Teacher-perceived supportive classroom climate protects against detrimental impact of reading disability risk on peer rejection

This study examined the role of a supportive classroom climate, class size, and length of teaching experience as protective factors against children's peer rejection. A total of 376 children were assessed in kindergarten for risk for reading disabilities (RD) and rated by their teachers on socially withdrawn and disruptive behaviors. The grade 1 measures included sociometric peer assessment and teachers' self-ratings of their supportiveness in the classroom, together with information on class size and teaching experience. The results showed, first, that the studied social and learning risk factors positively predicted peer rejection in grade 1. Moreover, teacher-reported supportive classroom climate in grade 1 protected children against the detrimental impact of RD risk on peer rejection. Smaller class size, in turn, served as a protective factor against the detrimental impact of social withdrawal on peer rejection. Finally, shorter teaching experience protected against both social and learning risk factors.     

A child’s psychological adjustment impacts teachers’ instructional support and affective response

This cross-lagged longitudinal study examines the evocative impact of a child’s psychological adjustment on teachers’ affective response and instructional support for a child, and the influence this support and response has on the child’s subsequent adjustment. A hundred and seventeen Finnish teachers self-rated the instructional support they gave, and the affect they experienced while teaching 307 children from school grades 1, 2 and 3. Teachers also rated the level of prosocial and externalizing problem behaviour among children. Results showed that the more children exhibited externalizing problem behaviour in grades 1 and 2, teachers not only did provide more instructional support for them a year later but, at the same time, they reported feeling less positive affect. Low levels of positive affect were also reported by teachers a year later with regard to children who had received more instructional support from them in grades 1 and 2.     

Citing as a sourcing practice: students’ citing self-selected online sources in their essays (Las citas como práctica del uso de las fuentes: las citas de fuentes en línea seleccionados por los estudiantes en sus trabajos)

ABSTRACT

This study examined upper secondary school students’ citations of self-selected online sources in their essays. Students (n = 140) conducted online inquiry about either effects of social media on people’s quality of life (SM) or allowance of genetic manipulation of organisms (GMO). Students, working either individually or in pairs, explored online sources with the help of a graphic organizer, after which they composed their essays. To capture the quality of citations identified in the essays, they were evaluated in terms of accuracy and richness of source features. Further, regression analysis was used to examine the effect of topic, grade level and work mode on the number and quality of citations. Results showed that students seldom cited sources in their essays, and when they did, citations were mostly accurate but less often rich in source features. When writing about SM, students most frequently cited media sources, while sources with ideological, political or religious motives were frequently cited in GMO essays. Students’ grades and work modes predicted the number of citations and number of accurate citations.     

University students’ emotions in virtual learning: a review of empirical research in the 21st century

This paper presents a systematic review of university students’ emotions in connection with virtual learning based on 91 articles published between 2002 and 2017 in four international journals that focus on virtual learning and educational technology or on learning in higher education. These journals were considered potential channels for research on emotions in virtual learning and higher education. The objective was to analyse the articles for concepts and theoretical background related to virtual learning and emotions, contextual focus, methodological choice, and/or results. The review showed that the most common emotion-related concept was “satisfaction.” The most common context for the articles was a complete non-physical learning environment (e.g. Second Life). Approximately 60% of the articles used quantitative methods. The most common design for studying emotions was an explanatory design. Students’ emotions were mainly studied through concepts related to emotion (e.g. “satisfaction”). Yet only a few of the studies focused on the fluctuation of emotions in the course of events, relying instead on post hoc data that treat students’ emotions as traits rather than states.     

Mothers’ trust toward teachers in relation to teaching practices

This study examined the extent to which mothers’ trust toward the classroom teacher of their child in first grade is related to observed teaching practices in Finland and Estonia. Sixty-six teachers (32 in Finland, 34 in Estonia) were observed using the Early Childhood Classroom Observation Measure (ECCOM; Stipek & Byler, 2004). Mothers in Finland (n = 266) and in Estonia (n = 348) filled in questionnaires measuring their trust in their child's first grade teacher. The connection between mothers’ education, child gender, and classroom size in relation to mothers’ trust was also investigated. The results of multilevel modeling showed that mothers in both countries trusted more in teachers who were characterized by a higher level of child-centered teaching practices than teacher-directed teaching practices. Furthermore, Estonian mothers showed greater trust in more experienced teachers. The results emphasize the importance of teaching practices in promoting mothers’ trust in their child's teacher.     

Pressures,rewards and teacher retention: a comparative study of primary teaching in England and Finland

The article presents some findings from the York‐Jyväskylä Teacher Professionalism project. The project was a follow‐up study to earlier case‐study research in six schools in Finland and six schools in England on the impact of educational reforms on teachers' work. Data were collected by re‐interviewing a sample of teachers from the original schools six years later. The views of English and Finnish teachers concerning the ways in which changes in practice, pay and working conditions affected their perception of teaching as a profession are contrasted. The crucial factors discouraging teachers from remaining in teaching were work intensification, low pay, deteriorating pupil behaviour and a decline in public respect. Positive influences on teacher retention were commitment to children, professional freedom and supportive colleagues. Suggestions are offered as to how policy makers should act to preserve the commitment of primary teachers and to promote their retention.     

Kindergarten teachers adjust their teaching practices in accordance with children’s academic pre‐skills

This study examined the extent to which kindergarten children’s academic pre‐skills are associated with their teachers’ subsequent teaching practices. The pre‐skills in reading and math of 1268 children (655 boys, 613 girls) were measured in kindergarten in the fall. A pair of trained observers used the Classroom Assessment Scoring System instrument to observe 49 kindergarten teachers on their emotional support, classroom organisation and instructional support in kindergarten in the spring. The results of the multilevel modelling showed that low levels of academic pre‐skills in kindergarten classrooms in the fall predicted high classroom quality in the classrooms later on. The results suggest that the overall level of children’s academic pre‐skills in the classroom plays an important role in the ways in which teachers adapt their instructional practices to the needs of a particular classroom.     

Instructional support predicts children's task avoidance in kindergarten

This study examined the role of observed classroom quality in children's task-avoidant behavior and math skills in kindergarten. To investigate this, 1268 children were tested twice on their math skills during their kindergarten year. Kindergarten teachers (N = 137) filled in questionnaires measuring their professional experience and also rated the children on their task-avoidant versus task-focused behaviors. Trained observers used the CLASS instrument (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008) to observe 49 kindergarten teachers (out of 137) on their emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support. The results of multilevel modeling showed that kindergarten classrooms differed in terms of children's task-avoidant behavior and math skills. Moreover, the more instructional support was evidenced in the classroom, the less children were rated as showing task-avoidant behavior. Task-avoidant behavior then predicted children's low levels of math skills. The findings of the present study emphasize the importance of quality of instructional support for children's adaptive classroom behaviors.     

Restricted inflectional form generation in management of morphological keyword variation

Word form normalization through lemmatization or stemming is a standard procedure in information retrieval because morphological variation needs to be accounted for and several languages are morphologically non-trivial. Lemmatization is effective but often requires expensive resources. Stemming is also effective in most contexts, generally almost as good as lemmatization and typically much less expensive; besides it also has a query expansion effect. However, in both approaches the idea is to turn many inflectional word forms to a single lemma or stem both in the database index and in queries. This means extra effort in creating database indexes. In this paper we take an opposite approach: we leave the database index un-normalized and enrich the queries to cover for surface form variation of keywords. A potential penalty of the approach would be long queries and slow processing. However, we show that it only matters to cover a negligible number of possible surface forms even in morphologically complex languages to arrive at a performance that is almost as good as that delivered by stemming or lemmatization. Moreover, we show that, at least for typical test collections, it only matters to cover nouns and adjectives in queries. Furthermore, we show that our findings are particularly good for short queries that resemble normal searches of web users. Our approach is called FCG (for Frequent Case (form) Generation). It can be relatively easily implemented for Latin/Greek/Cyrillic alphabet languages by examining their (typically very skewed) nominal form statistics in a small text sample and by creating surface form generators for the 3–9 most frequent forms. We demonstrate the potential of our FCG approach for several languages of varying morphological complexity: Swedish, German, Russian, and Finnish in well-known test collections. Applications include in particular Web IR in languages poor in morphological resources.     

Dictionary-Based Cross-Language Information Retrieval: Learning Experiences from CLEF 2000–2002

In this study the basic framework and performance analysis results are presented for the three year long development process of the dictionary-based UTACLIR system. The tests expand from bilingual CLIR for three language pairs Swedish, Finnish and German to English, to six language pairs, from English to French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Finnish, and from bilingual to multilingual. In addition, transitive translation tests are reported. The development process of the UTACLIR query translation system will be regarded from the point of view of a learning process. The contribution of the individual components, the effectiveness of compound handling, proper name matching and structuring of queries are analyzed. The results and the fault analysis have been valuable in the development process. Overall the results indicate that the process is robust and can be extended to other languages. The individual effects of the different components are in general positive. However, performance also depends on the topic set and the number of compounds and proper names in the topic, and to some extent on the source and target language. The dictionaries used affect the performance significantly.