Curriculum Design

How does teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge ("TPACK") inform their instructional planning? How can this knowledge be enhanced? In an interpretivist study of experienced secondary social studies teachers' planning, we sought to discover clues to the nature and development of these teachers' TPACK-in-action as it was expressed in their planning processes.

Student feedback is a contentious and confusing issue throughout higher education institutions. This paper develops and analyses two models of feedback: the first is based on the origins of the term in the disciplines of engineering and biology. It positions teachers as the drivers of feedback. The second draws on ideas of sustainable assessment. This positions learners as having a key role in driving learning, and thus generating and soliciting their own feedback. It suggests that the second model equips students beyond the immediate task and does not lead to false expectations that courses cannot deliver. It identifies the importance of curriculum design in creating opportunities for students to develop the capabilities to operate as judges of their own learning.

Personality and learning styles are both likely to play significant roles in influencing academic achievement. College students (308 undergraduates) completed the Five Factor Inventory and the Inventory of Learning Processes and reported their grade point average. Two of the Big Five traits, conscientiousness and agreeableness, were positively related with all four learning styles (synthesis analysis, methodical study, fact retention, and elaborative processing), whereas neuroticism was negatively related with all four learning styles. In addition, extraversion and openness were positively related with elaborative processing. The Big Five together explained 14% of the variance in grade point average (GPA), and learning styles explained an additional 3%, suggesting that both personality traits and learning styles contribute to academic performance. Further, the relationship between openness and GPA was mediated by reflective learning styles (synthesis-analysis and elaborative processing). These latter results suggest that being intellectually curious fully enhances academic performance when students combine this scholarly interest with thoughtful information processing. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of teaching techniques and curriculum design.

ABSTRACT: Many programs have been developed to help schools enhance students' health and reduce the prevalence of drug use, violence, and high-risk sexual behaviors. How should educators choose among these? This article describes selection criteria based on theory, research, and best educational practice that identify key social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies and program features. The SEL competencies for students include 17 skills and attitudes organized into four groups: awareness of self and others; positive attitudes and values; responsible decision making; and social interaction skills. The 11 program features critical to the success of school-based SEL programs emphasize curriculum design, coordination with larger systems, educator preparation and support, and program evaluation. Developed by the Collaborative to Advance Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), the SEL framework can be used to guide selection of research-based prevention programs that address health, substance abuse, violence prevention, sexuality, character, and social skills.

The ability of young children to manage their emotions and behaviors and to make meaningful friendships is an important prerequisite for school readiness and academic success. Socially competent children are also more academically successful and poor social skills are a strong predictor of academic failure. This article describes The Incredible Years Dinosaur Social Skills and Problem-Solving Child Training Program, which teaches skills such as emotional literacy, empathy or perspective taking, friendship and communication skills, anger management, interpersonal problem solving, and how to be successful at school. The program was first evaluated as a small group treatment program for young children who were diagnosed with oppositional defiant and conduct disorders. More recently the program has been adapted for use by preschool and elementary teachers as a prevention curriculum designed to increase the social, emotional, and academic competence, and decrease problem behaviors of all children in the classroom. The content, methods, and teaching processes of this classroom curriculum are discussed.

Scaling research-based curriculum to the multitude of science teaching standards and contexts has proven difficult in the past. To respond to the challenge, the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) offers designers a technology-enhanced, research-based, flexibly adaptive learning environment. The learning environment can incorporate new features such as modeling tools or hand-held devices. Using WISE, design teams can create projects that bend but do not break when customized to support new school contexts and state standards. WISE curriculum projects are created by diverse design teams that include classroom teachers, technologists, discipline experts, pedagogy researchers, and curriculum designers. WISE inquiry projects incorporate Internet materials and build on the commitments and talents of teachers as well as the constraints and opportunities of their classroom contexts rather than imposing new practices without concern for past successes. These design teams create projects that incorporate diverse features of the WISE learning environment to form specific patterns that are then combined into whole projects. We refer to the whole projects as implementing curriculum design patterns for student activities. The projects are tested to determine how the curriculum design patterns promote knowledge integration, then reviewed by WISE researchers and revised accordingly (see M. C. Linn, P. Bell, & E. A. Davis, in press, Internet Environments for Science Education). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.). The most successful projects become part of the WISE library. This paper describes WISE design team practices, features of the WISE learning environment, and patterns of feature use in current library projects. The success of WISE in classrooms illustrates how flexibly adaptive projects can meet the needs of diverse teachers. Variation amongst library projects shows that designers can support inquiry with a wide variety of activities. Taken together, the library of projects and the success of students learning from them suggest that sustainable curricular innovations require extensive opportunities for customization and flexibly adaptive designs.

Given that one of the main features of the Bologna process is the need to improve the traditional ways of describing qualifications and qualification structures, all modules and programmes in third level institutions throughout the European Higher Education Area should be (re)written in terms of learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are used to express what learners are expected to achieve and how they are expected to demonstrate that achievement. This article presents a summary of developments in curriculum design in higher education in recent decades and, drawing on recent practical experience, suggests a user-friendly methodology for writing modules, courses and programmes in terms of learning outcomes. Content Page C 3.4-1 Implementing Bologna in your institution Planning and implementing key Bologna features Using learning outcomes and competences 2 BH 1 02 06 12 Implementing Bologna in your institution C 3.4-1 Using learning outcomes and competences Planning and implementing key Bologna features BH 1 02 06 12 3 Moving from a teachercentred approach… … to a student-centred approach C 3.4-1 Implementing Bologna in your institution Planning and implementing key Bologna features Using learning outcomes and competences 4 BH 1 02 06 12 objectives (Mager, 1975). Using these instructional objectives and performance outcomes, he attempted to define the type of learning that would occur at the conclusion of instruction and how that learning would be assessed. These instructional objectives later developed into more precisely defined learning outcomes. Implementing Bologna in your institution C 3.4-1 Using learning outcomes and competences Planning and implementing key Bologna features BH 1 02 06 12 5 7 Tuning Educational Structures in Europe, http://tuning.unideusto.org/tuningeu/ Advantages of learning outcomes Lack of clear definition Implementing Bologna in your institution C 3.4-1 Using learning outcomes and competences Planning and implementing key Bologna features BH 1 02 06 12 7 A hierarchy of thinking processes Using correct verbs Implementing Bologna in your institution C 3.4-1 Using learning outcomes and competences Planning and implementing key Bologna features BH 1 02 06 12 9 C 3.4-1 Using learning outcomes and competences Planning and implementing key Bologna features BH 1 02 06 12 13 C 3.4-1 Using learning outcomes and competences Planning and implementing key Bologna features BH 1 02 06 12 23 Whilst there has been some criticism of outcome-based education in the literature, a learning outcomes approach to teaching and learning has received strong support at an international level. For example, Jenkins and Unwin (2001) assert that learning outcomes: Key characteristics Implementing Bologna in your institution C 3.4-1 Using learning outcomes and competences Planning and implementing key Bologna features BH 1 02 06 12 25

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) have the potential to connect devices and areas of the world that are under-served by current networks. A critical challenge for DTNs is determining routes through the network without ever having an end-to-end connection, or even knowing which "routers" will be connected at any given time. Prior approaches have focused either on epidemic message replication or on knowledge of the connectivity schedule. The epidemic approach of replicating messages to all nodes is expensive and does not appear to scale well with increasing load. It can, however, operate without any prior network configuration. The alternatives, by requiring a priori connectivity knowledge, appear infeasible for a self-configuring network.

This paper discusses the basic philosophical assumptions of objectivism and constructivism including their implications for course design, interaction, and evaluation in distance education. First, I provide a brief overview of the construct of interaction as it is used in the field of distance education. Second, I address the major philosophical ideas of objectivism and constructivism as they relate to education. Third, I discuss how curriculum designers from each paradigm design a distance education course. Finally, I compare and contrast the two approaches to distance education course design and provide suggestions for practitioners.

Belonging Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia or the EYLF is one of two components of Australia's National Quality Framework. I was invited by Professor Jennifer Sumsion and Professor Linda Harrison of Charles Sturt University Australia, to be a co-architect of this framework in a national consortium. My contribution was based on my sustained and unique position in the sector as an 'Early Childhood Research Pedagogue'.

A challenge facing many schools, especially those in urban settings that serve culturally and linguistically diverse populations, is a disconnection between schools and students' home communities, which can have both cognitive and affective implications for students. In this article we explore a form of “connected science,” in which real-world problems and school-community partnerships are used as contextual scaffolds for bridging students' community-based knowledge and school-based knowledge, as a way to provide all students opportunities for meaningful and intellectually challenging science learning. The potential of these scaffolds for connected science is examined through a case study in which a team of fifth-grade teachers used the student-identified problem of pollution along a nearby river as an interdisciplinary anchor for teaching science, math, language arts, and civics. Our analysis makes visible how diverse forms of knowledge were able to support project activities, examines the consequences for student learning, and identifies the features of real-world problems and school–community partnerships that created these bridging opportunities.

Over the past years, many universities have integrated sustainability into their education, research, outreach, and operations. Within education, competences regarding sustainable development (SD) have been defined, courses on sustainability have been developed, and manuals and methods for teaching SD have been developed and integrated in curricula. The integration of competences for SD in higher education programs can be seen as an important step in achieving sustainability in higher education. Although these competences are defined and described in different models and settings, little information is available on the actual status of the integration of competences for SD in different study programs. In order to find out how and to what extent these competences are already present, the existing competence schemes of study programs within two Belgian universities were analyzed in the fields of business management, office management, and applied information technology. Results of the analysis show that competences for SD related to responsibility and emotional intelligence are widely integrated, while competences for SD dealing with system orientation, future orientation, personal commitment, and action taking are virtually absent. The analysis also shows that many competences for SD could be discovered within the selected study programs, though in an implicit and fragmented way, thus not covering all necessary fields of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. This calls for an adjustment of the study programs to clearly and explicitly integrate competences for SD, especially those related to system orientation, future orientation, personal involvement, and action taking.

"In many countries, information and communication technology (ICT) has a clear impact on the development of educational curricula. In Flanders, the education government has identified and defined a framework of ICT competencies for expected outcomes, related to knowledge, skills and attitudes that pupils are expected to achieve at the end of primary school. However, it has never been examined whether teachers are using ICT in accordance with the competencies proposed by the Flemish government.

In order to answer this question, a survey was conducted among 570 respondents in a stratified sample of 53 primary schools. Results show that teachers mainly focus on the development of technical ICT skills, whereas the ICT curriculum centres on the integrated use of ICT within the learning and teaching process. This indicates the existence of a gap between the proposed and the implemented curriculum for ICT. The paper concludes with the potential value of a school-based ICT curriculum that ‘translates’ the national ICT-related curriculum into an ICT plan as part of the overall school policy."

This article presents conceptual and empirical analyses of several of the ''best practices'' of learning and instruction, and demonstrates how violent video games use them effectively to motivate learners to persevere in acquiring and mastering a number of skills, to navigate through complex problems and changing environments, and to experiment with different identities until success is achieved. These educational principles allow for the generation of several testable hypotheses, two of which are tested with samples of 430 elementary school children (mean age 10 years), 607 young adolescents (mean age 14 years), and 1,441 older adolescents (mean age 19 years). Participants were surveyed about their video game habits and their aggressive cognitions and behaviors. The first hypothesis is based on the principle that curricula that teach the same underlying concepts across contexts should have the highest transfer. Therefore, students who play multiple violent video games should be more likely to learn aggressive cognitions and behaviors than those who play fewer. The second hypothesis is based on the principle that long-term learning is improved the more practice is distributed across time. Therefore, students who play violent video games more frequently across time should be more likely to learn aggressive cognitions and behaviors than those who play the same types of games for equivalent amounts of time but less frequently. Both hypotheses were supported. We conclude by describing what educators can learn from the successful instructional and curriculum design features of video games.

The Interconnected Model of Professional Growth was used to identify processes of teacher learning during the collaborative design of curriculum materials in the context of curriculum innovation. Nine published studies from six different countries about teachers' collaborative curriculum design were analyzed to identify the learning processes that collaborative curriculum design fosters. It was concluded that the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth, although initially developed to recognize learning processes in individual teachers, can also be used to identify learning processes that are fostered by collaborative curriculum design in teams of teachers.

Anatomy instruction at Australian and New Zealand medical schools has been the subject of considerable debate recently. Many commentators have lamented the gradual devaluation of anatomy as core knowledge in medical courses. To date, much of this debate has been speculative or anecdotal and lacking reliable supporting data. To provide a basis for better understanding and more informed discussion, this study analyses how anatomy is currently taught and assessed in Australian and New Zealand medical schools.A mailed questionnaire survey was sent to each of the 19 Australian and 2 New Zealand medical schools, examining the time allocation, content, delivery and assessment of anatomy for the 2008 academic year.Nineteen of the 21 (90.5%) universities invited to participate completed the survey. There was considerable variability in the time allocation, content, delivery and assessment of anatomy in Australasian medical schools. The average total hours of anatomy teaching for all courses was 171 h (SD ± 116.7, range 56/560).Historical data indicate a major decline in anatomy teaching hours within medical courses in Australia and New Zealand. Our results reveal that as there is no national curriculum for anatomy instruction, the curriculum content, instruction methodology and assessment is highly variable between individual institutions. Such variability in anatomy teaching and assessment raises an important question: is there also variable depth of understanding of anatomy between graduates of different medical courses?

This paper describes the evaluation of an NSF-sponsored educational research project. The primary focus of this project was to develop and evaluate a course curriculum designed to improve retention and performance for "at risk" introductory computer science majors. The results of this research suggest that the newly developed course and curriculum materials did improve students' performance and retention in computer science and their attitudes towards computer science.

Evaluated Responding in Peaceful and Positive Ways (RIPP)-a 6th-grade universal violence prevention program. Classes of 6th graders at 3 urban middle schools serving predominantly African American youth were randomized to intervention (N = 321) and control groups (N = 305). Intervention effects were found on a knowledge test but not on other mediating variables. RIPP participants had fewer disciplinary violations for violent offenses and in-school suspensions at posttest compared with the control group. The reduction in suspensions was maintained at 12-month follow-up for boys but not for girls. RIPP participants also reported more frequent use of peer mediation and reductions in fight-related injuries at posttest. Intervention effects on several measures approached significance at 6-month and 12-month follow-up. The program's impact on violent behavior was more evident among those with high pretest levels of problem behavior.

Government agencies and members of the educational research community have petitioned for research-based curricula. The ambiguity of the phrase “research-based,” however, undermines attempts to create a shared research foundation for the development of, and informed choices about, classroom curricula. This article presents a framework for the construct of research-based curricula. One implication is that traditional strategies such as market research and research-to-practice models are insufficient; more adequate is the use of multiple phases of the proffered Curriculum Research Framework.

Teachers of mathematics face a particular tension, which the authors call the planning paradox. If teachers plan from objectives, the tasks they set are likely to be unrewarding for the pupils and mathematically impoverished. Planning from tasks may increase pupils' engagement but their activity is likely to be unfocused and learning difficult to assess. By seeking inspiration from research in the areas of curriculum design, the nature of authenticity in the classroom and the use of tools, and by looking retrospectively at the design of computer-based tasks that have underpinned their research for many years, the authors recognise a theme of purposeful activity, leading to a planned appreciation of utilities for certain mathematical concepts. The authors propose utility as a third dimension of understanding, which can be linked to purpose in the effective design of tasks. The article concludes with a set of heuristics to guide such planning.

Adding computer science as a separate school subject to the core K-6 curriculum is a complex issue with educational challenges. The authors herein address two of these challenges: (1) the design of the curriculum based on a generic computational thinking framework, and (2) the knowledge teachers need to teach the curriculum. The first issue is discussed within a perspective of designing an authentic computational thinking curriculum with a focus on real-world problems. The second issue is addressed within the framework of technological pedagogical content knowledge explicating in detail the body of knowledge that teachers need to have to be able to teach computational thinking in a K-6 environment. An example of how these ideas can be applied in practice is also given. While it is recognized there is a lack of adequate empirical evidence in terms of the effectiveness of the frameworks proposed herein, it is expected that our knowledge and research base will dramatically increase over the next several years, as more countries around the world add computer science as a separate school subject to their K-6 curriculum.

This article was developed for the Commission on Change and Innovation in Dental Education (CCI), established by the American Dental Education Association. CCI was created because numerous organizations within organized dentistry and the educational community have initiated studies or proposed modifications to the process of dental education, often working to achieve positive and desirable goals but without coordination or communication. The fundamental mission of CCI is to serve as a focal meeting place where dental educators and administrators, representatives from organized dentistry, the dental licensure community, the Commission on Dental Accreditation, the ADA Council on Dental Education and Licensure, and the Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations can meet and coordinate efforts to improve dental education and the nation's oral health. One of the objectives of the CCI is to provide guidance to dental schools related to curriculum design. In pursuit of that objective, this article summarizes the evidence related to this question: What are educational best practices for helping dental students acquire the capacity to function as an entry-level general dentist or to be a better candidate to begin advanced studies? Three issues are addressed, with special emphasis on the third: 1) What constitutes expertise, and when does an individual become an expert? 2) What are the differences between novice and expert thinking? and 3) What educational best practices can help our students acquire mental capacities associated with expert function, including critical thinking and self-directed learning? The purpose of this review is to provide a benchmark that faculty and academic planners can use to assess the degree to which their curricula include learning experiences associated with development of problem-solving, critical thinking, self-directed learning, and other cognitive skills necessary for dental school graduates to ultimately become expert performers as they develop professionally in the years after graduation.

This study is the first of a series of studies, collectively embodying a multiphase mixed methods design. The overall objective of these studies is to explore and address a variety of issues and features of the discipline of economics, particularly as they relate to and represent past present and future factors of globalization, education, citizenship, and society. This is done by collecting and analyzing data on numerous aspects of the undergraduate economics curriculum, economics as a discipline, and economics as applied in the real world.
      The overall purpose of these studies is to inform ongoing debates concerning the future of the discipline of economics and how it is taught, by examining and creating paradigms and methods that may be of aide. Additionally these studies collectively aim to outline, and in small ways develop, potential technological and organizational solutions for detailed longitudinal curriculum tracking. The frameworks employed and developed in these studies may eventually be scaled and adapted for all sorts of curricula. Ideally, the completion of this study’s overall objective yields practical insights and tools that empower faculty and departments, in economics and eventually in general, to better understand and design their own curriculum.
      This immediate study fills gaps in and updates data on the curriculum of undergraduate economics majors in U.S. institutions, while also establishing a baseline data set for future studies to build on. A qualitative census methodology is adapted and employed to explore how various institutional and program factors relate to certain types of major program requirements. Descriptive statistics are used for analysis, primarily to allow for comparisons to previous studies. In sum, the purpose of the data collected and analyzed in this census is to give a glimpse into the current state of the undergraduate economics curriculum in the U.S., and to inform the qualitative, quantitative, and transformative studies that are to follow in this multiphase series.

The Internet opens a new generation of distance education ( fourth generation ), introducing sophisticated delivery tools and creating a paradigm shift with profound implications on the design of distance education courses. In order to accommodate this medium, novel curriculum design and learning models may be appropriate. In this paper, there are several instructional design models presented and a hybrid model is developed. This model integrates both constructivist and objectivist approaches to instructional design. When creating or redesigning courses for Internet distribution, content and media developers, faculty and researchers bene®t from the identi®cation of a developmental model taking into account both learning and design principles. #

This paper presents an approach to design Electronic Systems Curricula for making electronics more appealing to students. Since electronics is an important grounding for other disciplines (computer science, signal processing, and communications), this approach proposes the development of multidisciplinary projects using the project-based learning (PBL) strategy for increasing the attractiveness of the curriculum. The proposed curriculum structure consists of eight courses: four theoretical courses and four PBL courses (including a compulsory Master's thesis). In PBL courses, the students, working together in groups, develop multidisciplinary systems, which become progressively more complex. To address this complexity, the Department of Electronic Engineering has invested in the last five years in many resources for developing software tools and a common hardware. This curriculum has been evaluated successfully for the last four academic years: the students have increased their interest in electronics and have given the courses an average grade of more than 71% for all PBL course evaluations (data extracted from students surveys). The students have also acquired new skills and obtained very good academic results: the average grade was more than 74% for all PBL courses. An important result is that all students have developed more complex and sophisticated electronic systems, while considering that the results are worth the effort invested.

The history of science education reform has been fundamentally centered around science curriculum development and implementation. The advent of mobile technologies has necessitated a re-examination of how students could better learn science through these 21st century tools. Conventional teaching materials may not prepare students to learn the inquiry way and to become self-directed and social learners who could learn “everywhere and all the time (seamlessly)” using mobile technologies. This paper is based on our first year of work in our mobile learning research project in transforming primary three science lessons into a “mobilized” curriculum for a classroom context in which students routinely use mobile technologies. Using an exemplar fungi topic, we discuss our approach as well as experiences in deconstructing and reconstructing an existing curriculum through a co-design approach with teachers in a Singapore local school. In doing so, we make a contribution to the methodology for developing mobilized science curricula for in-class learning that also extends to out-of-class learning.

This report describes the evaluation of a curriculum-integrated programme designed to help students develop an awareness of the nursing literature, the skills to locate and retrieve it, and skills required in its evaluation; in other words 'information literacy' . Positive changes in student performance on objective measures of information-literacy skills were revealed as well as a significant increase in the levels of confidence of the student in performing those skills. Students who had undertaken the information-literacy programme ('programme' students) performed better on a range of objective measures of information literacy, as well as reporting higher levels of confidence in these skills, than students who had not participated in the programme ('non-programme' students). Evaluation of this programme provides evidence of the potential usefulness of a curriculum-integrated approach for the development of information-literacy skills within nursing education. With these underlying skills, students will be better equipped to consolidate and extend their key informationliteracy skills to include research appreciation and application. These are vital for effective lifelong learning and a prerequisite to evidence-based practice.

A method of systematic task analysis is applied to the problem of designing a sequence of learning objectives that will provide an optimal match for the child's natural sequence of acquisition of mathematical skills and concepts. The authors begin by proposing an operational definition of the number concept in the form of a set of behaviors which, taken together, permit the inference that the child has an abstract concept of "number". These are the "objectives" of the curriculum. Each behavior in the defining set is then subjected to an analysis that identifies hypothesized components of skilled performance and prerequisites for learning these components. On the basis of these analyses, specific sequences of learning objectives are proposed. The proposed sequences are hypothesized to be those that will best facilitate learning, by maximizing transfer from earlier to later objectives. Relevant literature on early learning and cognitive development is considered in conjunction with the analyses and the resulting sequences. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the curriculum can be implemented and studied in schools. Examples of data on individual children are presented, and the use of such data for improving the curriculum itself, as well as for examining the effects of other treatment variables, is considered.

Background: Interprofessional Education (IPE) is now spreading worldwide and many universities are now including IPE in their curricula. The aim of this study was to investigate whether or not such student characteristics as gender, previous working experience in healthcare, educational progress and features of the learning environment, such as educational programmes and curriculum design, have an impact on their open-mindedness about co-operation with other professions. Methods: Medical and nursing students at two Swedish universities were invited to fill in the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS). Totally, 955 students were invited and 70.2% (n = 670) participated in the study. A factor analysis of the RIPLS revealed four item groupings (factors) for our empirical data, but only one had sufficient internal consistency. This factor was labelled "Team Player".

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the attitudes and knowledge of medical students (MS1-3), internal medicine residents (postgraduate years 1 to 3 (PGY1-3)), and geriatric medicine fellows about elderly patients before implementation of a new geriatrics curriculum. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: An academic medical center. PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred eleven people participated: 54 MS1, 52 MS2, 50 MS3, 20 PGY1, 12 PGY2, 12 PGY3, and 11 geriatric medicine fellows. MEASUREMENTS: Each participant completed a questionnaire, including a 16-item geriatrics attitude scale, and a 23-item knowledge test (both revised versions of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Geriatrics Survey). Pearson correlation coefficients and t tests were used for statistical analyses. RESULTS: Both surveys demonstrated high internal consistency (a 5 0.70 and 0.71, respectively). Knowledge test scores increased with advancing level of training. MS1 and MS2 scored significantly lower and fellows scored significantly higher than others. PGY3 scored significantly higher than PGY1 on the knowledge test. All groups demonstrated positive attitudes toward geriatric patients (score43.5). MS1 and fellows had significantly more favorable attitudes scores than more advanced students and residents. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that the UCLA Attitudes Scale and Knowledge Test can be used reliably to assess attitudes and knowledge level across all levels of medical education and training. The information from this study will be used to implement a more structured and comprehensive geriatrics curriculum across all trainee levels to improve attitudes and knowledge in the care of the geriatric patient. J Am Geriatr Soc 53: 99-102, 2005.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that creativity and imagination are key to envisioning alternatives to the problems of postnormal times. At the same time, educational institutions all over the globe are still mired in assumptions from the machine/industrial age, preparing students for reproduction and conformity rather than creativity. This article outlines the philosophical foundations of an educational approach in which creativity is central to scholarship, where learners move from being consumers to creators and from bystanders to participants in the postnormal dance of knowledge.

Prior research highlights the mismatch between adolescents' growing capacities for autonomy and the limited opportunities for influence in U.S. secondary schools. Youth-led participatory research (YPAR), an approach in which young people research and advocate for change on problems of concern to them, could increase students' autonomy in secondary schools. This qualitative study of YPAR examined whether and how the intervention meaningfully affected the interactions and roles of students and adults in two distinctive urban high school settings, identifying concepts for further empirical investigation. Results suggested that YPAR enabled processes of student professionalization that led to novel student-adult "collegial" interactions, expansion of domains of student influence, and diversification of students with opportunities to influence policies and practices across these two schools.

Within a European context, facilitating the increased participation of marginalized groups within society has become a cornerstone of social policy. In higher education in Ireland this has generally involved the targeting for support of individuals representing groups traditionally excluded on the grounds of socio-economic status. More recently, people with disability have been included in this consideration. This approach has tended to focus on physical access issues and some technical supports. However, access is multi-faceted and must include a review of pedagogic practices, assistive provision (technological and personal), student’s engagement with their workload (e.g. recording) and evaluation procedures: achieving accreditation levels commensurate with ability. This small-scale Irish study examined the experiences of two groups of young people with physical disabilities and with dyslexia in two higher education institutions. It was apparent that for students with physical disabilities and with dyslexia, assessment practices were fraught with additional limitations. Assessment practices were mediated for these students through the physical environment, the backwash effect of assessment on curriculum, the availability and use of assistive technology, and through the attitudes of staff and students. It can be concluded that access issues within higher education have been inadequately conceptualized and as a result failed to address fundamental issues around assessment for students with physical disabilities and with dyslexia.