Piloting and Evaluating a DTES Community Steward Program

Community stewardship is an emerging paradigm in income generation activities for marginalized populations. Drawing on residents with lived experience, stewardship creates employment through utilizing local-residents as custodians in parks, plazas and other public spaces. In order to fully develop these opportunities a common curriculum needs to be developed. This training program will allow Downtown Eastside […]

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Evaluating the Impact of Robotics Education on Young Children’s Cognitive Development and Self-efficacy

Our project will be the first research in Canada that draws the techniques and resources from four disciplines – education, psychology, psychometrics and computer science – to investigate the effects of robotics education (RE) on child cognitive development, self-efficacy and enjoyment. Hence, our research findings will help Robokids School to understand the long-term effects of […]

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Instrumentation for Gauging Computational Thinking in Elementary Grades

Computational thinking is a recent and very popular addition to elementary school curricula. Computational thinking projects students undertake include five basic parts: identifying key features of a problem (decomposing), creating a model of relationships among factors (modeling) in a causal system or data, designing steps (algorithm) to solve the problem or analyze data, trying out […]

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Measuring what matters in education

This research project aims to provide a robust account of school performance across Canada by collecting and measuring data on six critical indicators. These indicators are academic achievement, physical and mental health, social-emotional development, creativity and innovation, citizenship and democracy, and school climate. To address this inquiry, survey data will be collected and integrated with […]

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Narratives of Canadian Teacher Candidates’ Cross-cultural Experience in China

This study will explore narrative perspectives from Canadian teacher candidates’ cross-cultural experience in Chongqing, China from March 2015 to June 2015, and will be built on participant experiences during the Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Program between University of Windsor and Southwest University China. Inquiries into the Canadian students’ learning trip in China will discover how […]

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Teachers’ reciprocal learning in transnational professional communities between Ontario and Shanghai secondary schools

The proposed research project investigates two transnational teacher communities between Ontario and Shanghai secondary schools. Teachers’ cross-cultural professional learning is the focus of the study. To understand how, why, and what teachers learn from each other, the project needs to collect data from both countries. While in China, data collection will be completed in two […]

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Language immersion in ESL and EFL classes

The purpose of the study is to explore the similarities and differences between both Canadian and Chinese education systems in terms of language and culture. This particular study will focus on the impact that language immersion has on the learning of the English language. The impact of immersion will be explored via English as a […]

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Teachers’ reciprocal learning in transnational professional communities between Ontario and Shanghai secondary schools

The proposed research project investigates two transnational teacher communities between Ontario and Shanghai secondary schools. Teachers’ cross-cultural professional learning is the focus of the study. To understand how, why, and what teachers learn from each other, the project needs to collect data from both countries. While in China, data collection will be completed in two […]

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Understanding of key cognitive components of aviation training in the context of an e-learning environment

Complex learning environments that are mediated by technology require distinct concurrent methodologies that reveal when and where learning may occur (Azevedo et al., in press; Lajoie, Gauthier, & Lu, 2009). In this research, we use methods that are rooted in the learning sciences in order to identify, assess, and validate the instructional and learning components […]

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Using Engaged Philosophical Inquiry in Drug Education

Research has shown that “no use” drug education programs, with the objective of scaring or shaming youth into abstinence, have not been effective in addressing problematic substance use. The ineffectiveness of such scare tactic approaches has led program developers to focus on prevention and harm reduction associated with drug use, or in general, health literacy […]

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Transforming Learning Analytics Into Teaching and Learning: A Collaboration BetweenBitmaker Labs and Wilfrid Laurier University

Data-driven decision-making plays an increasingly important role in education (Mandinach & Gummer, 2013) and administrators now require educators to use data to inform practice (Earl & Seashore Louis, 2013). Furthermore, “harnessing big data and predictive analytics has transformed many industries, yet to date, the analytics to supportnext generation learning has been missing from education” (Baker, […]

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