Charles Crook

University of Nottingham | Notts · School of Education

The university lecture has attracted much critical evaluation over a long period. Yet it remains resilient in the face of such scepticism. However, the project reported here finds that a sample of experienced lecturers fail to recognise the terms of this critique in their own practice. They uniformly describe contrary approaches. These are characte...

Assessment studies using structural equation modeling and Rasch Model have long been prominent in all areas of educational psychology. Their emphases have covered, but have not been limited to, the improvement of quality in teaching, learning, and research as well as the pursuit of research productivity. However, such methodological approaches have...

There is a crisis of expectation in relation to educational technology. This is sometimes interpreted as a failure of academic researchers to disseminate their work to educational practitioners. However, another interpretation dwells on the lack of vision characterising such research. Because teachers often encounter research most intensely during...

There is widespread enthusiasm for 1:1 computing in education. Recognizing that secure innovation of educational practice should be built upon contextual sensitivity, this article reported two case studies anticipating the potential development of 1:1 classes in the particular cultural context of China. The first case described how the new technolo...

The term ‘smart’ has become widely and sometimes carelessly employed in relation to contemporary design. However, in certain areas of cultural practice it also has acquired a more specialised and focussed meaning. One such area is education. The present paper explores the discourse of smart as it is emerging in relation to both educational technolo...

There is much to be realised in the educational potential of national and world heritage sites. Such sites need to be supported in sharing their resources with a wide and international public, especially within formal education. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) heritage site visualisations could serve this need. Our study focuses on...

We explored the use of mobile social software, in the form of a mobile group blog, to assist cultural learning. The potential of using this technology for cultural adaptation among overseas students was examined as those students adapted to the everyday life of studying abroad. Two pilot studies and a successful field study of a mobile group blog a...

Schools are often encouraged to facilitate extra-curricular learning within their own premises. This study addresses the potential of social networking sites (SNS) for supporting such out-of-class study. Given concerns that learning on these sites may happen at a surface level, we adopted self-determination theory for designing a social networking...

This study explores what the microgenetic method can tell us about the way emotions change during computer-supported collaboration. It is applied to analyse fluctuations in three components of the challenge experience in a collaborative game: individuals’ feelings of challenge, the similarity of these feelings with those of a partner, and their awa...

A central challenge for science educators is to enable young people to act as scientists by gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments and engaging in informed debate. We report the design of the nQuire toolkit, a system to support scripted personal inquiry learning, and a study of its use with school students aged 11-14. This differs...

This paper addresses the problem of non-significant intention–behavior effects in educational technology adoption, based on a reanalysis of data from the Impact09 project, a UK-government funded evaluation of technology use in high schools in England that had been selected as representing outstanding Information and Communications Technologies (ICT...

This paper addresses the problem of non-significant intention–behavior effects in educational technology adoption, based on a reanalysis of data from the Impact09 project, a UK-government funded evaluation of technology use in high schools in England that had been selected as representing outstanding Information and Communications Technologies (ICT...

En los primeros dos años de vida, la interacción madre-hijo es el principal agente de socialización y esta relación tiene un carácter de reciprocidad. A esta conclusión han llegado una serie de estudios en los que se analizan las características de este sistema diádico y las contribuciones respectivas que hacen madre e hijo a esta relación, aunque...

A pedagogic scenario is described for providing primary school children with an understanding of the processes of invention while cultivating a sense of identity as 'inventor'. This scenario is positioned at the boundary of in-class and out-of-class experiences. Our central aim was to illustrate how digital resources might function to orchestrate t...

The recent Decoding Learning study seeks to pinpoint innovative practice by teachers and students when it comes to exploiting technology in education. It offers eight approaches to innovation with ICT. Professor Rosemary Luckin explains

Our Decoding Learning report looks at the impact of digital technology in the classroom. Key findings Schools spent £487 million on ICT equipment and services in 2009-2010. But this investment has not yet resulted in radical improvements to learning experiences or attainment. No technology has an impact on learning on its own right; impact depend...

An imperative to develop the social experience of learning has led to the design of informal learning spaces within libraries. Yet little is known about how these spaces are used by students or how students perceive them. Field work in one such space is reported. The general private study practice of undergraduates was captured through audio diarie...

This article compares the use of the Internet during the first year of university education of students who have pathological levels of Internet anxiety with those who do not. Two hundred and sixteen first year psychology students (females 184, males 32) were surveyed for their levels of Internet-related anxiety, from which 12 (5.6%) were identifie...

The rise of a socially-defined form of constructivism is identified as a central motif in current theorising around educational practice. The role of technology in supporting such a shift is noted along with a relative marginalisation of the role of teachers. While technology is implicated in creating less frequent contact between students and teac...

This report draws on 53 focus group interviews conducted with students aged 13 and 15 in both representative and innovating UK secondary schools. The schedule for these discussions covered a wide range of issues relating to the use of Web 2.0 services both in and out of school. These young people were often deeply engaged with this technology and b...

In this paper, a novel approach to engaging students in personal inquiry learning is described, whereby they carry out scientific investigations that are personally meaningful and relevant to their everyday lives. The learners are supported by software that guides the inquiry process, extending from the classroom into the school grounds, home, or o...

When young children draw a scene in which one object partially occludes another, they often depict hidden features of the occluded object by rendering the nearer object transparent. This may signify a motive to produce drawings that are informative. Three experiments are reported in which a simple paradigm is employed to consider this possible basi...

The advent of networked environments into the classroom is changing classroom debates in many ways. This article addresses one key attribute of these environments, namely anonymity, to explore its consequences for co-present adolescents anonymous, by virtue of the computer system, to peers not to teachers. Three studies with 16–17 year-olds used a...

Children's speed and fluency of writing has elsewhere been shown to correlate with the quality of their composition. Here, we compared speed and fluency of text production when children aged between 6 and 11 used either a pen or a computer keyboard. Younger children were reliably slower and less fluent when writing at a keyboard. All children were...

Sex differences in social behaviour emerge as early as 2 years of age and gender schema theorists have suggested that preverbal infants possess ‘tacit’ knowledge of gender which informs their behaviour. This study examined sex-congruent preferences using a visual preference paradigm in four domains (babies, children, toys, activities) in a longitud...

An inquiry-led investigation with technology was designed and implemented, aiming to enhance our understanding of how inquiry learning takes place within a personal, socio-cultural and institutional context. Children used personal technologies across contexts, to plan and collect evidence, analyse and share their work. These technologies are bounda...

Crook and Lewthwaite are interested in the reconfiguration of the practices of learning. Their contribution specifically explores the continuities that have been 'pursued between recreational ICT and its place within organised education', highlighting the salient influences on educational research and theory that arose as these new technologies wer...

Year 3 final report: Shaping Contexts to realise the potential of technologies to support learning

A summary of the final Capital Research Project report

Inquiry learning is an educational approach that involves a process of exploration, asking questions and making discoveries in the search for new understandings. Researchers however are divided about the value of the approach. In the symposium, it is argued that one of the reasons for this controversy is the way that inquiry learning is assessed. C...

This research has been concerned with the use of networked computer resources in the context of full‐time residential university education. Topics addressed include the use of computer‐mediated communication to supplement conventional teaching and the provision of access to campus networks and the Internet from university study‐bedrooms. The resear...

University staff are now encouraged to supplement their classroom activity with computer-based tools and resources accessible through virtual learning environments (VLEs). Meanwhile, university students increasingly make recreational use of computer networks in the form of various social software applications. This paper explores tensions of presen...

The paper describes a school trial in secondary to school to explore how version 1 of the PI Toolkit helped students to perform a personally relevant scientific inquiry in a science classroom and at home. Over a three-week period (nine lessons), twenty one 13-14 year old students in an inner city school participated in an inquiry to answer the ques...

3 Abstract: We explored children's spontaneous use of the Onion Street Maths and English message boards out-of-school. These are open-access, study support forums that are widely accessed and well-regarded by teachers and students in the UK. 416 messages were collected on the Maths board and 893 messages were collected on the English board. Sustain...

The current study aimed to examine the effect of anonymity and privacy on students' voting behaviour before and after classroom debate. A positioning system with three different settings was prototyped (Private, Anonymous or Public). It was predicted that students voting publicly would be less inclined to express changes in their views, and that th...

Learners nowadays have access to individual, networked computers for collaboration in the classroom merging features of face-to-face and distant collaboration and bringing new opportunities and problems to overcome. This paper describes a study exploring how chat and threaded discussion tools were used to debate. Preliminary analysis suggests that...

The paper describes a project to support personal inquiry learning with handheld and desktop technology between formal and informal settings. It presents a trial of the technology and learning across a school classroom, sports hall, and library. The main aim of the study was to incorporate inquiry learning activities within an extended school scien...

This paper summarises a number of projects all concerned with university students' use of institutional ICT facilities. In each case I note a discrepancy between the stated expectations of educational policy makers and technology architects. Together the cases discussed suggest that much more research is needed to understand established cultures of...

Sociocultural vocabulary is shown to have become increasingly visible within psychology publications since the early 1990s. It is suggested that this form of theorizing has been particularly influential within the literature of the new learning sciences. Yet the meaning of concepts imported from cultural psychology needs careful scrutiny: particula...

This Becta study reported that e-portfolios benefit learning most when considered as part of a joined-up approach, rather than as a discrete entity. The approach should include online repositories, planning and communication tools, and opportunities for both students and teachers to draw out and present e-portfolios at particular times and for part...

A cultural-psychological view of knowledge and learning is presented. Its concerns are defined by comparative discussion of other theoretical traditions in psychology. The cultural view frames intelligent action as something that is mediated. This renders knowledge as participatory, distributed, and socially guided. It is argued that adoption of th...

This paper reports a study investigating the relationship between Internet identification and future Internet use. We predict that Internet identification is stable over time and that it is predictive of future use. The participants were 216 undergraduate students (184 females and 32 males) from five universities in the United Kingdom. They complet...

It is argued that the auditing demands of quality assurance have encouraged a greater proceduralisation of university coursework assessment. Interviews with academics from a cross‐section of Psychology departments illustrated how assessment had acquired the tightly scripted character of an organisational process. Yet undergraduate focus group conve...

Academic literacies research has significantly informed educational practice across a range of disciplines. But this influence has largely been through a focus on genres of written language. The growth of new information and communication technologies demands a broader view of academic literacy and how it now informs situations of learning. This ch...

This paper reports a study that investigated the effects of gender, Internet anxiety, and Internet identification on use of the Internet. The study involved 608 undergraduate students (490 females and 118 males). We surveyed the students' experience with the Internet, as well as their levels of Internet anxiety and Internet identification. We found...

A procedure is described for mobilizing ICT resources in order to implement collaborative tutorial conversations with large undergraduate classes. The method allows intense, intimate and regular face-to-face conversations the consequences of which are used as grounding for traditional lecture presentations. Data from focus group discussion, system...

This paper summarises a number of projects all concerned with university students use of institutional ICT facilities. In each case I note a mismatch between expectations advertised by educational policy makers and technology architects. Together the cases discussed suggest that much more research is needed to understand established cultures of lea...

One hundred and eighty five undergraduates were resourced with hypertext lecture support documents that were readable with Internet browsers located throughout their campus. The materials included both a bulletin board facility and an email launcher. These features offered learners a more interactive engagement. Usage patterns and student attitudes...

The home computer use of 33 children aged between 7 and 11 years is described. These children and their parents were interviewed on four occasions. In addition, domestic computer use was monitored for 30 days in respect of the identity of user(s) and the nature and duration of their software use. Although parents had strong aspirations that househo...

Abstract Undergraduate students were observed engaged in a species of collaboration rarely studied and yet which is grounded in an authentic form of normal study practice: namely, revising a course in preparation for an exam. Pairs of undergraduates were convened for recorded sessions in which they did this around either their own personal lecture...

During the course of a collaborative project about virtual universities, Vivienne Light started to refer to student study-bedrooms as ‘nests’. There was something engaging about her metaphor. Cosy, personalized spaces: private, yet securely embedded in a larger community. If equipped with networked computers, these rooms become ‘learning nests’. I...

It is argued that, for full-time undergraduates, ubiquitous computing will continue to involve the private, circumscribed workstation as a significant feature of its design. We report records of how a random sample of campus-resident students makes use of a networked and versatile infrastructure of computers. Highly detailed system logs re- vealed...

The increase in student numbers in further and higher education over the last decade has been dramatic, placing greater pressures on academic staff in terms of contact hours. At the same time public funding of universities has decreased. Furthermore, the current pace of technological innovation and change and the fact that there are fewer jobs for...

The project work presented in this paper is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) January‐December 1999. Our task has been to identify effective communicative practices for different technologies, in relation to the contexts in which they occur, and to feed back information about such practices to the educational community in a c...

There are numerous research accounts of computer networks in university teaching. However, so far there has been limited examination of the tensions or transformations that occur as network technologies make contact with existing community structures of higher education. Our research will focus on networked resources for teaching and learning that...

A modern enthusiasm for pupils to learn collaboratively within early education is identified. It is shown that educational practice is in harmony with theories of learning promoted by developmental psychologists and also with studies of classroom interventions evaluating cooperative learning regimes. However, observations of children's spontaneous...

Evidence is summarised suggesting that electronic mail is not readily appropriated by undergraduates for informal study-related exchanges with either peers or their tutors.

In these times, a learned society needs a long period for incubation during which constitutions are written, bylaws defined, and financial security established. Thanks to the patience and enthusiasm of George Butterworth, the European Society for Developmental Psychology has now been born and its first year has proved most successful. There are now...

In commenting on Alberto Rosa's paper-'Bartlett's Psycho-anthropological Project' (1996) we examine the analytic use of intellectual histories in defining disciplinary issues and discuss Bartlett's use of cultural issues in his presentation of himself in autobiography as a psychologist; we examine continuities of interest in sociocultural issues in...

Although peer-based work is encouraged by theories in developmental psychology and although classroom interventions suggest it is effective, there are grounds for recognizing that young pupils find collaborative learning hard to sustain. Interpretations of this observation are discussed; it is suggested that these interpretations have been preoccup...

This paper considers the promise of local area networks for education. Two issues are discussed. Firstly, the distinctive forms of educational practice that networks afford. This discussion is reinforced with case study observations from a primary school and a university department. Secondly, consideration is given to the theoretical bases for inno...

Preschoolers and children within the first 3 years of formal education are compared in respect of their performance on four tasks that embody basic skills underlying mouse-based control of a graphical computer interface. The children had not used such an interface before and were compared after a small number of introductory and practice sessions....

It is argued that the effective evaluation of computer-based interventions must be grounded in a strong theory relating cognitive development to instructional practice. Cultural psychology furnishes theory of this kind. Two themes from within that tradition, both relating to instruction, are described. They each invite closer attention to the socia...

It is argued that the potential of computers in preschool settings is undermined by the cumbersome methods required for interaction with them. Computer interfaces based on direct manipulation are described and their strengths and shortcomings for use in early education are discussed. An example of an application for young children that employs this...

Abstract Many activities from the infant class curriculum may be enhanced by realising them in the interactive context of a computer environment. This raises the question of whether young children can make choices among such activities that would reflect an awareness of their difficulty and a motivation to master them. In this research, infant clas...

And being now at some pause, looking back into that I have passed through, this writing seemeth to me, si nunquam fallit imago (as far as a man can judge of his own work) not much better than that noise or sound which musicians make while they are tuning their instruments: which is nothing pleasant to hear, but yet is a cause why the music is sweet...

Observed 24 children aged 15 mo and 24 mo with their mothers in a directed play situation. Mothers were asked to take an active role by ensuring that the children played with the full range of toys available. The children's responses to the mothers' control directives were assessed in terms of 3 types of compliance: orientation, contact, and task c...

This paper presents an analysis of the control techniques adopted by the mothers of 15- and 24-month-old children during an 8-min laboratory play situation. Mothers were requested to take an active role in the interaction by ensuring that the child played with the full range of toys available. The analysis focuses on the nature of maternal controls...

This chapter assembles and evaluates recent studies concerning the organization and control of the infant's sucking reflex. Organization refers to the rhythm of the total activity rather than to the coordination of fine movements comprising a single response. The literature review is guided by the principle that sucking behavior is an activity of i...

Four experiments were concerned with the effects of brief intraoral fluid stimulation upon the nonnutritive sucking rhythm of newborn infants. When it occurred during a pause in the rhythm, such stimulation was rapidly followed by a burst of sucking. The length of the potentiated burst reflected taste properties of the stimulus. Relative to stimula...