Roberta V. Nata (Editor)

Series: Progress in Education
BISAC: EDU000000

Progress in Education. Volume 53 explores the different factors involved in flexible study options and delivery modes in higher education from a student’s and service provider’s perspective. The authors also investigate the available literature in order to explore the fine line between offering students a variety of study options to suit their specific needs, circumstances and learning styles, versus exploiting the tertiary education system through commercialization and implementing a pure business model that considers students as clients or service users rather than knowledge seekers.

Following this, the compilation delves into the potential impact of profiling on students’ learning experiences and well-being at school. The authors contend that achieving a particular type of profiling may assist in the enhancement of academic experiences, and this theorization has important educational and psychological implications.

The performance of Spanish secondary schools whose 15-year-old students were assessed in mathematical competencies by the OECD (PISA program) in 2003 and 2012 is evaluated, and research reveals that Spanish schools decreased in efficiency over time. Persistent technical inefficiency was a larger problem than residual technical inefficiency when evaluating the educational performance of Spanish secondary schools over time. The results are worrisome because the average socio-economic status of the families increased significantly in this period.

The next study was conducted with the goal of determining how flipped teaching and learning classrooms affects university students’ perceptions of teachers’ professional development. The results show that there are significant differences in some dimensions of TPACK for two university instructors, and the research implications and limitations of this study are detailed along with suggestions.

One study aims to examine the types of conclusion of argumentative discussions between parents and children during mealtime. The findings of this study show that the most frequent types of conclusions are dialectical, i.e., one of the two parties accept or refuse the standpoint of the other party, reaching in this way the concluding stage of their argumentative discussions.

Later, a case study is detailed which examines student perceptions of a fully online community learning environment within an undergraduate course at a Canadian university. The authors use a theoretical model based on elements of engaging online learning environments, and the results indicate that successful design of flipped classroom models requires full student participation in Authentic and Alternative Assessment, Problem-Based Learning, Online Learning Communities and Critical Reflection of self and peers.

The authors analyze inverse modeling problems in the context of teacher training courses. Two different inverse modeling problems are proposed to prospective teachers, who are asked to reformulate them in order to be used in secondary school courses. These type of problems have been the core subject of several preceding papers and have been studied as they relate to engineering undergraduates.

The concluding chapter reviews literature on the philosophical concept of bullying strategies. The authors analyze the significant usage of anti-bullying strategies as prominent strategies in teaching, as informed by conceptual and theoretical frameworks of cognitive and metacognitive theories.