority of Web pages are posted in English, and this fact naturally poses a challenge for any students who still learning to read or write English. For another, schools vary widely in how much Internet service they can provide. In general, well-to-do schools and those in cities provide more access than those located in less well-off areas or in rural areas—though there are many exceptions. A richly endowed school might have an Internet connection in every classroom as well as multiple connections in a school library or in specialized computer rooms. Students as well as faculty would be able to use these facilities, and one or more teachers might have special training in Internet research to help when problems arise. At the other extreme, a school might have only a few Internet connections for the entire school, or even just one, located in a central place like the library or the school office. Usage by students would consequently be limited, and teachers would essentially teach themselves how to search the Internet and how to troubleshoot technical problems when they occur.

In spite of these problems, the Internet has considerable potential for enhancing students’ learning, precisely because of its flexibility and near universality. Some of the best recent successes involve the creation of a learning commons (sometimes also called an information commons or teaching commons), a combination of a website and an actual, physical place in a school or library that brings together information, students and teachers so that both (though perhaps especially students) can learn (Haas & Robertson, 2004; Beagle, 2006). A learning commons includes an online library catalogue and online Internet service, but it also offers other services: online information and advice about study skills, for example, as well as access to peer tutors and support groups, either online or in person, that can help with difficulties about writing or doing assignments. As you might suspect, using a learning commons effectively sometimes requires reorganizing certain features of teaching and learning, chiefly toward greater explicit collaboration among students and teachers.

Using Local Experts and Field Trips
Two other ways of enhancing learning include bringing local experts to the classroom and taking the class on field trips outside the classroom. Both of these strategies help to make learning more vivid, as well as more relevant to the particular community and lives that students lead.

Local Experts
Classroom visits by persons with key experience can often add a lot to many curriculum subjects and topics. In one tenth-grade science class studying environmental issues, for example, the teacher invited the city forester, the person responsible for the health of trees planted in city parks and along city boulevards. The forester had special knowledge of the stresses on trees in urban environments, and was able to explain and give examples of particular problems that had occurred and their solutions. In a second-grade class with many Hispanic students, on the other hand, a teacher aide was able to serve as an expert visitor by describing her memories of childhood in a Spanish-speaking community in New Mexico. Later she also recruited an older Hispanic friend and relative to the class to describe their experiences growing up in Central America. She also acted as their English-Spanish interpreter. In all of these examples, the experts made the learning more real and immediate. Their presence counteracted the tendency to equate school learning with book-based knowledge—a common hazard when basing instructional planning primarily on curriculum documents.

Field Trips
In addition to bringing the world to the classroom by inviting visitors, teachers can do the converse: they can take the classroom to the world by leading students on field trips. Such trips are not confined to any particular grade level. In the early grades of elementary school, for example, one common goal of the curriculum is to learn about community helpers—the police, firefighters, store owners, and others who make a community safe and livable. As indicated already, representatives of these groups can visit the class and tell about their work. But the class can also visit the places which these people tell about: a police station, a fire hall, a local retail store, and the like. Such trips offer a more complete picture of the context in which community professionals work than is possible simply from hearing and reading about it. The benefits are possible for older students as well. In learning about water-borne diseases as part of a biology class, for example, one middle-school class took a field trip to the local water-treatment facility, where staff members explained where the town’s water came from and how the water was cleaned to become drinkable at any tap.

From a teacher’s point of view, of course, there are certain risks about arranging classroom visitors or field trips. One is that a visitor may turn out not to communicate well with children or young people—he or she may assume too much prior knowledge, for example, or veer off the chosen topic. Another problem is that field trips often require additional funds (for admission fees or to pay for a bus), and require support from additional adults—often parents—to supervise of students outside of school. Some of these problems are by-passed by arranging “virtual” field trips and hearing from “virtual” visitors: using computer software or media to show students places and activities which they cannot visit in person (Clark, 2006). Generally, though, a computer-based experience cannot with a real trip or visitor in vividness, and the benefits of actual, in-person field trips and visitors often therefore outweigh the challenges of arranging them.

Service Learning
Still another way to enhance learning is to incorporate service learning, which is activity that combines real community service with analysis and reflection on the significance of the service (Johnson & O’Grady, 2006; Thomsen, 2006). Picking up trash in an urban streambed, for example, is a community service which students can perform. To transform this service into service learning, students also need to note and reflect on the trash that they find; talk and write about the ecological environment of the stream and of the community; and even make recommendations for improving the local environment. To accomplish these objectives, service learning activities should not be sporadic, nor used as a punishment—as when a teacher or principal assigns trash pick-up as an after-school detention activity.

Under good conditions, service learning enhances instructional plans both morally and intellectually. Morally, it places students in the role of creating good for the community, and counteracts students’ perception that being “good” simply means complying with teachers’ or parents’ rules passively. Intellectually, service learning places social and community issues in a vivid, lived context. The environment, economic inequality, or race relations, for example, are no longer just ideas that people merely talk about, but problems that people actually act upon (Dicklitch, 2005).

As you might suspect, though, making service learning successful is not automatic. For one thing, service learning lends itself well only to certain curriculum areas (for example, community studies or social studies). For another, some students may initially resist service learning, wondering whether it benefits them personally as students (Jones, Gilbride-Brown, & Gasiorski, 2005). And for another, some service projects may inadvertently be invented only to benefit students, without adequate consultation or advice from community members. Bringing food hampers to low-income families may seem like a good idea to middle-class students or instructors, but some families may perceive this action less as a benefit than as an act of charity which they therefore resent. But none of these problems are insurmountable. Evaluations generally find that service learning, when done well, increases students’ sense of moral empowerment as well as their knowledge of social issues (Buchanan, Baldwin, & Rudisill, 2002). Like many other educational practices, insuring success with service learning requires doing it well.

(back to Chapter 9...)


text:
Talk:Cantonese/About Cantonese

Untitled
Inconsistancy of traditional and simplified chinese, which should be used when writing? --24.40.202.246 20:39, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

title: Talk:Cantonese/About Cantonese


text:
Microsoft Project Crash Course/Level 1/Tasks/Basic Schedule

Overview
In this section you'll do the following:
 * Create a new blank project (mpp file)
 * Indicate the overall project start date
 * Capture phases, tasks and milestones
 * Create dependencies between tasks
 * Use the Gantt Wizard to markup tasks on the critical path in red

Create a new blank project
Launch the application (Start > All programs > Microsoft Project) The application launches with a new blank project open by default.

If there is not blank project open, you can create a new one (File > New... > Blank Project)

Save the file before continuing. (File > Save as...)

Set the project start date
Use the project information dialogue box to specify the Project Start date and ensure the project gets schedule from the start date. Let's imagine today is 1 Jan 2010 and you're planning this project for February so you want all tasks by default to start on 1 Feb 2010.

Enter project stages
Click in the first line in the Task Name column. Do not type in your project title in line one, this is already contained in a line 0 which is currently just not displaying. By default, the first line in the task sheet should be numbered 1.

Let's assume that we're doing a systems development project and we are going to specify the stages of the project. Initially, you enter the stages as normal tasks. Type "Initiation" in the task name field and hit Return to move down. Continue to do this for the following stages: Planning, Requirements, Design, Develop, Test and Deploy. Note that the duration column reads "1 day?" for all the tasks because we have not specified a duration.

Compare your screen with the image below before continuing.

Insert tasks into stages
To specify that the initiation stage will consist of 2 sub tasks, click one row down on planning and press the "Insert" key on your keyboard twice to create 2 blank lines above planning (below Initation). Enter the following tasks below Initiation: Create project charter, Create business case. Select the 2 sub tasks by dragging over them and click on the green indent button (circled in red below). Notice how the 2 tasks now fall under Initiation and the Initiation task now turns into a Summary task which appears bold and has a different bar type on the chart.

Specify task durations
Let's assume you estimate the project charter will take 4 days. You have no idea how long the business case will take and you'll need to first speak to the person who will be doing it but for now you want to enter a "guesstimate" of 5 days.

Click in the duration cell next to the task name "Create project charter" and type "4" and hit Return. You'll see project automatically assumes the duration as 4 days. Now type in "5?" and hit return. The question mark tells project that the duration entered is a "guesstimate" and that it needs to be confirmed at a later stage. Compare your screen with the one below.

Note on the Gantt chart how project assumes that all tasks can run concurrently.

Link tasks
To indicate that the project charter must first be completed before the business case can start you need to link the tasks in such a way that Project Charter is the predecessor and business case is the sucessor. The easiest way is to Select the tasks (make sure you select top down in this case). Compare your screen with the one below.

Note on the Gantt chart how the business case task now "waits" for the charter to finish before.