The role of educational context in beliefs about knowledge,information, and truth: an exploratory study

Beliefs about knowledge have been found to relate to a variety of student outcomes and to vary across educational domains and instructional contexts. However, there are limited data on students’ beliefs about information and truth, vis-à-vis knowledge (i.e., epistemic beliefs) and how these beliefs differ across instructional settings. Undergraduates from two educational contexts, in the USA (n?=?240) and the Netherlands (n?=?72), participated in this study. While students in the USA were enrolled primarily in lecture and discussion classes, students in the Netherlands followed a problem-based learning curriculum. Beliefs about knowledge, information, and truth and their interrelations were examined across these two contexts through graphical and written justification tasks. Results from this exploratory study indicate that Dutch students were more likely than American students to depict knowledge, information, and truth as subjective and to define knowledge and information as synonymous. Commonalities and differences associated with educational backgrounds are considered in relation to instructional implications.     

Teacher Beliefs about Adolescent Development: Cultural and organizational impacts on Japanese and US middle school teachers' beliefs

Teacher beliefs can greatly influence the school experiences of young adolescents. In this study, the authors analyze a bi-national survey about teacher beliefs surrounding puberty, adolescence and academic items. The authors find significant differences between Japanese and US teachers of young adolescents with regard to the onset and duration of puberty, adolescence and rebellious attitudes. Items concerning teachers' impact on students reflect a pattern that shows both cultural differences and cross-national trends. The authors discuss the survey results in light of previous qualitative studies of Japanese education, and suggest directions for future research.     

Telling the truth about stories

This paper opens with two stories—about the “joking relationship” discovered by anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown Structure and function in primitive society. New York: The Free Press (1965), and an incident in the life of Rousseau—which illustrate that sometimes a story needs to be true, and that the opinion of an outsider can be preferable to that of the insider whose story it is. Recent papers by Carter and Polkinghorne Educational Researcher, 22(1), 5–12 (1993) and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 5–23 (1995) are analysed; it is argued that a clear and enticing plot is no indicator of a story's truth, furthermore the need to be true can hold both of “analysis of narratives” and “narrative analysis”.     

美国大学人看终身教职后评估

在美国大学校园,对终身教职后评估众说纷纭。多数教师认为,在评估中只得到很少甚至完全没有得到有效的业绩反馈,评估对教师的业绩没有影响。这些研究结果可用来反思并改进我国高校的教师考核工作。     

民办高校经营理念研究

本文全面阐述了民办高校经营理念问题。具体论述了民办高校办学必须树立教育供求理念;民办高校办学必须树立教育"产品"的生产与营销理念;民办高校办学必须树立成本——质量效益理念。同时提出了民办高校同"双重调节"机制相适应的"双适应"应变之策,民办高校进行教育生产与产品营销的市场化运作机制,民办高校通过优化人、财、物、技术等教育资源配置及绩效管理等措施来降低教育成本,提高教学质量与办学效益、按市场机制经营学校与依法规范办学行为必须相统一。     

Formalist thinking and language arts instruction: teachers’ and students’ beliefs about truth and caring in the teaching conversation

Two studies illustrate the concern that the connection between teachers’ beliefs and their instructional practices can be a troublesome one if beliefs are informed by formalist thinking related to truth and caring in the teaching conversation. Twenty-seven middle school language arts teachers and 216 8th grade students were asked what they thought would constitute appropriate responses to a middle school student’s request for feedback about his poem. In spite of their training and experience, the instructional strategies of the teachers were guided by formalist beliefs about what they believed to be sound pedagogy. As a consequence, they minimized the importance of what the student actually said in his poem. Honest criticism and instruction were minimized. Teachers interpreted caring as helping the child to feel good about his work and about himself independent of the work’s merits. In contrast, students called out for honesty and for academic instruction and interpreted caring as receiving academic help. Few expressed formalist principles, and most argued that their teachers need not surrender truth, criticism, or instruction to express care and concern. They also revealed that they could, and would, see through their teachers’ efforts at impression management. Findings are interpreted within a framework provided by S. Cavell (1969)’s criteria for reciprocal conversation.     

Uncovering Beliefs about Deceptive Communication

This study consists of four phases of a research program exploring beliefs that have some bearing on the choices people make when considering deception. The authors argue that understanding why people engage in deception is partially dependent on their deception-related beliefs. The initial stage of this research was inductively driven in order to identify themes of deception that could be verified in subsequent phases of this program. The validation of these factors of deception was attempted through multiple waves of self-report surveys. The five influences tested in phases three and four were acceptance of deception, ethics, motives, intentionality, and upbringing. A series of factor analyses revealed that factors labeled “intentionality,” “deception is wrong,” “acceptance of deception,” and “upbringing” emerged as constructs of deceptive communication. The knowledge gained from this study suggests implications for initiating further work that could shed light on beliefs that most significantly underlying deceptive communication.     

Children's Beliefs about Long-Term Retention

In 2 experiments, we examined pre-school, grade 1, and grade 3 children's metamemory about long-term retention. Specifically, we examined beliefs about the type of information most likely to be forgotten and beliefs about the impact of suggestions and retroactive interference on memory. Children made and explained paired-comparison judgments concerning the differential forgetting of peripheral versus central information, whether misinformation effects would arise from suggestions by others, and whether retroactive interference would arise from experiencing two similar events. The major findings were that ( a ) most children believed that events central to a story would be retained better than peripheral details; ( b ) in preschool and first grade, children believed that memory was invulnerable to suggestion (from a parent or a sibling), but in third grade, children believed suggestion could adversely affect memory; ( c ) most preschoolers believed that retroactive interference effects would not occur, whereas most first and third graders acknowledged that they would; ( d ) older children believed that both suggestibility and interference were less likely given a retention interval of several months compared to 1 day; and ( e ) in explaining their beliefs, children assigned sensory-behavioral factors a major causal role in determining what would be remembered over the long term. These results are discussed in terms of the development of beliefs about memory and the mind in general.     

Children's beliefs about everyday reasoning

Two studies investigated children's metacognition about everyday reasoning, assessing how they distinguish reasoning from nonreasoning and "good" reasoning from "bad." In Study 1, 80 1st graders (6-7 years), 3rd graders (8-9 years), 5th graders (10-11 years), and adults (18+ years) evaluated scenarios where people (a) used reasoning, (b) solved problems with nonreasoning approaches, or (c) reacted appropriately but automatically to events. All age groups distinguished reasoning from type (b) nonreasoning cases, but age-related improvement occurred for type (c) cases. Study 2 tested 160 1st, 3rd, 5th graders' and adults' evaluation of good and bad reasoning processes, finding 2 developmental changes: initial improvement in discriminating thinking processes by 3rd grade, and emergence of an adult-like, process-focused (vs. outcome-focused) concept of thinking quality by 5th grade.     

Assessing teachers’ multicultural and egalitarian beliefs: The Teacher Cultural Beliefs Scale

The article describes the newly developed Teacher Cultural Beliefs Scale (TCBS). The TCBS assesses multicultural and egalitarian beliefs about diversity, both of which reflect favorable attitudes toward immigrant students, but differ with regard to how cultural diversity is believed to be best accommodated in schools. Results from a first study with 433 beginning teachers supported the two-factor structure and the measurement invariance of the scale. Results from a second study with 340 teacher candidates and educational science students showed that proponents of multiculturalism and egalitarianism shared a motivation to control prejudiced reactions, but that they differed in their views on acculturation, prejudices, and authoritarianism.     

Cultural Beliefs about Autism in Indonesia

Cultural beliefs about parenting have an important influence on parenting behaviours, including considerations about appropriate ways to parent children with autism. Although Indonesia has one of the largest and most ethnically diverse populations in the world, little is known about cultural beliefs regarding children with autism within Indonesian cultures. The goal of the present study was to investigate how Indonesian mothers from a range of backgrounds and without a child with autism understood autism and the most appropriate ways to parent such a child. The study was a qualitative investigation using semi-structured interviews with nine Indonesian mothers. Five aspects were investigated: understanding about autism, beliefs about causes of autism, possible reactions to having a child with autism, perceptions of parenting a child with autism, and perceptions of parent-child relationships. The interviews revealed five related themes about autism, including traditional cultural beliefs about appropriate behaviour during pregnancy, karma, and God’s plan, that are not usually reported in the literature from western countries.     

Teacher and technologist beliefs about educational technology

This study investigated perceptions of teachers and educational technologists about the following areas: instructional design, cooperative learning, learner control, school reform, computers and media, and implementation of a key practice in each area in their teaching. Subjects were 477 individuals representing four respondent groups: educational technology faculty, educational technology graduate students, K-8 teachers, and 9–12 teachers. Data were collected using a 30-item, five-choice Likert-type questionnaire containing five items per topic area. Significant differences between groups were found on 16 items, with an overall total of 32 significant between-group differences. Nineteen of the 32 differences were between K-8 teachers and either the educational technology faculty or the graduate students. K-8 teachers had significantly more positive perceptions than one or both of the educational technology groups on all five of the cooperative learning items and on three of the five learner control items. The results suggest approaches that educational technologists can use in teaching instructional design courses and in designing instructional programs for the schools. Deborah L. Lowther is Program Evaluator for the Phoenix Urban Systemic Initiative which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Maricopa Community Colleges. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of the following people to this study: Gayle Davidson, Thomas Duffy, Nick Eastmond, Donald Ely, Michael Hannafin, Simon Hooper, James Klein, Kyle Peck, Robert Reiser, Lloyd Rieber, and Steven Ross.     

Teachers' beliefs about pedagogy and related issues

This study explores teachers' beliefs about pedagogical issues as well as related educational and professional issues. Six hundred K–12 teachers in three Midwestern states received surveys and 60% returned them. Results of the survey indicated that teachers were relatively unified in their beliefs, and few differences emerged around demographic variables. More teachers believed in teaching practices consistent with constructivism than believed in explicit instruction; however the majority of teachers were mixed, undecided, or balanced about pedagogy. Teachers reserved their strongest beliefs for the importance of learning style, eclectic instruction, and small class size in the primary grades. Few teachers believed that a great teacher is characterized by high student achievement outcomes, and over half believed that factors such as home environment or dyslexia prevent children from learning basic skills despite the school's best efforts. Teachers valued experience over education and training for professional development and viewed teaching as more of an art than a science. Results are discussed in relationship to current challenges in education. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 44: 873–886, 2007.     

Beliefs of experienced and novice teachers about achievement

The aim of this study was to examine the beliefs that experienced and novice teachers hold about school achievement. It is important to investigate these beliefs and attributions because of the significant role that teachers play in the lives of most children. A group of Greek Cypriot elementary school teachers (n = 154) and a comparable group of teacher education students (n = 159) completed the Beliefs About School Achievement (BASA) scale. It was found that, in comparison to student teachers, experienced teachers tend to attribute achievement more to factors that are biologically determined, uncontrollable by the child, and stable over time – such as intellectual ability. They also believe significantly more than student teachers that factors such as gender and family background play an important role in child achievement. In contrast, novice teachers believe more in the role that teachers play in student learning and in the importance of student effort.     

A Case Study of Teacher Beliefs on Students' Beliefs about Multiple Representations

The mathematics education community, in its call for reform, underscores the importance of mathematics instruction emphasizing the use of multiple representations in the presentation of concepts. The focus of the study was how teacher beliefs affect their ability to implement a multiple representations curriculum. The novice instructor's attitude remained neutral while the experienced instructor's attitude remained somewhat positive. Of the eight students in the study, six of them showed a more positive attitude towards technology use and multiple representations by the end of the semester. The students increased their calculator use in both classes, particularly in the experienced teacher's class. Implications for further research were that teacher training is essential if reform curricula are to be properly implemented.