Papers by Marilena Petrou
and other research outputs The challenge of supporting networked personal inquiry learning across... more and other research outputs The challenge of supporting networked personal inquiry learning across contexts Conference Item How to cite:
and other research outputs Using netbooks to support mobile learners ’ investigations across acti... more and other research outputs Using netbooks to support mobile learners ’ investigations across activities and places
Supporting learning across different contexts can be challenging. Defining formal, informal and n... more Supporting learning across different contexts can be challenging. Defining formal, informal and nonformal learning is the subject of continuing debate as each can be difficult to describe. We report on a study that evaluated the effectiveness of a Personal Inquiry toolkit on supporting personal inquiries into the sustainability of the food cycle, carried out across the contexts of home and an after school club in a UK secondary school. The toolkit consisted of a web-based Sustainability Investigator that could be accessed from any location, together with a selection of data-gathering tools such as environmental sensors (e.g. temperature probes) and cameras. It was designed to support students through the process of carrying out inquiries within the club and between the club and their home. Our main focus here is on describing how the Sustainability Investigator supported students' inquiries that were conceived and designed within the club and conducted at home. The 30 students (aged 12-14 years) chose to investigate home food storage, packaging and preservation. Our focus is on exploring the nature of the semi-formal club context and how this mediated students' use of the Sustainability Investigator. Analysis of our field notes, log files of students' use of the Sustainability Investigator, together with video and audio recordings of club sessions and interviews with teachers and pupils, suggest that while the pupils' use of the toolkit across contexts was sporadic and varied between students, they successfully completed personally relevant inquiries and developed positive attitudes to the process. This was different to the predictable, sustained and consistent use of the toolkit identified in our previous studies when the students used it (again successfully) to support their inquiries in a formal classroom setting (see e.g. Scanlon et al. 2009). Three main features of the school club context that mediated the ways in which the Sustainability Investigator was used by the students across contexts were: 1) the students' aims and priorities, 2) affordances and constraints of the technology, and 3) institutional priorities. We use this example of a study of learning across contexts to suggest implications of the work for the potential of a Personal Inquiry toolkit to support learning across the life course.
This paper builds on the work carried out by colleagues on using an empiricallybased conceptual f... more This paper builds on the work carried out by colleagues on using an empiricallybased conceptual framework, the Knowledge Quartet, as a tool for the analysis of mathematics lessons taught by preservice teachers in the UK. This framework categorises situations from classrooms where mathematical knowledge surfaces in teaching, and was used with the aim of understanding what relationship can be observed between Cypriot preservice teachers’ mathematical knowledge and their teaching. In particular, in this paper I suggest that the framework needs to be supplemented in order to incorporate the interpretation of mathematics textbooks by teachers. I illustrate this by giving examples from lessons taught by participants in
HPB, 2021
BACKGROUND To identify pancreatectomy specific risk factors for myocardial infarction and cardiac... more BACKGROUND To identify pancreatectomy specific risk factors for myocardial infarction and cardiac arrest (MICA) and to assess whether addition of new information obtained during the hospitalization changes these risk factors. METHODS Analysis was performed on elective pancreatectomy data from the ACS-NSQIP database (2014-2019). Risk factors were grouped into pre-operative, intra-operative, and postoperative phases. Factors were selected using a bootstrap resampling procedure to determine MICA association. Independent significance was assessed by logistic regression. RESULTS In the first 30 days post-op, 650 of 39779 patients (1.88%) developed MICA. Some of the surgery specific, intra- and post-operative factors that were identified are: delayed gastric emptying (OR: 2.61; 95% CI: 2.12-3.21), total pancreatectomy (OR: 2.16; 95% CI: 1.29-3.42), pancreatic fistula (OR: 1.54; 95% CI: 1.25-1.90), post-operative transfusion (OR: 1.28; 95% CI: 1.03-1.58), and open approach (OR: 1.36; 95% CI: 1.05-1.77). Adding new variables improved statistical model performance and the c-statistic improved from 0.69 to 0.76 in the final analysis. CONCLUSION Surgery specific, intra-, and post-operative factors were associated with MICA. Addition of new information during the hospital course changed risk factors and the statistical prediction of MICA risk improved.
In the classroom, children are often asked to work in groups and to discuss learning activities t... more In the classroom, children are often asked to work in groups and to discuss learning activities together. However, they can find this challenging as they do not always have the necessary discussion and argumentation skills and may fail to understand what they should aim to achieve. Discussion is important in the science classroom as it is an opportunity for children to express their views and listen to those of their peers so a clearer understanding can emerge. However, it is often the case that teachers adopt a role that focuses on imparting information, thus giving students little opportunity to discuss their own views. We report on a study that involved primary school children aged 9-10 years, together with their teachers, in the learner-centred participatory design and evaluation of software – the Talk Factory – aimed at supporting exploratory talk in science. The Talk Factory enables the teacher to represent, in real time on an interactive whiteboard, evolving graphical represe...
Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Computer supported collaborative learning - CSCL'09, 2009
Interactions between students can be ineffective when they fail to understand how to talk togethe... more Interactions between students can be ineffective when they fail to understand how to talk together and what they should aim to achieve (Dawes, Mercer & Wegerif, 2004). Research suggests that argumentation skills need to be taught explicitly to children and recent work developed students' collaborative argumentation as a means of improving their understanding of science (Aufschnaiter, Erduran, Osborne & Simon, 2008).Talk Factory is designed to generate graphical representations of the content and processes of students' collaborative argumentation in real time to assist with these difficulties. We discuss the theoretical underpinning of our work and our participatory design approach.
Alison (2013). Challenges in personalisation: supporting mobile science inquiry learning across c... more Alison (2013). Challenges in personalisation: supporting mobile science inquiry learning across contexts. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning, 8(1) pp. 21-42. For guidance on citations see FAQs.
ABSTRACT Most research studies concerned with inquiry learning have focused on understanding clas... more ABSTRACT Most research studies concerned with inquiry learning have focused on understanding classroom-based inquiries that are contextualised within specific curricular frameworks. There is, thus, a pressing need for work which resources our understanding of the process of inquiry learning in less formal contexts, such as after-school clubs. In recent years, educational policy makers in the UK have been very concerned with a personalization agenda. This is defined and understood in many different ways, but one aspect is the possibility of learner choice. It is this element of choice that is reflected in the idea of personal inquiries. In this chapter the focus is on inquiries that students themselves develop, in the semi-formal context of an after-school club, supported by their teachers and researchers and resourced by a technology toolkit: nQuire. Specifically, key issues and challenges in relation to the orchestration of inquiry learning within semi-formal settings are discussed. The chapter begins by considering the importance of informal and semi-formal inquiry science learning and how these terms are understood in the literature, followed by a review of related work. A case study follows that discusses the processes of inquiry learning in a Geography after-school club, the "Sustainability Squad", which ran for 11 weeks. The students' main inquiries focused on food decomposition experiments and how variables such as the nature of the food and packaging affected this. They monitored the decay of different foodstuffs, observing, recording and analysing data, reflecting on their findings and presenting them to the other students in the club. This less formal setting provided the opportunity for types of inquiry that could not be supported within the formal curriculum, and also for the choice of inquiry to be decided by the students themselves. The case study describes how the nQuire toolkit was able to support a number of aspects of the students’ inquiries including: student choice; a representation of a jointly negotiated, personalized version of inquiry; defining the inquiry; providing a shared focus and for bridging the contexts of school and home.
Geography fieldtrips are described often in terms of providing learners with first hand experienc... more Geography fieldtrips are described often in terms of providing learners with first hand experience of the natural world. However, this perspective of fieldtrips takes for granted that learners will engage in certain types of 'given'practices, such as data collection, writing notes and the taking of photographs, and fails to look closely at such activities in terms of how they constitute what it means to be a Geographer and to engage in evidence-based inquiry. We report on two studies carried out in 2008 and 2009 by the Personal Inquiry project which ...
Supporting learning across different contexts can be challenging. Defining formal, informal and n... more Supporting learning across different contexts can be challenging. Defining formal, informal and nonformal learning is the subject of continuing debate as each can be difficult to describe. We report on a study that evaluated the effectiveness of a Personal Inquiry toolkit on supporting personal inquiries into the sustainability of the food cycle, carried out across the contexts of home and an after school club in a UK secondary school. The toolkit consisted of a web-based Sustainability Investigator that could be accessed from any ...
Open Learning, Nov 1, 2010
We explore how small‐format laptops ('netbooks') have been used within evidence‐based i... more We explore how small‐format laptops ('netbooks') have been used within evidence‐based investigations undertaken by secondary school students, to what extent these are suitable for effectively supporting learners across different locations and contexts, and their implications for open learning. Over the course of seven trials with 300 students and seven teachers we have gathered data on how netbooks have been used in formal and informal learning contexts, bridging school, field locations and home. The netbooks have ...
Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 2012
ABSTRACT Previous research into enhancing children’s educational dialogues during group work has ... more ABSTRACT Previous research into enhancing children’s educational dialogues during group work has recognised the role of teachers in modelling dialogue and guiding their students’ engagement in reasoning. Whole-class plenaries also offer teachers such opportunities but the technological support of dialogue in plenaries remains relatively unexplored. The authors’ comparative study evaluated teachers’ use of Talk Factory – innovative software designed to model and represent students’ engagement with the ground rules of exploratory talk in science plenaries. Their qualitative analysis compares the dialogue during lessons taught by two teachers where Talk Factory was used, with previous lessons by the same teachers where it was not used. They found that the nature of the dialogue in the intervention classes changed considerably: instead of plenaries characterised by unsubstantiated responses from students, the teachers used TF to mediate their students’ exploration, and challenge, of each other’s ideas. The authors explore the significance of these findings in respect of practice-based implications and future research.
In the literature different analytic models of teachers' knowledge are proposed. Currently, there... more In the literature different analytic models of teachers' knowledge are proposed. Currently, there is no agreement on a widely accepted model that can be used to describe teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching. Our aim is to discuss the different models of teachers' knowledge existing in the literature, and explain how these can be understood as elaborating conceptualisation of content related categories of teachers' knowledge. Furthermore, this paper aims to show how the existing models on teachers' knowledge can be seen as a start in addressing concerns about whether the distinction between SMK and PCK could and should be made. We go on to suggest a number of research questions and explore the individualistic nature of conceptions of PCK.
Interactive Learning Environments, 2011
Student engagement in the design and implementation of inquiries is an effective way for them to ... more Student engagement in the design and implementation of inquiries is an effective way for them to learn about the inquiry process and the domain being studied. However, inquiry learning in geography can be challenging for teachers and students due to the complexity of scientific inquiry and the diversity of pupils' and teachers' knowledge and abilities. To address this, the Personal Inquiry project has designed a tool kit that includes nQuire, a Web-based tool to support students through the inquiry process. Here, we identify when, across five lessons comprising an inquiry into microclimates, nQuire was used by a teacher and a case study group of her 12 to 13-year-old students, and the ways in which they adopted nQuire as a tool to facilitate the creation of a coherent and cumulative inquiry learning experience over time. We found that students' use of nQuire supported them in capturing and representing their evolving understanding of inquiry, in defining and supporting their progression through the process of inquiry and in resourcing their cognitive engagement in data interpretation and representation. nQuire supported the students in accumulating and integrating new understandings across contexts and over time. In this way, nQuire successfully resourced and supported the students' learning journeys or trajectories. We conclude that nQuire can be an effective tool for supporting teachers' and students' understanding of the nature of inquiry and how to design and implement inquiries of their own.
Interactions between students can be ineffective when they fail to understand how to talk togethe... more Interactions between students can be ineffective when they fail to understand how to talk together and what they should aim to achieve . Research suggests that argumentation skills need to be taught explicitly to children and recent work developed students' collaborative argumentation as a means of improving their understanding of science .Talk Factory is designed to generate graphical representations of the content and processes of students' collaborative argumentation in real time to assist with these difficulties. We discuss the theoretical underpinning of our work and our participatory design approach.
Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 2010
We explore how small‐format laptops (‘netbooks’) have been used within evidence‐based investigati... more We explore how small‐format laptops (‘netbooks’) have been used within evidence‐based investigations undertaken by secondary school students, to what extent these are suitable for effectively supporting learners across different locations and contexts, and their implications for open learning. Over the course of seven trials with 300 students and seven teachers we have gathered data on how netbooks have been used in formal and informal learning contexts, bridging school, field locations and home. The netbooks have supported individual, group and class tasks, and acted as both stand‐alone and networked devices. Three themes have emerged: the use of a single device to support inquiries across activities and places; student use and appropriation; and organisation and management. We conclude that netbooks are a category of device that can be highly effective in supporting open learning, although careful consideration is required when considering their deployment and use.
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Papers by Marilena Petrou