Patterns of word reading skill,interest and self-concept of ability

The majority of previous research on academic skills, self-concept of ability and interest has deployed the variable-oriented approach and focused on self-concept, or ability, or interest only. This study examined the patterns and dynamics of pattern change in Finnish children’s word reading skill, self-concept of ability and interest from kindergarten to Grade 2. Six groups of children were identified by using the I-states as objects analysis (ISOA) procedure: (a) low skills, negative self-concept but high interest; (b) high skills but low interest; (c) average; (d) high skills, positive self-concept and high interest; (e) low skills, negative self-concept and low interest; and (f) positive self-concept but low interest. The typically occurring transitions between groups were characterised by changes in either reading-related interest or simultaneously in self-concept and skills. Gender, risk for reading difficulties (RD), being an early reader, mother’s level of education and home literacy environment predicted group membership in kindergarten, and gender, RD risk, being an early reader, and mother’s level of education also predicted transitions between groups.     

Connecting teacher and student motivation: Student-perceived teacher need-supportive practices and student need satisfaction

According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), teacher motivation affects student motivation indirectly via teaching practices that support the satisfaction of students’ basic psychological needs, but studies have not shown evidence of this entire sequence. We tested the complete model: teacher motivation (autonomous, controlled, and amotivation) → perceived need-supportive practices (autonomy support, structure, and involvement) → student need satisfaction (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) → student motivation (autonomous, controlled, and amotivation) → student academic achievement. South Korean 5th and 6th graders (N = 697) and their 35 teachers participated in this study. A multi-level structural equation model showed evidence supporting: 1) a positive link between teacher and student autonomous motivation, and, 2) its mediation by student perceived need-supportive practices and student autonomy and competence. We discussed further conceptual and empirical consideration with the results..     

Student behaviors, teacher reinforcement, student ability, and learning

Ninety-eight children were observed for 6-min periods on each of 10 days during 50-min, small-group classes in either mathematics, science, geography, or language usage. Two student behaviors (on-task behavior and accuracy of responding to teacher-directed questions) and three types of teacher reinforcement (verbal reinforcement for on-task behavior and accurate responding and tangible reinforcers) were coded during each observation period. A post-test of achievement, directly related to the content of the lessons, was administered at the end of the 10 days of instruction. The causal effects of student behaviors, teacher reinforcement, and student ability (reading achievement and intelligence) on achievement were evaluated using path analysis. The strongest effects were from student ability measures, with accurate responding by students and teacher reinforcement of accurate responding exhibiting smaller, but significant effects. Findings are discussed to qualify the relationship between overt classroom behaviors and degree of learning and the mediating effects of student ability.     

Correlates of teacher appraisals of student behaviors

The purpose of this study was to assess whether burnout and personality were linked to the perceived severity of 24 undesirable student behaviors among experienced and trainee teachers. Results indicated that teaching experience, student gender, and type of behavior were important determinants of their perceptions. Burnout had a significant effect on the severity ratings of antisocial and oppositional/defiant behaviors, suggesting that the more stressed teachers are, the less tolerant they become of such challenging and aversive behaviors. With regard to personality, severity ratings of students' undesirable behaviors were associated with high levels of conscientiousness and neuroticism. Findings indicate that burnout and personality provide a lens through which teachers appraise the severity of students' behaviors. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 42: 79–89, 2005.     

Beginning literacy: links among teacher knowledge, teacher practice, and student learning

Although the importance of phonological awareness has been discussed widely in the research literature, the concept is not well understood by many classroom teachers. In the study described here, we worked with groups of kindergarten and first-grade teachers (the experimental group) during a 2-week summer institute and throughout the school year. We shared with them research about learning disabilities and effective instruction, stressing the importance of explicit instruction in phonological and orthographic awareness. We followed the experimental group and a control group into their classrooms for a year, assessing teachers' classroom practices and their students' (n = 779) learning. The study yielded three major findings: We can deepen teachers' own knowledge of the role of phonological and orthographic information in literacy instruction; teachers can use that knowledge to change classroom practice; and changes in teacher knowledge and classroom practice can improve student learning.     

Collaborative learning practices: teacher and student perceived obstacles to effective student collaboration

While the educational literature mentions several obstacles affecting the effectiveness of collaborative learning (CL), they have often been investigated through the perceptions of only one actor, either teachers or students. Therefore, some sources of obstacles that teachers and students encounter may not have been revealed. In this study, 19 teachers and 23 students in different disciplines at a pre-service teacher education faculty at a university in Vietnam were interviewed. In total, 47% of the teachers taught science subjects and 53% taught social subjects; 35% of the students majored in science subjects, 57% in social subjects, and 8% in primary education. With regard to study cohorts, 22% of the students were in the first and second year while 78% were in the third and fourth year of their four-year bachelor’s programme. These programmes produce qualified teachers for primary and secondary schools nationwide. Based on grounded theory analysis, four common obstacles to collaboration were identified: students’ lack of collaborative skills, free-riding, competence status, and friendship. Furthermore, the results showed three interrelated antecedents that contribute to these obstacles. Central to the antecedents is the strong focus of the teachers on the cognitive aspects of CL, which led the participating teachers to neglect the collaborative aspects of CL. These antecedents were demonstrated in the ways teachers set CL goals, provided instruction, and assessed student collaboration. This study may be useful for educators, designers, and researchers to foster the quality of student collaboration.     

The role of teacher instructional practices in student collaboration

Prior research on collaborative learning identifies student behaviors that significantly predict student achievement, such as giving explanations of one’s thinking. Less often studied is the role of teachers’ instructional practices in collaboration among students. This article investigates the extent to which teachers engage in practices that support students’ explanations of their thinking, and how these teacher practices might be related to the nature of explanations that students give when asked by the teacher to collaborate with each other. The teachers observed here, all of whom received specific instruction in eliciting the details of student thinking, varied significantly in the extent to which they asked students to elaborate on their suggestions. This variation corresponded to variation across classrooms in the nature and extent of student explanations during collaborative conversations and to differences in student achievement.     

The Impact of teacher behavior,teacher sex,and student sex upon student self-disclosure

The effects of systematically varied teacher verbal and nonverbal evaluative behavior upon student willingness to self-disclose were studied within an experimental microlesson. Subjects were 126 sixth-grade students who were removed from their classrooms to participate in a vocabulary lesson with one of the four experimental teachers (two male and two female). Within each experimental condition, the teacher employed one of four evaluative styles: (1) verbally and nonverbally positive, (2) verbally positive and nonverbally negative, (3) verbally negative and nonverbally positive, or (4) verbally and nonverbally negative. The data analysis indicated that teachers' verbal behavior influenced self-disclosure. The magnitude of student self-disclosure scores was a direct function of the positiveness of teacher verbal behavior. Nonverbal behavior also influenced self-disclosure, interacting with student sex. This effect varied across individual teachers, however, and no consistent pattern was evident.     

The relation of beginning readers' reported word identification strategies to reading achievement,reading-related skills,and academic self-perceptions

Beginning readers' reported word identificationstrategies for identifying unfamiliar words intext were examined in relation to readingachievement, reading-related skills, andacademic self-perceptions. Children who wereparticipating in a three-year longitudinalstudy of reading acquisition in a wholelanguage instructional context were placed intwo groups according to their reported wordidentification strategies obtained towards theend of their first year of schooling. Resultsindicated that children who reported usingword-based strategies showed superior readingand reading-related performance, and reportedmore positive self-efficacy beliefs in readingand more positive academic self-concepts thanchildren who reported using text-basedstrategies. The results are discussed in termsof predictions stemming from the differenttheoretical assumptions about readingacquisition that underlie the code-emphasis andwhole language approaches to beginning readinginstruction.     

The relationship among students' reading performance,their classroom behavior,and teacher skills

The relationship among students' reading performance, their behavior (task-focused behavior, emotional stability, and compliant behavior) in the classroom, and the teacher's skills was investigated in 66 third-grade classrooms. Results from this study showed the students' reading performance and their behavior in the classroom are all significantly interrelated. Better reading performance at the beginning of the school year goes with better behavior at the end of the school year. In turn, better behavior at the beginning of the school year goes with better reading performance at the end of the school year. The teacher can improve the behavior of the students by providing high-quality reading instruction. Some teacher skills have differential effects, however, on the various behavioral aspects. The implications for the educational practice as well as for future research are discussed.     

Observational,student, and teacher perspectives on interpersonal teacher behavior: Shared and unique associations with teacher and student emotions

Teachers’ interpersonal behavior in class is important for teacher and student emotions. Often the same rater (either teacher or students) is used to assess both perceptions of teacher behavior and emotions, which makes it vulnerable to common-method bias. Including other perspectives on teacher behavior has been proposed as a solution, but it is unclear to what extent different perspectives are correlated and how to separate their shared and unique variance in explaining emotions. Behavior of 80 teachers was rated from three perspectives (observers, students, and teachers) in terms of Agency (i.e., social influence) and Communion (i.e., friendliness). The three perspectives overlapped more strongly for teacher agency than for communion. Especially for students, teacher communion was a stronger predictor of emotions than agency. Our innovative statistical approach showed that the strong association between ratings of teacher behavior and emotions of the same rater are unlikely to result from common-method bias only.     

Relations among reading skills and sub-skills and text-level reading proficiency in developing readers

Despite the recent attention to text reading fluency, few studies have studied the construct of oral reading rate and accuracy in connected text in a model that simultaneously examines many of the important variables in a multi-leveled fashion with young readers. Using Structural Equation Modeling, this study examined the measurement and structural relations of the rate and accuracy of variables important in early reading: phonemic blending, letter sounds, phonograms, decoding, single-word reading, reading comprehension, and text reading as well as reading comprehension among second grade readers. The effects from phonemic blending fluency and letter sound fluency to decoding were completely mediated by phonogram fluency, decoding fluency, single-word reading fluency, and reading comprehension had direct effects on the text reading fluency of the second grade students. Understanding the relationship among the many component skills of readers early in their reading development is important because a deficiency in any of the component skills has the potential to affect the development of other skills and, ultimately, the development of the child as a proficient reader.     

Characterizing teacher attention to student thinking: A role for epistemological messages

Although research and policy suggest science and mathematics teachers should attend to their student's thinking during instruction, our field has inadequately defined what that means in relation to our ultimate goals for the practice. Here I present a theoretical argument that, in making their definitions, researchers should leverage the ways students understand such attention by characterizing teacher attention based on the epistemological messages it sends students about the nature of knowledge and learning in the classroom. Using data collected from high school science and mathematics teachers with a new video‐capture methodology, I present an analysis of variability in epistemological messages of teacher attention to illustrate work could unfold if we as researchers took up the theoretical claims made in this work. In doing so, I endeavor to draw the construct of epistemological messages into our collective conversations about teacher attention, and provide a starting point for our field to begin debating the most productive ways to study and unpack the epistemological messages we value in that teacher attention. I conclude by demonstrating the feasibility of using these messages to distinguish the types of teacher attention our field wants to develop and encourage in teacher education. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 55: 94–120, 2018     

Visual search and reading comprehension in Chinese children: the mediation of word detection skill

Reading and Writing - The present study explored the mediating effect of word detection on the relationship between visual-spatial attention and reading comprehension in Chinese. The participants...     

Perceptions and practices of multicultural education among Ethiopian secondary teacher education program officials,teacher educators and prospective teachers

This study explores the perceptions and practices of multicultural education among Ethiopian secondary teacher education program officials, teacher educators and prospective teachers. To that end, data were collected from secondary teacher education program officials, teacher educators and student teachers using questionnaire and interview. The data were analyzed by employing mixed methodologies. The study revealed that while Ethiopian secondary teacher education program officials and teacher educators have awareness about multicultural education, the prospective teachers’ awareness was found to be very low. Furthermore, there are inadequate practices of multicultural education in the secondary teacher education institutions. Suggestions which may enhance the implementation of multicultural education in the secondary teacher education program of the country and beyond are discussed in the article.