Eliciting personal constructs of research,teaching, and#shor professional development

This paper introduces a research methodology in higher education that elicits personal theories of several aspects of higher education (e.g., research, teaching, learning, and/or professional development) and that is an alternative to traditional methods of studying people's perceptions and perspectives (by questionnaire, interview, or structured group discussion). The paper outlines Kelly's repertory grid technique and the theoretical assumptions on which it is based. Some examples are given to illustrate how the research method may be applied to higher education research and development and how it may assist people in reconstructing their teaching or research practice.     

Art Teachers' Views of National Curriculum Art: A repertory grid analysis

There have been calls for a radical revision of National Curriculum Art. A number of prominent academics have argued that its inadequate theoretical base has led to unsatisfactory formalist and normative tendencies in school-based art courses. The paper describes a small-scale survey, using the repertory grid technique, of the opinions and attitudes of experienced heads of art departments in comprehensive schools. Although the results indicate some areas of dissatisfaction, there is a clear overall consensus for acceptance of the mandatory framework. Such views are clearly at odds with most published discourse about National Curriculum Art. It is suggested that the school teachers' attitude to art education is an essentially pragmatic one, which recognises many forms of accountability.     

Eliciting personal constructs and articulating goals

Summary A structured exercise that is based on PCP theory has been described and demonstrated to show how it can facilitate self-understanding and career development. The primary advantage of a PCP-based approach, when compared to approaches that use standardized inventories, is that a PCP approach encourages career explorers to use their own constructs. It is hypothesized that when people use goals that are articulated from their own constructs, they will understand their goals more fully and be more empowered to work towards those goals. A fuller understanding of their goals should allow them to find environments where these goals are more likely to be realized. Future investigations will continue to test these hypotheses.     

Race-reimaging educational psychology research: Investigating constructs through the lens of race and culture

Despite increasing racial and cultural diversity in the United States and many other industrialized countries, less than 2% of research published in top-tier educational psychology journals authentically examines the experiences of racial and cultural minorities. Through this special issue, we not only aim to increase representation of these populations in our research, but we also strive to promote greater integrity in how racial and cultural constructs are managed in the theories, methods, analyses, and interpretations of educational psychology research. In this introduction article, we define and discuss race-reimaging in educational psychology. Further, we briefly review the historical and contemporary issues in conventional psychological research that necessitate race-reimaging and underscore its appeal. Subsequently, we introduce each article in the special issue and speak to how its respective race-reimaging qualities inform as well as extend traditional educational psychology constructs. Finally, we point to special guest commentary by Paul Schutz and conclude with implications for race-reimaged research broadly.     

Studying innovation in science teaching: the use of repertory grid techniques in developing a research strategy

Summaries

English

Conventional correlation studies are of limited value in research aimed at discovering why curricula are successful or unsuccessful. Their basic weakness is that they offer little scope for revealing how and why innovations become modified in practice as a result of their interaction with contextual constraints such as teachers’ views of their own roles and purposes. Observational studies and the collection, through interviews, of participants’ accounts can to some degree remedy this deficiency. However, such methods encounter problems of subjective data interpretation and of establishing their reliability.

In a study of the implementation of an innovative science curriculum, the Schools Council Integrated Science Project (SCISP), in three English comprehensive schools, the authors experimented with the use of repertory grid techniques based on personal construct theory: This allowed interviews of teachers to be conducted in such a way that categories were revealed rather than imposed and provided data which could be subjected to conventional statistical analysis. Some factors crucially affecting curriculum innovation were identified which might not have been readily discovered by the application of either trait measurement or ethnographic methods.     

How to conduct research on the inherent moral significance of teaching: A phenomenological elaboration of the standard repertory grid application

George Kelly’s repertory grid application seems a promising method for researching the moral significance of teaching from a ‘life world’ perspective. However, we encountered several challenges employing the repertory grid in its standard form for an inquiry into the inherent moral significance of teachers’ everyday classroom interactions. In this article we will set out in detail how, on the basis of the standard repertory grid application, we developed a repertory interview method that can be used to collect data that could foster a thorough understanding of the inherent moral significance of teachers’ day-to-day classroom interactions.     

Changes in students' educational attitudes: A study of an experimental living-learning program

This study highlights the longitudinal changes in educational attitudes of students during the freshman year of college, with the prime focus on comparisons between students in a living-learning program (N=95) and students in the regular curriculum (N=89) at the University of California, Davis. The Student Orientations Survey was used in a pre-post design, and major results were (1) students who selected the experimental program held somewhat different attitudes from their peers in the regular curriculum prior to the start of the academic year and (2) compared to changes in attitudes of their peers, the experimental-program students, by the end of the academic year, had significantly decreased their desire for lectures and formalized education, expressed greater interest in self-directed independent study, desired a more significant role in educational decision-making, and viewed education more as a way of exploring various academic areas rather than solely preparing for a vocational future. Coupled with findings from student interviews, various implications of the results were discussed.     

对教育叙事研究之我见

本文提出教育叙事研究是教育研究的一种方法,应从注重实践的观念、"从下而上"的决策机制、尊重群众的观点、科学研究的自身视角4个方面,学习教育叙事研究的精神实质,推进教育改革.     

师范生人格特征与考试焦虑的相关研究

本文在问卷调查的基础上,运用方差分析和多元回归分析的方法,对师范生人格特征与考试焦虑的关系作了实证研究.研究表明师范生人格特征与考试焦虑相关;师范生人格差异是导致同一考试情景下产生不同考试焦虑的根本原因.     

当代大学生信仰危机教育对策初探

本文通过问卷调查揭示了当代大学生政治信仰呈现一元主导多样并存的特点,宗教信仰等构成对主导信仰价值观的有力冲击甚至使许多大学生出现了信仰缺失现象。在分析导致大学生信仰危机产生的教育原因基础上,本文指出创新信仰教育内容、丰富信仰教育形式和拓展教育途径等方式在完善信仰教育体系建设中的重要性。     

教育生态视野下高校学生管理工作方法研究

高校学生管理工作是高校育人工作的一部分。当前,高校学生具有他们自身的特点,他们对于社会教育的需求也发生了重大改变,传统的学生管理工作方法已经不能够适应当前高校学生管理工作的要求。因此,创新学生管理方式方法势在必行。结合当前高校学生的特点,立足于教育生态学的视野,探索高校学生管理的新途径、新方法。     

The leeway of qualitative educational research: A case study

This article presents a case study into the question of how research-internal and research-external factors influence the leeway of qualitative research, and ultimately determine which questions can and cannot be addressed in research. First an overview is presented of the position of qualiative research in the field of education in The Netherlands. This position is then analysed by situating educational research in the particular research political context. In the second part of the article the authors focus on effective schools research, one of the strongest research programmes in Dutch educational studies, in order to show the consequences of the lack of a qualitative tradition.     

Interactions of study orientation and students' appreciation of structure in their educational environment

Instructional systems differ in the amount of structure they impose on the educational environment in which learning activities take place, e.g., mastery learning implies highly structured learning, whereas problem-based learning (PBL) claims its effectiveness just because of its freedom in learning. Yet there seems to be a lot of structure in the educational system in which PBL is embedded. In this study dimensions of structure were explored in a curriculum based on PBL. Factor analysis on student judgments unfolded three forms of structure concerning different aspects of the educational environment: content, organization, and social setting.When looking for interactions between structure and student characteristics, e.g., in research on the effectiveness of PBL, it could be important to take this distinction in structure dimensions into account. In general, ATI-research suggests interaction effects for structure. The study that is presented here explored interactions between study orientation and students' appreciation of the three structure dimensions, revealing a rather consistent pattern of differences in appreciation tendencies influenced by the orientation of the student: meaning, dependence, minimalistic, or strategic.     

A comparative study of educational research in China and the United States

This article examines one major research journal from China and one from the United States. The study compares the two journals with regard to three questions: 1) Who is doing research published in the journals? 2) What are the major issues and concerns represented in the journals? 3) What research methodologies are favoured in the journals? The authors believe that understanding another country's educational research practices, through addressing these questions, can better enable domestic researchers, educators and policymakers to acknowledge the major educational concerns and issues that exist across countries. As boundaries between national borders continue to blur, this understanding can help educational researchers better interpret and present their findings with greater international relevance.     

Bereavement and personal constructs: old theories and new concepts

This paper reviews several traditional and current theories regarding the nature of bereavement and argues that conceptualizing grieving in personal construct terms can clarify and extend existing work in this area. In particular, it is contended that a personal construct view of the importance of "core role" (self) structure helps explain Bowlby's theory of "defensive exclusion" of the reality of the death: because an individual's perceived relationship with a significant other helps define his or her core role, loss of the relationship through death directly challenges the most central dimensions of the bereaved person's construct system. Implications of this cognitive theory of bereavement are detailed, and several testable hypotheses are put forward.     

中国教育传统研究与教育改革

教育史学科应受到重视,教育史工作应努力为现代教育改革提供借鉴,并应积极直接参与到教育改革之中去,而不要封闭长城民为历史陈迹后才去研究它。     

大学生安全意识状况及教育对策分析

当今社会经济快速发展,各种新事物层出不穷,导致社会中存在一些不稳定因素,出现一些安全事故,危害大学生的身心健康。因此研究如何提升大学生安全意识是当前社会所面临的一大挑战。本文分析了大学生的安全意识状况以及如何提升大学生安全教育的对策。