What Does the Skill of Observation Look Like in Young Children?

Fifty‐six children, aged between 4 and 11 years, in seven groups, were videoed playing with, being questioned about and sorting a collection of toys in order to identify what skills of observation looked like in young children, how observations influenced other scientific skills and what supported the skill of observation. Children’s skills of observation were found to be similar across all ages and included affective, functional, social and exploratory comments, actions, and questions. These initial observations led to the use of other scientific process skills: classification, prediction, hypotheses, along with explanation for younger children and interpretations for older children. There was generally a greater sophistication of observation skills with increasing age of the children. Observations in young children were found to be tactile and developed in two ways: by engaging in more unique close observation and interpreting observation by utilising previous knowledge and experiences. Important factors affecting the development of observational and other scientific skills were found to be the context (activity, environment, resources) and combination of social interactions between individuals, peers, and adults. This combination supported the development of both observational and other scientific skills, although the nature and amount of this interaction appeared individual to different groups of children and could not be predicted.     

Different Ways of Reading,or Just Making the Right Noises?

What does reading look like? Can learning to read be reduced to the acquisition of a set of isolable skills, or proficiency in reading be equated with the independence of the solitary, silent reader of prose fiction? These conceptions of reading and reading development, which figure strongly in educational policy, may appear to be simple common sense. But both ethnographic data and evidence from literary texts suggest that such paradigms offer, at most, a partial and ahistorical picture of reading. An important dimension, neglected in the dominant paradigms, is the irreducibly social quality of reading practices.     

Print Reading in General Education Kindergarten Classrooms: What Does It Look Like for Students At‐risk for Reading Difficulties?

The purpose of this study was to examine the amount of time spent actively engaged in reading sounds, words, and connected text for students at‐risk for reading difficulties in the first formal grade of reading instruction, kindergarten. Observational data of 109 kindergarten students at high‐risk for later reading difficulties were collected during general education reading instruction across the school year. Findings revealed students read orally for just over 1 minute during their reading instruction with approximately equal time spent reading sounds, words, or connected text. Implications of these results for early reading instruction and intervention for students at‐risk for reading difficulties or disabilities are presented.     

Culturalizing Science Instruction: What Is It,What Does It Look Like and Why Do We Need It?

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Reading reform in Egypt: Do the second-grade textbooks reflect the new direction?

In light of disappointing scores on the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), Arabic-speaking countries have begun to reexamine, and in some case reform, how they teach reading in the early grades. Egypt was one of the first countries to initiate early-grade reading reforms in 2010. This article presents a single case study from Egypt, examining whether the grade 2 Arabic-language textbook supports its reform goals. Data were collected through detailed content analysis of the textbook and coded using a “best practices” framework. While the textbook has strengths, it is not consistently in alignment with current research on reading in Arabic. We contend that modest textbook reform could be the easiest and fastest way to improve the teaching and learning of reading in Egypt and the region, in part because teachers depend so heavily on textbooks for lesson structure and because textbooks are generally available.     

Exploring the Value Added of a Guided,Silent Reading Intervention: Effects on Struggling Third-Grade Readers’ Achievement

ABSTRACT

The authors’ purpose was to explore the effects of a supplementary, guided, silent reading intervention with 80 struggling third-grade readers who were retained at grade level as a result of poor performance on the reading portion of a criterion referenced state assessment. The students were distributed in 11 elementary schools in a large, urban school district in the state of Florida. A matched, quasi-experimental design was constructed using propensity scores for this study. Students in the guided, silent reading intervention, Reading Plus, evidenced higher, statistically significant mean scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test criterion assessment measure of reading at posttest. The effect size, favoring the guided, silent reading intervention group was large, 1 full standard deviation, when comparing the 2 comparison groups’ mean posttest scores. As such, the results indicate a large advantage for providing struggling third-grade readers guided silent reading fluency practice in a computer-based practice environment. No significant difference was found between the treatment and control group on the Stanford Achievement Test–10 (SAT-10) posttest scores, although posttest scores for the treatment group trended higher than the control. After conducting a power analysis, it was determined that the sample size (n = 80) was too small to provide sufficient statistical power to detect a difference in third-grade students’ SAT-10 scores.     

Young working-class men do not read: or do they? Challenging the dominant discourse of reading

ABSTRACT

In the majority of the research on boys’ and young men’s relation to reading, it is argued that boys and young men read too little, read poorly and in all the wrong ways. However, few studies focus on how boys and young men read the texts they do encounter. In particular, there is a lack of research on young men of working-class background, whose relationship to reading is stressed as particularly problematic in many studies. In this article, we approach the reader histories of three young working-class men from a life story perspective, on the basis of a broad definition of text and reading, to capture how reading and texts are used in their identity construction. Our analysis shows that the young men engage in reading in different ways, from listening to audio books and reading aloud to watching films. We argue that our approach makes it possible to re-envision working-class men as readers who, among other things, use reading to construct softer masculinities, thus challenging the dominant narrative of working-class masculinity and working-class men’s relationship to reading and texts.     

Specific Reading Comprehension Disability: Major Problem,Myth, or Misnomer?

The goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension. Participants in the study were first, second, and third graders, totaling nine cohorts and over 425,000 participants in all. The pattern of results was consistent across all cohorts: Less than 1 percent of first‐ through third‐grade students who scored as poor in reading comprehension were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.     

Images of the future for education? Videoconferencing: a literature review

In the past two decades, as new capabilities for video communication have emerged, their use in educational contexts has steadily increased. Initially located in higher education, the use of videoconferencing for a broad range of learning purposes is now established in many schools. Although a considerable body of literature exists that describes the experience of videoconferencing using traditional pedagogies, much less has been published on the contextual factors that lead to effective learning outcomes and innovative uses of videoconferencing. The purpose of this review is to establish a baseline for researchers interested in the area. In focusing on educational uses in both higher education and mainstream schooling, the review examines the affordances and barriers to effective teaching and learning, with what are increasingly robust and easy‐to‐use technologies. The paper concludes with a call for further research into the more innovative possibilities of videoconferencing.     

Teaching,Learning, and the Public: Interpretations of Teachers’ Classroom Images

Interchange - This article presents findings from an interpretive study of teachers’ visualized and publicly shared depictions of teaching and learning. Drawing on images posted by teachers...     

Preservice Teachers’ Images of Scientists: Do Prior Science Experiences Make a Difference?

This article presents the results of a mixed methods study that used the Draw-a-Scientist Test as a visual tool for exploring preservice teachers’ beliefs about scientists. A questionnaire was also administered to 165 students who were enrolled in elementary (K–8) and secondary (8–12) science methods courses. Taken as a whole, the images drawn by preservice teachers reflected the stereotype of a scientist as a man with a wild hairdo who wears a lab coat and glasses while working in a laboratory setting. However, results indicated statistically significant differences in stereotypical components of representations of scientists depending on preservice teachers’ program and previous science experiences. Post degree students in secondary science methods courses created images of scientists with fewer stereotypical elements than drawings created by students in the regular elementary program.     

Disinterested,disengaged, useless: Conservative or progressive idea of the university?

There is evidence aplenty of academics' increasing incorporation into the life and fate of their university's brand, just as it is clear that university structures and incentives generally are dependent upon increasingly competitive resource capture under tightened managerial ideologies of institutional commitment (albeit by way of innumerable “consultation” and “responsibilisation” mechanisms). In that context, it becomes important to re‐think and re‐imagine the very “idea of the university”, especially now that images and imperatives around the Engaged University are a) omnipresent and b) convene a whole range of entirely disparate activities, governed by very different intellectual rationales. While hardly wishing to be “against” university involvement in the “wider world”, this article critically questions the new metaphysic of Engagement, and the discursive framings and traps that sustain it. In an age when perhaps only paradox and counter‐intuitive gesturing seem to work as prompts towards thinking otherwise, I make the case that some “traditionalist” ideas of higher education can be part of a reasserted “progressivist” social ethics.     

Do gooders or do betters? An analysis of the motivation of student tutors

Across the UK hundreds of undergraduate students are volunteering their time and skills to assist teachers in local schools. This research investigates the factors that motivate already pressured undergraduate students to give up their precious free time for community work. Specifically, it addresses the question: are they primarily seeking to better their community or themselves? This short report argues that the primary motivation for such apparently community‐focused activity among undergraduates, in the south‐east, is actually centred on a concept of self‐improvement. The volunteer student, by undertaking unpaid community work, is engaged in a conscious attempt to enhance his/her chances of success in seeking post‐education employment. The paper goes on to argue that this finding has significant implications for the administration of student tutoring schemes, as recruitment and funding are the two major obstacles to establishing and maintaining an extracurricular activity in higher education (Stadium, 1997). Therefore, when the factors known to motivate undergraduates to undertake additional responsibilities are incorporated into recruitment and fund‐raising strategies, the activities can be tailored to maximize potential.     

Instructional Leadership in Practice: What Does It Look Like,and What Influence Does It Have?

Literature on school reform has emphasized the need for principals to expand beyond their traditionally administrative role and become instructional leaders. This article examines the relationship between the practice of site-based instructional leadership and the professional development that teachers received in the context of a district-wide reform effort in San Diego City Schools. Using data from teacher surveys and school-based interviews, we find a connection between aspects of principal instructional leadership (coherent school-wide vision and leaders' engagement in instructional improvement) and selected research-based characteristics of effective teacher professional development (coherence and focus on content and curriculum). We conclude by addressing some of the tensions and limitations associated with a particular vision for site-based instructional leadership.     

Assumption of the burden: Science or criticism?

This article adjudicates the claim to science made by current researchers in speech communication. It argues the point that contemporary research is best characterized as criticism, and that the cause of research in the field would be best advanced if scholars engaged in the enterprise of discourse analysis and conversation analysis regarded themselves as critics and made themselves subject to criticism as such.     

Depersonalization or cynicism, efficacy or inefficacy: what are the dimensions of teacher burnout?

This article seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on the dimensionality of the burnout syndrome. Specifically, its aims are: (1) to investigate the role of efficacy beliefs using negatively worded inefficacy items instead of positive ones and (2) to establish whether depersonalization and cynicism can be considered two different dimensions of the teacher burnout syndrome. The results show that, compared with efficacy beliefs, inefficacy beliefs relate more strongly to the other burnout dimensions considered by the study (i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and cynicism). Moreover, using partial disaggregation method, a better fit is found for the four-factor model with separate depersonalization and cynicism dimensions than for the three-factor model in which depersonalization and cynicism are collapsed into one factor. The article concludes that future research on teacher burnout should: (1) use the inefficacy scale as the “third dimension” of burnout, rather than the efficacy scale, and (2) include the cynicism and depersonalization constructs.     

Reading the Multimodal Ologies: New Literacy Challenges or Old Wine in New Bottles?

In this article, the Ologies series of books are interrogated with a focus on whether they present new challenges for the reader or merely require previously acquired skills. The multimodal texts are unusual in that they combine non-fiction with fantasy while including tactile elements such as flaps, pull-outs and items to stroke. Ways of approaching multimodal texts are discussed with reference to the work of Kress, van Leeuwen and Moss. Finally, reference is made to Mackey’s research on multimodal platforms, applying her terms ‘playing the text’, the notion of ‘performance’ and ‘engaging in the rules of the game’. The conclusion leaves the question posed in the title open and suggests further research into actual readers will reveal more.