In their seminal 2002 paper, Kollmuss and Agyeman asked the important question ‘Why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behaviour?’ The article has had a remarkably high rate of readership, with 64,900 electronic views to date, and 16 years later, this question remains significant. But are environmental educators and researchers any closer to understanding why people engage in pro-environmental behaviour? For this special issue of the Australian Journal of Environmental Education and its focus on ecologising education, it is timely not only to re-explore but to (re)story the concepts of environmental knowledge, environmental awareness and pro-environmental behaviour, in order to generate fertile ground for the creation of new understandings and practices in environmental education. After considering relevant literature published between 2000 and 2018, this article offers an original framework for considering the complex, varied, and interconnected influences on the development of pro-environmental behaviour by (re)storying the development of pro-environmental behaviour through articulating it as a living forest.
QuickSmart is a basic academic skills intervention designed for persistently low-achieving students in the middle years of schooling that aims to improve the automaticity of basic skills to improve higher-order processes, such as problem solving and comprehension, as measured on standardized tests. The QuickSmart instructional program consists of three structured, teacher- or teacher aide-directed, 30-minute, small-group lessons each week for approximately 26 weeks. In this study, 42 middle school students experiencing learning difficulties (LD) completed the QuickSmart reading program, and a further 42 students with LD took part in the QuickSmart mathematics program. To investigate the effects of the intervention, comparisons were made between the reading and mathematics progress of the intervention group and a group of 10 high-achieving and 10 average-achieving peers. The results indicated that although the standardized reading comprehension and mathematics scores of QuickSmart students remained below those of comparison students, they improved significantly from pretest to posttest. In contrast, the standardized scores of comparison students were not significantly different from pretest to posttest. On measures of response speed and accuracy gathered using the Cognitive Aptitude Assessment System (CAAS), QuickSmart students were able to narrow the gap between their performance and that of their high- and average-achieving peers. Implications are drawn regarding the importance of interventions that emphasize the automaticity of basic academic skills for students with learning difficulties.
The aim of this article is to promote discussion and professional development around the topic of learning difficulties in mathematics, particularly as these pertain to teaching and learning in the middle school years. The article has three sections. In the first section, a review of literature about learning difficulties (LD) in mathematics is presented. Definitional issues are discussed, key underlying causes of LD in mathematics are highlighted and common ‘learner characteristics’ of middle-years students with LD in mathematics are identified. The second part of the article is an overview of a responsive intervention currently being developed to support middle-years students with LD in mathematics. This section describes the implementation of the QuickSmart mathematics intervention with 42 participating students and 12 comparison students enrolled in five schools from a rural area of New South Wales. The results of pre-intervention and post-intervention assessments, using both standardised and achievement-based measures are reported. The findings indicate that the QuickSmart intervention approach improved students’ mathematical knowledge, skills and understandings. In the third section of the article research-validated, curriculum-relevant strategies from the QuickSmart mathematics program are described.
This article focuses on the cognitive factors that impact on students in the middle school years experiencing learning difficulties in basic mathematics. It begins with a review of selected literature providing information about the learning difficulties in mathematics. Focus then shifts to an implementation of the QuickSmart intervention. QuickSmart is a basic academic skills intervention designed for persistently low-achieving middle-years' students. In this small-scale study, 12 middle school students experiencing learning difficulties participated in the QuickSmart mathematics program. Comparisons are made between the mathematics progress of the intervention group and eight average-achieving peers. The results indicate that on measures of response speed and accuracy QuickSmart participant students were able to narrow the gap between their performance and that of their average-achieving peers. Further, on standardized tests of more general mathematical knowledge, participant students improved significantly from pre-test to post-test. Implications are drawn regarding the importance of interventions that emphasize automaticity in basic mathematics for middle years students with learning difficulties.
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