Teaching and learning are complex, highly diverse, and frequently individualistic phenomena. That complexity poses a major dilemma in educational research: Since educational phenomena typically are poorly understood, investigating them requires insights from multiple disciplines using multiple kinds of research designs. Further, researchers must thoroughly explore their internal and external characteristics currently, over time, in multiple settings, and with different kinds of teachers and learners. It is difficult to achieve this type of detailed and careful exploration because framing educational problems in terms of complexity pits educational research against political realities. United States’ educational culture, and – by extension – all educational systems influenced by the United States, whether directly through foreign aid, or indirectly through the work of United States’ based educational consultants and United States’ dominated non-governmental organizations and international organizations, have focused on quick fixes and universal solutions. This makes problematic the serious consideration of difficult problems and long-term solutions. It pushes research in education to emphasize products or outcomes (measured in terms of academic achievement and student test scores) directed at identifying short term solutions to what have been defined as single – albeit complex – problems. In part this preference may be driven by a prejudice toward experimental designs that require single causes and favor unambiguous effects; it also may be a function of the technocratic and impatient nature of United States’ culture, which permeates every aspect of the educational system. United States’ culture is reluctant to frame social problems in complex, multi-facetted ways and even more reluctant to view education as an expensive venture, worthwhile at least as much because of its contribution to social justice and the overall common good as because of its contribution to the economy. In this chapter, a distinction is made between educational research, done primarily by investigators in the field of education, and research on school systems and educational phenomena, carried out by researchers in the social and behavioral sciences more broadly. The former is focused primarily on the acts of teaching and learning by teachers and students; its context is narrowly construed as the classroom itself. TRENDS IN RESEARCH ON TEACHING: AN HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Trends in Research on Teaching: an Historical and Critical Overview

This study measured to what degree achievement in a computer literacy course related to each of the following variables: general cognitive level, computer aptitude and prior experience using computers, and inherent stress. Subjects were 60 students enrolled in an undergraduate business course designed to teach the use of software packages. Achievement was measured by three course exams. Achievement early in the course was moderately related to measures of computer aptitude and cognitive level, but by the end of the course prior experience using computers emerged as the most important variable. Despite the logical and empirical connections drawn between general cognitive abilities and the ability to learn how to use computers, general abilities may be only marginally relevant to the task of learning to use software.

Cognitive Level and Achievement in Computer Literacy

Author(s): Tercier, John; Callaham, Michael L. | Abstract: Objective: Peer review is considered crucial to the selection and publication of quality research, yet little is known of the values, beliefs and attitudes of peer reviewers towards the process of peer review. This study elicits reviewer beliefs about the process in order to produce a normative model of peer review. Methods and Findings: The 72 subjects were experienced reviewers at Annals of Emergency Medicine and had completed at least 5 reviews in the past 2 years. Subjects participated in 40 minute structured telephone interviews focusing on reviewer attitudes, beliefs and values towards the process of peer review. Subject responses were coded and categorized using grounded theory to produce a qualitative profile of reviewers' attitudes towards peer review and generate a normative model of the peer review process. This model was found to closely adhere to conventionally held beliefs 2 about the process of peer review. However, within it were revealed a number of areas where reviewers, aware of tensions within the process, questioned those conventional beliefs, expressing concern about methods, operations and outcomes. As researchers producing research and receiving reviews and as reviewers judging others’ research and producing reviews, the reviewer’s status as “peer” was seen as both essential to the operation of the system and problematic. In their perception of the role of the peer reviewer, though respondents identified evaluation of the manuscript (selecting submissions for publication by filtering out incorrect or inadequate work) as the primary goal of the formal process, instruction of the researcher (improving the accuracy, clarity and utility of published research) was considered by the majority of reviewers as the more important practice. Likewise, though there was recognition that the review process aims to prevent poor research from being published, there was more concern over the danger that it results in good research being “strangled in its cradle”. Though respondents believed that the quality of the review is determined primarily by the skills of the individual reviewer, they maintain that the validity of the process is determined by the corporate nature of the review panel acting as a system of checks and balances. Though perceiving this system of checks and balances as requiring a degree of separation of authorial, review and editorial functions, reviewers, at the same time, express the desire for a more open system of feedback leading towards a more consensual research outcome. Two issues of concern arose repeatedly in the interviews: frustration at a perceived lack of feedback from editors to reviewers and repeated condemnations of “mean-spirited” feedback from reviewers to authors. Defects in feedback were cited by respondents as a major barrier to optimizing research quality and editorial judgment. Conclusions: The tensions found in the peer review process, sometimes seen as barriers to its effective operation, are less defects in the process than definitive of the concept of peer review itself and thus necessary to its operation. While at a practical level peer review operates as a triage exercise, it is, at the same time, on a social level, a mode of disciplinary dialogue between peers: important not only to the maintenance of an effective knowledge base and thus disciplinary validity, but also, through its effect on researchers and reviewers, important in the construction of disciplinary identity. Peer review's practical and social operations are not antithetical to each other but rather are inherent in the hybrid concept of the peer reviewer, where one's status as a peer makes possible one's activity as reviewer.

/pdf/a-normative-model-of-peer-review-qualitative-assessment-of-3zsmu7esxi.pdf

A normative model of peer review: qualitative assessment of manuscript reviewers’ attitudes towards peer review

Are cognitive abilities that were related to achievement in an introductory course in computer programming also related to achievement in a computer literacy course? Correlations between scores on a programming aptitude test and scores obtained on three exams given in an undergraduate course that taught the use of software were examined. A secondary purpose of the study was to investigate correlations between several personality measures and exam scores. Subjects were 90 college students enrolled in “Computers in Business”. Once achievement was controlled for basic verbal and numerical aptitude, the programming aptitude test did not significantly predict scores on any of the course exams. Thus, the task of learning to use software seemed to be analogous to any other academic learning and could be viewed as simply another application of generic cognitive abilities. Two variables, ownership of a personal computer and scores on a personality test measuring a concern for detail and perfectionism, were conducive to achievement early in the course, while experience in a prior programming course was related to achievement later in the course.

Aptitude for computer literacy

Author(s): Tercier, J; Callaham, ML | Abstract: Objective: Peer review is considered crucial to the selection and publication of quality research, yet little is known of the values, beliefs and attitudes of peer reviewers towards the process of peer review. This study elicits reviewer beliefs about the process in order to produce a normative model of peer review. Methods and Findings: The 72 subjects were experienced reviewers at Annals of Emergency Medicine and had completed at least 5 reviews in the past 2 years. Subjects participated in 40 minute structured telephone interviews focusing on reviewer attitudes, beliefs and values towards the process of peer review. Subject responses were coded and categorized using grounded theory to produce a qualitative profile of reviewers' attitudes towards peer review and generate a normative model of the peer review process. This model was found to closely adhere to conventionally held beliefs about the process of peer review. However, within it were revealed a number of areas where reviewers, aware of tensions within the process, questioned those conventional beliefs, expressing concern about methods, operations and outcomes. As researchers producing research and receiving reviews and as reviewers judging others’ research and producing reviews, the reviewer’s status as “peer” was seen as both essential to the operation of the system and problematic. In their perception of the role of the peer reviewer, though respondents identified evaluation of the manuscript (selecting submissions for publication by filtering out incorrect or inadequate work) as the primary goal of the formal process, instruction of the researcher (improving the accuracy, clarity and utility of published research) was considered by the majority of reviewers as the more important practice. Likewise, though there was recognition that the review process aims to prevent poor research from being published, there was more concern over the danger that it results in good research being “strangled in its cradle”. Though respondents believed that the quality of the review is determined primarily by the skills of the individual reviewer, they maintain that the validity of the process is determined by the corporate nature of the review panel acting as a system of checks and balances. Though perceiving this system of checks and balances as requiring a degree of separation of authorial, review and editorial functions, reviewers, at the same time, express the desire for a more open system of feedback leading towards a more consensual research outcome. Two issues of concern arose repeatedly in the interviews: frustration at a perceived lack of feedback from editors to reviewers and repeated condemnations of “mean-spirited” feedback from reviewers to authors. Defects in feedback were cited by respondents as a major barrier to optimizing research quality and editorial judgment. Conclusions: The tensions found in the peer review process, sometimes seen as barriers to its effective operation, are less defects in the process than definitive of the concept of peer review itself and thus necessary to its operation. While at a practical level peer review operates as a triage exercise, it is, at the same time, on a social level, a mode of disciplinary dialogue between peers: important not only to the maintenance of an effective knowledge base and thus disciplinary validity, but also, through its effect on researchers and reviewers, important in the construction of disciplinary identity. Peer review's practical and social operations are not antithetical to each other but rather are inherent in the hybrid concept of the peer reviewer, where one's status as a peer makes possible one's activity as reviewer.

/pdf/normative-model-of-peer-review-qualitative-assessment-51qafgysu1.pdf

Normative model of peer review - Qualitative assessment

Strengths (and Weaknesses) of Peer Review

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Strengths (and Weaknesses) of Peer Review