Extending understandings

Essential Understandings

Essential Knowledge  Peristalsis moves food through the digestive tract.  Food is broken down in a series of mechanical and chemical ways throughout the digestive process.  The major organs of the digestive tract include: Mouth (and all associated parts), Esophagus, Stomach, Pancreas, Liver, Small Intestines, and Large Intestines.  Most nutrients are absorbed after passing through the stoma...

Globalization and Youth: Evolving Understandings

Students’ understandings of concurrent programming

This paper describes a qualitative, explorative study of how students understand some concepts in concurrent programming. The study is based on interviews with students regarding the final programming assignment in a concurrent programming course. We use phenomenography to analyse the students’ statements about tuple spaces, the concurrent data structures on which the assignments are based, and...

Teachers’ (mis)understandings of resilience

This study aimed to extend previous studies into resilience, by identifying the roles that teachers played in fostering resilience (N=57: females n=43; and males n=14). A quantitative scale was administered to teachers in South Australia’s Catholic education sector to determine the extent to which they were involved in fostering resilience. A qualitative questionnaire followed which determined ...

Students’ Understandings of Storing Objects

This paper reports a phenomenographic study of how introductory students view objects that have been created and stored by an object-oriented program. By analyzing student interviews, we identify five categories of description, each representing a different kind of understanding of the phenomenon. Of these categories, some represent viable understandings that we would like our students to have....