Teaching Thinking Skills in Context-Based Learning: Teachers’ Challenges and Assessment Knowledge

Abstract

For an educational reform to succeed, teachers need to adjust their perceptions to the reform's new curricula and strategies and cope with new content, as well as new teaching and assessment strategies. Developing students' scientific literacy through context-based chemistry and higher order thinking skills was the framework for establishing a new chemistry curriculum for Israeli high school students. As part of this endeavor, we developed the Taste of Chemistry module, which focuses on contextbased chemistry, chemical understanding, and higher order thinking skills. Our research objectives were (a) to identify the challenges and difficulties chemistry teachers faced, as well as the advantages they found, while teaching and assessing the Taste of Chemistry module; and (b) to investigate how they coped with teaching and assessing thinking skills that include analyzing data from graphs and tables, transferring between multiple representations and, transferring between chemistry understanding levels.

Resignification of educational e-innovation to enhance opportunities for graduate employability in the context of new university degrees

“…The importance of favouring employability opportunities of graduates from a resignification of educational e-innovation becomes apparent inasmuch, as the results of the evolution during the semester are analyzed, we can see that students develop a critical vision of the technological environment (Gozálvez & Aguaded, 2012), as well as a skill for thinking systemically, strategically and dialogically, as mentioned in Avargil et al (2012), Asiya et al (2016) and Hajhosseiny (2012), respectively. An emancipatory perspective from which they design, implement and manage their own social media aimed at job placement, specialization of professional profile, and their incorporation to the job market, as we can observe when comparing their initial self perception about the use of technologies and social media with the lessons learned and abilities acquired at the end of the semester.…”

“…With regards to e-innovation in higher education and its resignification, it is important to reflect on students' training in three thinking dimensions: systemic (Avargil, Herscovitz, & Dori, 2012), strategic (Asiya, Naaranoja, Kyotla, & Kantola 2016) and dialogic (Hajhosseiny, 2012). These dimensions should sustain creative learning environments (Davies, Jindal, Collier, Digby, & Hay, 2013) and turn students into competent professionals and entrepreneurs, with a critical and transdisciplinary vision, which in Morín's terms, father of complex thinking, can be considered a product of inadequacy "of disjoined, divided and partitioned wisdoms" (Morín, 1999, p. 16), which in addition constitutes an educational challenge of the reorganization of thinking and education.…”

Medical Community of Inquiry: A Diagnostic Tool for Learning, Assessment, and Research

“…It also refers to teachers' ability to design and apply assignments suitable for assessing students' knowledge and skills (Avargil, Herscovitz, & Dori, 2012). In our methodology (described below), we combined the TPACK components with Assessment Knowledge and added an in-depth analysis of forum use.…”

Redesigning the Instructional Act in Romanian Higher Education

“…The motivation for this study is the fact that the bridge between student and teacher, and between quality/ quantity of information conveyed and development of personal efficacy, flexibility and life-long learning of the students is the teaching/learning process 10 . This lays the foundations for the development of the competence system, which is directly responsible for personal growth of the students and indirectly for the evolution of society.…”