Abstracts - Earli

Evaluation at the service of the educational systemAnat Raviv, Ministry of Education, IsraelThe study focuses on the Israeli education system that has to cop with pupils of significant social,cultural and socioeconomic variance that are new immigrants coming to Israel from all over theworld. This challenge produces a collaborative model of cooperation including all partners in theelementary schools system. The aim was to engage all the education system to cop with the targetof increasing pupil’s knowledge and well being in order to help them to integrate moresuccessfully in the Israeli society. The program was associated with an assessment and evaluationprogram. The intervention programs at the different levels lead to a significant improvement in thepupils’ achievements and in their integration into the education system, as a basis for theirsuccessful integration in society. The model can be used in other countries to respond to the needsof many immigrant pupils, who find it difficult to integrate into school and society at large.Child care students: procedural conceptions of learning in a vocational contextGillian Boulton-Lewis, Queensland University of Technology, AustraliaJoanne Brownlee, Queensland University of Technology, AustraliaDonna Berthelsen, Queensland University of Technology, AustraliaThis paper presents an analysis of the transcripts of interviews with 77 first and second year childcare students for conceptions of learning. All six categories of conceptions as identified originallyby Marton, Dall’Alba and Beaty (1993) were found, but in a procedural mode, and about 50% ofthese were at level A (increasing knowledge, getting information). This category was richer andmore differentiated than has been found previously and had a very practical, applied focus. Theparticipants did not generally situate learning in a formal context based on reading theoreticalmaterial but rather on learning by observing and doing. The results are compared with similarresponses for informal and workplace learning. The students’ conceptions could present challengesfor lecturers who expect that they will underpin skills with theoretical knowledge and this hasimplications for students’ practice. It raises the question of how to move students’ conceptions to ahigher more theoretical level.The role of conceptual knowledge on word problem solving. An instructional design for low-abilitychildrenJose Orrantia, University of Salamanca, SpainSantiago Vicente, University of Salamanca, SpainDifferent hypotheses have been advanced to explain why children succeed or fail in addition andsubtraction word problem solving. Prominent among these is the hypothesis that conceptualknowledge is an important foundation for successful problem solving. The present study has beendesigned to analyse this hypothesis. When we talk about conceptual knowledge, we mean anunderstanding of the semantic relations (schemata) described by the problem text, this is,knowledge about increases, decreases, combinations, and comparisons involving sets of objects. Inturn, to be able to operate with these semantic relations depends on acquisition of knowledgeconcerning part-whole relations. To analyse this hypothesis, we developed an instructionalprogram in order to improve word problem solving ability of low-ability children. The essentialcomponents of this program are: textual processing (construction of the text base in terms ofreading comprehension), schema identification (with the help of schemata diagrams), andrepresentation in terms of a part-whole structure. Our goal was to analyze how different aidsrelated to these components were incorporated by children. For this, the instructors worked– 681 –