A review of research related to the topological primacy thesis

Piaget and Inhelder (1956) claimed that the young child's intrinsic geometry was first of all topological and then, later, projective and Euclidean. This theory has become known as the topological primacy thesis and it will be referred to as such throughout this paper. Many researchers have supported the theory, yet a few, like Martin (1976a) and Kapadia (1974), have criticised it. This paper consists of a review of work related to the topological primacy thesis and a critique of some aspects of it.     

Positivism,Structurationism and the Differentiation‐Polarisation Theory: a reconsideration of Shilling's novelty and primacy thesis

This paper critically assesses Chris Shilling's claims that structuration theory provides a new and important direction for sociology of education. That assessment is conducted with particular reference to the long‐standing research programme in the sociology of education, known as the differentiation‐polarisation theory (d‐p). The plausibility of the claim that d‐p is positivist is examined, and the extent to which d‐p meets the supposed inadequacies of sociology of education allegedly exposed by structuration theory is investigated. It is concluded that the novelty and importance of structuration theory for sociology of education and a fortiori education policy remains unproven.     

Identifying didactic knowledge: An empirical study of the educationally critical aspects of learning about information systems

This paper backgrounds and illustrates an approach to researching didactic knowledge. Underlying the approach are some of the frameworks developed from the student learning research. Based on these frameworks the experience of learning about a particular phenomenon is theorised as having educationally critical aspects. Without addressing these aspects in learning experiences, students are highly unlikely to achieve the target understanding desired by the teacher. The approach developed to research educationally critical aspects compares scholarly and student experiences of learning about a phenomenon using the analytical framework of a structure of awareness. An application of the approach is reported in the form of a phenomenographic study which researched didactic knowledge about the concept of an information system (IS). Multiple, previously unreported, educationally critical aspects of learning about the concept of an IS were identified. Some implications of this finding for the design of IS undergraduate curricula, textbooks, teaching strategies and learning tasks are proposed. Finally, the research approach is promoted as a means to investigate didactic knowledge about other phenomena.     

The Bachelor's thesis in teacher education

The theory‐oriented approach to the final thesis in higher education is still dominant at the Master as well as Bachelor level. We believe, however, that at the Bachelor level a practice‐oriented approach would be more appropriate. Our research as presented below explores the possibilities of a practice‐oriented approach to the Bachelor's thesis in teacher education. Semi‐structured interviews form the basis for a grounded theory regarding the various current final thesis models and the conditions in which these have to be realized. The conclusion is that the portfolio as final thesis proves to be a satisfactory practice‐oriented alternative to the highly criticized traditional final thesis.

L'approche privilégiée pour la réalisation du mémoire de fin d'études dans les formations supérieures du Master et du Bachelor est encore toujours une approche théorique. Pourtant nous croyons que pour le niveau Bachelor, une méthode orientée vers la pratique serait plus appropriée. Notre étude explore les possibilités d'une méthode orientée vers la pratique pour les mémoires de fin d'étude des Bachelors dans la formation initiale des professeurs. Des interviews semi‐structurées constituent la base pour l'élaboration d'une théorie sur les différents modèles des mémoires de fin d'étude et les conditions dans lesquelles ils doivent se réaliser. La conclusion est que le portfolio comme mémoire de fin d'étude s'avère une alternative orientée sur la pratique satisfaisante pour le mémoire final traditionnel beaucoup critiqué.

El método del ‘enfoque téorico’ de la tesina en la enseñanza superior del Master y del Bachelor todavía es el más utilizado. Sin embargo, pensamos que en el nivel del Bachelor, un método enfocado hacia la práctica sería más apropiado. Nuestro estudio explora las posibilidades de un método enfocado hacia la práctica en los Bachelors de formación inicial de profesores. Entrevistas semi‐estructuradas constituyen la base de una teoría sobre los diferentes modelos de tesinas las condiciones en las que deben realizarse. La conclución es que el portfolio es una alternativa práctica satisfactoria por la tesina tradicional muy criticada.

Noch immer herrscht für Abschlussarbeiten im Rahmen der höheren Bildung auf dem Master und Bachelor Niveau der Theorie‐orientierte Ansatz vor. Wir haben jedoch Grund zu der Annahme, dass für den Bachelor ein Praxis‐orientierter Ansatz passender wäre. Unsere Forschung untersucht die Möglichkeiten eines Praxis‐orientierten Ansatzes für die Bachelor‐Thesis in der Lehrerausbildung. Leitfadeninterviews bilden die Grundlage für eine begründete Theorie in Bezug auf die verschiedenen Modelle einer Abschlussarbeit und unter welchen Bedingungen diese realisiert werden müssen. Das Fazit ist, dass Portfolios als Abschlussarbeit bewiesenermaßen eine durchaus zufriedenstellende Praxis‐orientierte Alternative für die viel kritisierte traditionelle Abschlussarbeit darstellen.     

Exemplary teaching: some possibilities for renovating and stimulating didactic practice

Exemplary teaching is directed to the essences of a lesson theme and provides possibilities for successfully implementing the essential conditions for educative and formative tasks. A particular example is not chosen to serve as a first learning step but because the essence of a greater whole is reflected in it. This gives teaching a depth where originality is pursued at the expense of completeness. In practice the aim is to use a particular example to give pupils the opportunity to experience the essence of a matter or phenomenon. Exemplary teaching does not force the learner to master vast quantities of factual knowledge. As a fundamental didactic form it presents a solution to rigidity in teaching, as well as to the problem of over‐burdening the pupil.     

The thesis of stages fourteen years later

The author indicates the changes and additions he would make to his book The Quality of Education in Developing Countries (1966) if he were re-writing it in 1980. He would make clearer that his primary interest is in a continuum of change, the process of growth of a school system, and that the stages are only a convenient non-mathematical artifact to make the thesis more useful to administrators and planners.In the light of more recent developments and experiences, he now gives new stress to the pluralism of objectives at the stage of Meaning, and discusses the political, social, cultural and financial reasons why a country may choose not to take the difficult step from stage III to stage IV. Recent forms of alternative education, particularly those embodying plans for lifelong education, offer some hope of bypassing his thesis of stages. More consideration is given to constraints other than that of teacher qualification, though the difficulty of changing the skills, habits, attitudes and purposes in the teaching profession remain the chief obstacle to qualitative growth. Particular attention is paid to crash programmes where processes that are, by their very nature, successive are compressed into simultaneous or almost simultaneous ones. Some implications of the thesis of stages for teacher training are briefly dealt with. Regarding the application of the thesis to secondary education, he maintains that a better model of growth would be one based on the capacity of secondary education to respond to the changing economic and social demands of the community.Finally, he suggests three methods of testing his hypotheses and pleads that more consideration be given to building up a body of educational, theory based on the experience of developing countries over the past three decades.

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Zusammenfassung Der Autor führt aus, wie er sein Buch The Quality of Education in Developing Countries (1966) abändern bzw. ergänzen würde, wenn er es im Jahre 1980 schriebe. Er würde klarer herausstellen, daß sein Hauptinteresse kontinuierlichem Wandel sowie dem Wachstumsprozess von Schulsystemen gilt, und daß die Phasen nur als ein handliches, nicht-mathematisches Hilfsmittel anzusehen sind, um seine These für Administratoren und Planer nützlicher zu machen.Angesichts neuerer Entwicklungen und Erfahrungen betont er jetzt stärker den Pluralismus von Zielen in der Bedeutungsphase und erörtert die politischen, sozialen, kulturellen und finanziellen Gründe, aus denen ein Land es vorziehen kann, auf den schwierigen Schritt von Phase III auf Phase IV zu verzichten. Neue Formen alternativer Bildung, insbesondere des lebenslangen Lernens, erwecken einige Hoffnung auf ein mögliches Umgehen seiner Phasentheorie. Zusätzlich zur Lehrerqualifikation bestehende Hemmnisse werden eingehender behandelt; doch bleibt die Schwierigkeit, die Fähigkeiten, Gewohnheiten, Einstellungen und Zielsetzungen der Lehrer zu ändern, das Haupthindernis für qualitatives Wachstum. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit widmet er Blitz-Reformprogrammen, die verschiedene Neuerungen in einen kurzen Zeitraum zusammenpressen und damit von Natur aus aufeinanderfolgende Prozesse in gleichzeitige oder fast gleichzeitige umgestalten. Einige Auswirkungen der Phasenthese auf die Lehrerbildung werden kurz besprochen. In bezug auf die Anwendung der These auf den Sekundärbereich meint der Autor, ein besseres Modell wäre eins, das auf der Fähigkeit der Sekundärschulen beruhte, den wechselnden wirtshaftlichen und sozialen Anforderungen der Gemeinschaft zu entsprechen.Schließlich schlägt er noch drei Methoden zur Überprüfung seiner Hypothesen vor und plädiert für den Aufbau einer umfassenden Bildungstheorie auf der Basis der in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten in Entwicklungsländern gemachten Erfahrungen.

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Résumé L'auteur indique les changements et compléments qu'il apporterait à son livre The Quality of Education in Developing Countries (1966) s'il le rédigeait en 1980. Il ferait apparaître plus nettement que son interêt principal se porte sur un continuum du changement et le processus de croissance du système scolaire, et que les étapes ne sont qu'un instrument convenable et non-mathématique pour rendre sa thèse plus utile aux administrateurs et planificateurs.A la lumière de développements et d'expériences plus récents, il met à présent plus d'accent sur le pluralisme des objectifs dans l'étape dite de signification. D'autre part, il fait état des raisons politiques, sociales, culturelles et financières pour lesquelles un pays peut renoncer au difficile passage de l'étape III à l'étape IV. De nouvelles formes d'éducation, surtout celles qui empruntent quelques caractéristiques à l'éducation permanente, pourraient offrir une chance d'écarter sa thèse d'étapes. Il met plus en évidence les contraintes autres que celles des qualifications des enseignants, bien que la difficulté de changer les compétences, habitudes, attitudes et objectifs des maîtres reste l'obstacle essentiel pour la réalisation d'une croissance qualitative, et porte aussi une attention particulière aux programmes rapides de réforme qui, en comprimant les multiples changements en un temps très court, transforment des processus de nature successive en processus simultanés ou presque simultanés. Quelques implications de la thèse d'étapes pour la formation des enseignants sont brièvement signalées. Quant à l'application de cette thèse à l'éducation secondaire, l'auteur pense qu'il conviendrait mieux d'employer un modèle basé sur la capacité des écoles secondaires à répondre aux demandes économiques et sociales de la collectivité.Enfin il propose trois méthodes pour vérifier ses hypothèses et recommande l'élaboration d'une théorie pédagogique générale basée sur l'expérience des pays en développement dans les trois dernières décennies.

     

本科生毕业论文设计中的问题与对策思考

本科毕业论文是本科生四年专业学习的综合展示,也是本科生科学实践的初步尝试过程,同时也是衡量高校教学质量的重要环节。本文对本科毕业论文设计和实践中存在的一些问题和不足进行总结,并提出了一些应对措施。     

School knowledge and didactic analysis: A research perspective in comparative didactics

The article presents some aspects of an approach to disciplinary teaching phenomena that adopts the new perspective of comparative didactics. This approach consists of implementing research projects that examine teaching problems in a comparative study of various specific didactics.In the first part of the article, examination of the origins of school knowledge leads to the proposal of a new tool for analyzing the phenomena of didactic transposition in a broader perspective. In the second part, a new tool is proposed for analyzing in-class teaching phenomena for different disciplines.     

Problem definition and thesis writing

The purpose of this paper is to present some innovative solutions to major problems experienced by coursework postgraduate students. The paper focusses on two key problem areas: the definition of the research problem, and the planning and writing of the first draft of the thesis. It is argued that one approach which can assist the student to overcome these problems is the workshop; research skills can be developed through the practical guidance, group-support, discussion and reflection which occur in the workshop context. The authors' experiences in conducting postgraduate workshops at Griffith University are discussed, and student evaluation of the workshops presented.     

The roles of teacher efficacy in instructional innovation: its predictive relations to constructivist and didactic instruction

Constructivist instruction has been implemented in the current instructional innovation in Singapore. Large scale survey study was conducted to examine the roles of teacher efficacy in implementing the innovative constructivist instruction. The results showed that the positive correlation between teacher efficacy and constructivist instruction was stronger than the correlation between teacher efficacy and didactic instruction. The study suggests that policy makers and school leaders should try to improve teacher’s efficacy beliefs so that innovative instruction could be effectively implemented by school teachers.     

Test preparation in New Jersey: inquiry‐oriented and didactic responses1

As testing becomes more prevalent as a policy tool in the Anglo‐Saxon world, debates continue as to whether it supports central reforms of instruction or leads to a kind of ‘teaching to the test’ that invalidates results and undermines more challenging instruction. This paper reports on a three‐year study of mathematics testing of nine‐year‐olds in New Jersey. Using a mix of surveys and direct observations with interviews, we conclude that New Jersey's testing policies contributed to both results. Where teachers feel more pressure, they respond with short‐term test preparation and focus on more didactic instructional strategies. When they know more about state and national standards and have the opportunity to learn more, they are inclined to use more inquiry‐oriented approaches and integrate test preparation with regular instruction.     

简论中学语文中的作文教学

师范大学的学生今后主要从事教学工作,因此,师范大学中文系的同学把握学习中的作文教学就显得十分重要。结合我国大部分地区的实际,中学语文中的作文教学应注意几个方面。首先是培养学生兴趣;其次是提高学生对生活的认识、观察与感受;再次,还要引导学生审题立意;最后,还要做好文章讲评。     

Shedding the content: semantics of teaching burdened by didactic formalisms

The paper argues that what is left behind in the current era of accountability is the educational content. The authors present shedding the content as the great challenge of teaching and learning in today’s schools. They turn to the tradition of Bildung and outline the theoretical background for the content-focused approach to (research on) teaching and learning. Their approach is based on analyses of authentic (real-life) teaching and learning situations. The paper highlights how didactic case studies can be used to generalize the findings across individual cases. Within the multiple case studies, 44 didactic case studies were reanalysed to identify didactic formalisms, i.e. problems in the semantic and logical structure of educational content, which corrupt the quality of instruction. Two specific types of didactic formalism are described in detail; stolen cognition and concealed cognition. Stolen cognition prevents cognitive activation of students when the teacher over-reduces the space allowed for the students’ cognitive work with the content, concealed cognition are instances of purposeless cognitive activation of students due to their being disconnected from the content.     

Controlling the didactic relation: a case in process engineering education

A case study was conducted during 1994–2013 on several groups of process engineering students to see what was needed to transform a single course from a teacher-centred to a student-centred learning environment (SCLE). Development work was done incrementally, using Herbart's didactic triangle as a theoretical framework. The effects of the changes in learning environment were analysed using quantitative (student attendance, pass rate, attrition, grades) and qualitative data (student feedback). Guiding the didactic relation, i.e. the studying done by students, by continuous assessment was found to be very useful. Using SCLEs that emphasise student responsibility and activity in learning has been found in this case to enhance student learning considerably.     

Representation of situations involving changes sequence: A didactic interdisciplinary intervention

Our previous research, conducted in various fields, demonstrates the obvious difficulties children encounter when they must achieve, in a collective game situation, coordinated motor actions (Garnier, 1989) or solve additive problems in mathematics involving changes sequence (Bednarz Schmidt, & Dufour-Janvier, 1989b; Poirier & Bednarz. 1991a, b). These investigations show the children’s extreme centration on the states, and a global non anticipation of the situations that lead them to act punctually and sequentially. The didactic intervention that was developed in view of these difficulties, integrating sociomotor and mathematics activity, aims to develop the cognitive processes of decentration and anticipation on the basis of the resolution of these situations. In the pedagogical approach undertaken on 30 grade three children (8–9 years old), the social actions and interactions played a major part in the development of the aimed processes and in the elaboration of the representation of underlying relations to the situations involved (games and problems). A sociomotor examination (collective game) and a written examination in mathematics, carried out before and after the experiment, show, along with the qualitative analysis achieved during the intervention, the evolution of the child jaced with the aimed processes.