Search

Self-regulated learning has been described as an adaptive process: students adapt their learning strategies for attaining different learning goals. In order to be adaptive, students must have a clear notion of what the task requirements consist of. Both trace data and questionnaire data indicate that students adapt study strategies in limited ways and that their awareness of task demands seems to be low. In the present think-aloud study we examined task awareness of tenth-graders who selected text fragments in three different selection tasks. Students' task awareness was analysed at a global and a local task level. Awareness at the global task level refers to processing the instruction and reflecting about general selection goals; awareness at the local task level includes spontaneous reasoning about selecting specific text fragments. On either level, students showed difficulties in verbalizing task demands. In line with previous work, tenth-graders apparently experience a limited awareness of task demands. (Contains 5 tables.)

This study attempts to reliably measure literature reading and creative writing ability, and subsequently to determine whether a relationship exists between the two abilities. Participants were 19 eleventh-grade students: 11 were known to be good readers of literature, whereas 8 were known to be poor readers of literature. Each participant read 4 literary texts and wrote 5 creative texts. Texts concerned two genres: poems and short stories. The transcriptions of reading responses and writing products were rated by different panels of 7 and 8 independent expert judges, respectively. Multilevel analyses indicated that agreement among judges was high and that individual student performance relative to other students was fairly consistent among tasks, both for reading and writing tasks. Moreover, average reading and average writing performance appeared to be related even when the a priori selection was taken into account. The results support our hypothesis that a positive relationship exists between literature reading and creative writing ability. Moreover, it shows that both constructs can be measured in reliable ways. Implications for further research and for the position of creative writing within the literature curriculum are discussed. (Contains 4 tables and 3 footnotes.)

According to theories of students' test preparation, students may optimize their test performance by paying special attention to important information and processing this information in ways that are appropriate to the type of questions included in the forthcoming test. However, research is unclear about the conditions under which students adapt study strategies to the demands of test preparation tasks. Moreover, little is known about the processes and abilities involved. In this article, we present a theoretical model that integrates various factors that seem relevant to strategy adaptation in test preparation, including the teacher's intended task demands, students' perceptions of these demands, students' personal goals for studying, and their ability to adapt and implement strategies. The aim of our model is to stimulate further research on strategy adaptation, which may eventually provide evidence-based guidelines that could help teachers support the development of students' strategy adaptability and use tests as learning tools.

In the heated debate on the gap between educational research and practice, participants often defend single solutions based on monocausal problem analyses. This article aims to improve the quality of the debate by encouraging participants to take a many-sided perspective. To this purpose, we first reviewed the literature and developed an inventory of the problems, causes, and solutions that have been determined in relation to the gap. The literature review constituted a basis for a symposium and questionnaire, which was completed by participants of the symposium in advance. Different groups took part in the symposium, including researchers, teachers, teacher trainers, and policy-makers. The questionnaire indicated that, on average, these groups showed remarkable consensus about the existence and causes of a gap between educational research and practice. At the symposium, participants took a multisided perspective and considered various solution strategies to close the gap as complementary. Article includes appendix: Inventory of Problems and Causes Identified in the Literature as Constituting a Gap between Educational Research and Practice. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Departing from a realistic classroom context, this study focuses on the relationship between students' perception of task demands and their learning performance. History teachers (N=20) and their 11th-grade students (N=375) rated the relative importance of sections of an instructional text on which teachers would be giving a test. In addition, test grades were collected. It was hypothesized that the degree of correspondence between ratings of individual students and those of their teacher would reflect the accurateness of students' perception of task demands and therefore would be positively related with test grade. Multilevel analysis revealed partly support for this hypothesis. Students with higher grades more consistently showed a relative close correspondence with their teacher than students with lower grades. Nonetheless, a substantial number of students who showed a relatively close correspondence with their teacher, obtained a low test grade. This suggests that a more accurate perception of task demands did not guarantee a higher test performance. (Contains 2 tables, 1 figure, and 7 notes.)

History teachers and their 11th-grade students rated the relative importance of sections of instructional text on which teachers would be giving a test. Multilevel analysis revealed only a moderate correspondence between teachers in importance ratings. This suggested there were large differences between task demands of individual teachers, therefore, students needed to attune to the demands their own teacher set. (Author)

One requirement of reflective conceptual change by teachers is the need to map classroom situations onto situations that are subjected to educational research. A classification of instructional-learning episodes is presented as an instrument to facilitate this mapping. Using the instrument in teacher training and educational research is discussed. (SLD)