This paper describes a course on spatial thinking and communicating designed by an interdisciplinary team and offered to first-year university students. An important goal was to introduce spatial thinking while accommodating the needs of the students from diverse backgrounds, educational goals and career pathways. Students in a first-year interdisciplinary cohort of 340 represented Mechatronics Systems Engineering, Business, Interactive Arts, Communications, and Computing Science. A major feature of the course design was an integrated laboratory, which served to amplify lecture content via practicing exercises aimed at developing their abilities to think and work spatially in 2D and 3D using tools including pencil and paper, digital and physical Lego, and a computer-aided design system. We describe our course design and team-teaching processes, realities that constrained our choices, the tools we use to assist our decision making during course design and delivery, and the structure and function of the teaching team. We also present selected student artifacts to demonstrate how students learned to think spatially. We then identify lessons-learned and revision plans.
Test-retest (stability) reliability coefficients are, by their nature, affected by what has happened to the tested subjects during the period between testings. Similarly, changes in subjects' mean performance will reflect what happened to them in the interim period. In this regard, the relative values of stability coefficients for experimental and control groups are indicative of the relative degree to which an experimental program is able to change the rankings of the students on criteria measures at pre-and posttreatment times. Changes in students' rankings however do not necessarily affect the level of the group's average performance. This study examines the stability reliabilities of three standardized testing instruments used in the evaluation of a special (enriched)
In the present study, the facial features of the “IT” figure in the IT Scale for Children were used as a less biased modification for measuring sex-role preference of preschool black children (46 boys, 47 girls). Data showed that the majority of the children identified “IT” as their own sex. Also, significant differences were obtained between the present sample of black boys and those black boys in a comparison sample. No differences existed, however, between the present sample and the original normative white sample of boys. Black girls in the present sample were as feminine as both the black and white comparison samples. The results indicate that the facial features version is appropriate when using the IT Scale. Black children seemed to manifest sex-role preference similar to their white peers although girls' scores were more variable. Previous assumptions regarding the socialization of sex-role behavior of black children are challengeable and must be reconsidered.
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