Instructional practices in secondary science: How teachers achieve local and standards-based success

This article reports on analyses of the instructional practices of six middle- and high-school science teachers in the United States who participated in a research-practice partnership that aims to support reform science education goals at scale. All six teachers were well qualified, experienced, and locally successful—respected by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators—but they differed in their success in supporting students' three-dimensional learning. Our goal is to understand how the teachers' instructional practices contributed to their similarities in achieving local success and to differences in enabling students' learning, and to consider the implications of these findings for research-practice partnerships. Data sources included classroom videos supplemented by interviews with teachers and focus students and examples of student work. We also compared students' learning gains by teacher using pre–post assessments that elicited three-dimensional performances. Analyses of classroom videos showed how all six teachers achieved local success—they led effectively managed classrooms, covered the curriculum by teaching almost all unit activities, and assessed students' work in fair and efficient ways. There were important differences, however, in how teachers engaged students in science practices. Teachers in classrooms where students achieved lower learning gains followed a pattern of practice we describe as activity-based teaching, in which students completed investigations and hands-on activities with few opportunities for sensemaking discussions or three-dimensional science performances. Teachers whose students achieved higher learning gains combined the social stability characteristic of local classroom success with more demanding instructional practices associated with scientific sensemaking and cognitive apprenticeship. We conclude with a discussion of implications for research-practice partnerships, highlighting how partnerships need to support all teachers in achieving both local and standards-based success.     

Students' recognition of educational demands in the context of a socioscientific issues curriculum

Students' difficulties in interpreting what counts as knowledge have been addressed in past research on science education. The implementation of progressivist pedagogy in terms of more student-active classroom practice and the introduction of a variety of discourses into the science classroom deepens students' difficulties. The integration of different forms and demands of knowledge and discourses typified by Science-in-Context initiatives, such as within the socioscientific framework, exemplifies this development in science education. Here, the diffuse boundaries between school subjects and other silos of knowledge lead to considerable difficulties for students to interpret what is expected from them. Such contexts having diffuse boundaries between, for example, subject discourses and other forms of knowledge, have been describes as contexts with weak classification. The present study aims to explore students' interpretation of what knowledge or meaning they are requested to produce in contexts with weak classification, here exemplified within an SSI-task. We use Bernstein's concepts of recognition rules and classification to analyze how 15- to 16-year-old students develop their discussions in groups of 4–6 students. This study reports how students' recognition of the educational demands enabled integration of different discourses in their discussion, and that the use of both universalistic and particularistic meanings can produce new understandings. Students who had not acquired recognition rules were found to keep discourses apart, expressed either as rejection of the relevance of the task, answering questions as in a traditional school task, or just exchange of personal opinions. Furthermore, they included discourses irrelevant to the issue. An important outcome of the study was that socioscientific thinking was hampered when students kept universalistic and particularistic meanings apart. This hampering results from the inhibition of dynamic exploration during SSI discussions. The results provide new insights with relevance for teachers' guiding students toward a fruitful SSI-discourse.     

Schooled in our own minds: mind-wandering and mindfulness in the makings of the curriculum

Curriculum discourse focuses understandably, on the formal and enacted curriculum; however, studies demonstrate that much of individuals’ waking hours are spent in task-unrelated thinking and mind-wandering. No less, this pervasive phenomenon has been shown to affect us in many ways that can be linked to education. This paper examines this null-hidden inner curriculum that is enacted within students’ minds when they are not attentive to the formal/enacted curriculum. Drawing on a review of research in cognitive science, the paper develops a theory of ‘the mind as a curriculum deliberator’ and explains how the mind can be seen as ‘schooling itself’. Different states of mind such as mind-wandering, rumination and mindfulness are discussed in terms of their educational effects and a systematic framework that renders them in curricular terms is suggested. Based on this analysis, the paper aims to mobilize this inner curriculum from opaqueness and absence to a more explicit presence in curricular discourse, in an attempt to broaden our understanding of how the mind can both enhance and hinder education.     

Discursive construction of Pakistan's national identity through curriculum textbook discourses in a Pakistani school in Dubai,the United Arab Emirates

This study investigates Pakistan's secondary school children's constructions of their national identity in a Pakistani school in Dubai by drawing on data collected from students and teachers from the case school and analysing national curriculum textbooks used in the school. Informed by Foucault's concepts, the article problematises how the curriculum textbooks are employed as a technology of power for inculcating national consciousness in the students. The findings suggest that Pakistan's national curriculum textbooks deploy a specific version of Islam as a major technology, which then influences other national identity signifiers in the textbooks for shaping students' national identity. The school affords a crucial space for the complex interplay of these technologies, which construct students' ethnocentric national identities, encouraging social polarisation. This has implications for Pakistan's national social cohesion as well as the potential for subverting international peaceful coexistence and working relationships, particularly in the selected overseas study context.     

Mexican Immigrant Students' Schooling Experiences and the Construction of Disengagement in Mathematics Learning Contexts

Through an ethnographic and narrative inquiry approach, this study draws attention to the plight of 4 Mexican immigrant high school students and their pursuit of education and mathematics learning. Their elementary school stories and experiences show a deep relationship between the learning contexts in which these students largely do school (i.e., an English learner context) and the nature of students' relationships (or lack thereof) with teachers and their process of disengagement from mathematics learning and school. Doing school is used to convey a key distinction from simply attending school. Attending school assumes uniformity/neutrality in how students might experience schooling and is a passive way of describing student participation in school. Doing school implies that students make sense of and respond to their schooling experiences in different ways and accounts for how these experiences are shaped and/or influenced by other forces (e.g., structural forces, social forces) in and out of school.     

Troubling notions of risk: dissensus,dissonance, and making sense of students and learning

This article troubles constructions of ‘at-risk students.’ Utilizing Rancière's discussion of dissensus, the author first argues that what is at risk are not students but contemporary common sense notions of schooling. From this perspective, students' labeled as ‘at risk’ ways of knowing and being that interrupt ideas and ideals about the purpose and function of schooling. In order to make this argument, the author links Rancière and others' discussions of the importance of dissensus to questions of sense-making, the dangers of resonance in consensus, and the possibilities in the dissonance of dissensus. These assertions are then further complicated by the assertion that education is a necessarily risky endeavor and that all students should be placed at risk of learning. Understanding all students as at risk is significant as it simultaneously provides a space for students' complex constellations of identity to be treated with dignity in learning experiences and creates a less punitive context in which differences are less likely to be conceptualized as deficits.     

Resolution Adopted by the ad hoc Conference on Society and the Study of Science,Mathematics and Technology

This study explored and documented students' responses to opportunities for collective knowledge building and collaboration in a problem-solving process within complex environmental challenges and pressing issues with various dimensions of knowledge and skills. Middle-school students (n =?16; age 14) and high-school students (n?=?16; age 17) from two Singapore public institutions participated in an environmental science field study to experience knowledge integration and a decision-making process. Students worked on six research topics to understand the characteristics of an organic farm and plan for building an ecological village. Students collected and analysed data from the field and shared their findings. Their field work and discussions were video-recorded, and their reflective notes and final reports were collected for data coding and interpretation. The results revealed that throughout the study, students experienced the needs and development of integrated knowledge, encountered the challenges of knowledge sharing and communication during their collaboration, and learned how to cope with the difficulties. Based on research findings, this study further discusses students' learning through a collaborative problem-solving process, including the interdependence of knowledge and the development of mutual relationships such as respect and care for others' knowledge and learning.     

Genetically modified food in perspective: an inquiry‐based curriculum to help middle school students make sense of tradeoffs

To understand how students learn about science controversy, this study examines students' reasoning about tradeoffs in the context of a technology‐enhanced curriculum about genetically modified food. The curriculum was designed and refined based on the Scaffolded Knowledge Integration Framework to help students sort and integrate their initial ideas and those presented in the curriculum. Pre‐test and post‐test scores from 190 students show that students made significant (p?<?0.0001) gains in their understanding of the genetically modified food controversy. Analyses of students' final papers, in which they took and defended a position on what type of agricultural practice should be used in their geographical region, showed that students were able to provide evidence both for and against their positions, but were less explicit about how they weighed these tradeoffs. These results provide important insights into students' thinking and have implications for curricular design.     

‘If they can say it they can write it’: Inclusive pedagogies for senior secondary physical education

Pedagogical practices are fundamental to teachers' work, and in the spaces of schooling impact significantly on students' success and achievement (Evans, J. 1986. Physical Education, Sport and Schooling: Studies in the Sociology of Physical Education. London: Falmer Press.). This is especially the case for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are deeply reliant on schooling for their educational resources. This article explores the interrelationships between pedagogical practices, the physical education curriculum at the senior secondary level and learning by both students and a teacher in a school located in an area of socio-economic disadvantage. Action research investigating a pedagogical redesign of a unit of ‘Skill Acquisition’ is the specific focus. Of key interest are pedagogical practices that incorporated opportunities to learn ‘about’ Skill Acquisition ‘through’ and ‘in’ movement. These practices attempted to develop and apply scientific literacies specific to the human movement sciences, which are important for academic success in senior secondary physical education. Findings reveal high student engagement, increasing utilisation of scientific literacies and application of new learning to life-world situations. We argue that pedagogical practices that integrate learning ‘about’ ‘through’ and ‘in’ movement disrupt default modes of teaching theoretical concepts in physical education, which diminish opportunities for academic success amongst students from low-socio-economic backgrounds.     

Chinese primary school mathematics teachers working in a centralised curriculum system: a case study of two primary schools in North‐East China

Mainland China has a highly centralised curriculum development system. A study of two schools in northeast China, one in a rural area and the other in an urban area, indicates that the primary mathematics curriculum has been widely adopted by teachers at the classroom level. Feeling the intense pressure generated by the national mathematics Olympiad,1 1. The mathematics Olympiad is a type of ‘extracurricular’ activity that aims to promote students' interest and improve their ability in mathematics. Students participating in the competition are required to complete some challenging and non‐routine mathematical operations. The international mathematics Olympiad is held every year. In Mainland China, this competition is commonly organised at city, provincial and national level. Students who perform exceptionally well are exempted from the highly competitive national university entrance examinations for entry to universities View all notes teachers in the urban school tended to give more difficult mathematics problems to their students in the hope that above‐average students would perform well in the competition. In the rural school, the ability of students was more varied and generally lower. Teachers there worked very hard to push their students to meet the national requirements. The driving force behind this was the county‐wide public examination in which students' performance was taken as an indicator of teachers' competence. Teachers in both schools also have not taken effective steps to adapt the curriculum for students' individual differences. A comparison of the practices between the teachers in the two schools suggests that teachers' beliefs, their professional knowledge and skills shape their inclination and ability in curriculum adaptation and differentiation.     

Conceptualizing shadow curriculum: definition,features and the changing landscapes of learning cultures

This article presents a new conceptualization of ‘shadow curriculum’, one component of the worldwide phenomenon of shadow education, i.e. learning outside of school. Traditional conceptions of curriculum are not applicable to shadow education, and so this article begins by exploring how shadow education practices qualify as a new focus of curriculum studies. Based on existing scholarship and our own field experience in South Korea, we propose that shadow curriculum can be defined as supplementary curriculum out of schooling provided by educational business industries that are aimed for individual students’ academic success in formal education. The following discussion explores the characteristics of shadow curriculum and shows that incorporating shadow curriculum as a new area of focus in the field of curriculum studies can broaden existing understandings of student learning and the concept of curriculum. Our hope is that this discussion will open a new intellectual space for analysis of the complex phenomenon of shadow education within the field of curriculum studies.     

Placism in NCLB—How Rural Children are Left Behind

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has been proclaimed by some as a reform that will improve education for students from all backgrounds, in all locations. The main components of NCLB, however, are biased against students in small and rural schools. This bias, called “placism,” discriminates against people based on where they live. This rural incompatibility is evident in NCLB's accountability provisions, sanctions, and highly qualified teacher provisions. Problems in these areas are the result of ignoring, or distorting, the realities of rural schooling. The accountability provisions are constructed so that small schools will frequently be incorrectly labeled as failing. The sanctions, inappropriate for rural areas, fail to provide solutions to existing rural challenges. The “highly qualified” teacher provisions make it more difficult, not easier, for rural districts to attract and retain competent teachers. Unless these injustices are corrected, NCLB will serve to decrease educational quality for rural students.     

Rural Students in a Chinese Top-Tier University: Family Background,School Effects,and Academic Performance

Abstract

New preferential policies in China promise to increase the number of rural students entering top-tier universities, where there is a wider path to a higher social status. While a substantial body of literature has investigated rural students’ trajectories to university, there is a dearth of systematic empirical studies on the academic success of rural students in colleges and universities. This study seek to address this gap by examining the academic achievement of representative samples of students entering an elite university in China, including their place of origin, family background, school experience, and the characteristics that align with their academic performance. The data suggest no significant difference in academic performance obtained by urban and rural students with respect to average grade point average (over four years). It also suggests that fathers’ occupations may not be associated with the academic achievements of students from different families. However, the data suggest a relatively clear school effect on the academic performance of students at University S.¹For ethical considerations, we use pseudonyms in the article. The study enriches the discussions of the inequality issue in China’s higher education sector. It also enriches the literature in sociology of education by looking at the relative strength of the relationship between the possible causes and outcomes of schooling.     

In Plato's Shadow: Curriculum Differentiation and the Comprehensive American High School

This article examines the emergence and persistence of curriculum differentiation in the comprehensive high school. We argue that curriculum differentiation has roots in Plato's Republic, where it is proposed that education (and later work, especially the work of ruling) should be distributed on the basis of ability. The concept of ideology is used here to help explain why the practice of curriculum differentiation has remained a defining—and largely unchallenged—characteristic of the comprehensive high school. The persistence of curriculum differentiation matters because it is a means by which different groups of students are given access to different kinds of knowledge. Not all knowledge is equally valued, and access to certain kinds of this educational good has implications for young persons’ well-being that extend well beyond their formal schooling.     

Analyzing Learning About Conservation of Matter in Students While Adapting to the Needs of a School

We probed the impact of two teaching strategies, guided inquiry and argumentation, on students' conceptual understanding of the conservation of matter. Conservation of matter is a central concept in middle school science curriculum and a prerequisite upon which rests more complex constructs in chemistry. The results indicate that guided inquiry was particularly effective in improving students' conceptual understanding, as evidenced by pre/posttest results and by a skill analysis of in-depth interviews of student dyads. We also discuss how the challenges inherent to educational contexts can undermine the quality and limit the impact of empirical research carried out in many schools. We suggest how these challenges could be met in the emerging infrastructures for change called the Research Schools Network.     

School Work,Homework and Gender

This paper explores female and male students' attitudes towards school work in terms of application and achievement. The data are drawn from interviews with students, teachers, careers officers and welfare officers in three semi‐rural comprehensive schools in one local education authority (LEA) [1]. (The students were in their last year of compulsory schooling, Year 11, and were aged 16 [2].) The three schools had invited the authors to explore why boys were achieving below their potential in terms of course work and end of course grades. The findings of the study show how school, peer group and community factors influence students' attitudes towards school work and homework. However, the situation is not just one of boys' under‐performance: the pattern of girls' achievement at 16 (the school leaving age) is not always carried through post‐16 or into career destinations. The problem is one of ‘equalising opportunities’ for all young people, taking into account the different patterns of need at different stages in their school careers.     

Education for citizenship in South Australian public schools: a pilot study of senior leader and teacher perceptions

Preparing students for informed and active citizenship is a core goal of education and schooling in Australia. The ways schools educate and prepare young Australians for citizenship involves a range of processes and initiatives central to the work of schools, including school ethos, mission, extracurricular activities and community-based participation. With regard to the formal curriculum, the recent introduction and implementation of the first ever Federal Australian Curriculum includes provision for a new subject – Civics and Citizenship. Research evidence from other nations suggests that schools understand, approach and enact education for citizenship in a multitude of ways, yet how Australian schools construct this aspect of their work is currently under-researched. In this context, and drawing on data from interviews with school leaders and teachers of Years 6–8 (11–14 year olds) students in a small sample of South Australian primary and secondary schools, we explore perceptions and current approaches to education for citizenship. Our findings suggest (1) that while school leaders and teachers value education for citizenship, they do so for different reasons; (2) that schools place values as central to education for citizenship; and (3) that community involvement is typically understood as occurring within rather than beyond the school.     

Social difference and the politics of schooling in Africa: a Ghanaian case study

This paper examines the implications of ‘social difference’ for schooling in African contexts. It highlights theoretical and philosophical engagements with ‘difference’ that could help explore and search for viable educational options in Africa. The paper engages voices of university students interviewed in a longitudinal ethnographic research study on schooling done in Ghana. Issues and questions about knowledge production, identity development and representation in pluralistic schooling contexts are raised. Insights about local knowledges, individual agency and resistance as they relate to possibilities for rethinking schooling and education in Africa are also explored. The students' narratives reveal how dialogues about school and educators' practices about difference and diversity are [not] addressed with respect to the students' schooling. Lessons on the possibilities of inclusive schooling environments are offered.     

Students teach sex education: introducing alternative conceptions of sexuality

In this paper, we describe an exercise that challenges hetero-normative and sexist notions of sexuality, allowing students to envision alternative models. Research shows how active learning eases student anxiety over challenging or threatening material. After reading Jessica Fields' Risky Lessons and Waskul, Vannini, and Weisen's article entitled ‘Women and Their Clitoris’, students designed a sex education curriculum that challenges conventional methods. Beyond critiquing existing sex education models, this exercise provides a space for students to reflect on their own sex education experiences, develop their own ideas for teaching about sex and become comfortable discussing sex and sexuality with their peers. All but one of the students reported finding the activity enjoyable or interesting. More than half of students reported change in their views about sex and sex education as a result of the activity.