L’éCOLE PUBLIQUE AU SéNéGAL : APPROCHE PSYCHOSOCIALE DES PRATIQUES PARENTALES DE (NON) SCOLARISATION ET DES EXPéRIENCES éDUCATIVES DES ENFANTS

PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN SENEGAL: ANALYSING THE REASONS FOR (NON) ENROLMENT – This study focuses on Senegal, where the education system is split between traditional Koranic schools and purportedly “modern” public schools, which have been compulsory since 1990 but which are currently attended by only two-thirds of children eligible to enrol. The article argues that a number of psychosocial factors need to be studied in order to understand this issue fully. By analysing responses gathered from 20 parent-child units, the authors reveal: (a) how parental identity strategies affect how they choose to school their children, and (b) how children’s attitudes are shaped in different ways depending on whether they attend “traditional” or “modern” schools.     

Ready...Fire...Aim! Toward meaningful technology standards for educators and students

Conclusion I applaud ISTE, AASL, AECT, and the other organizations involved for tackling the “messy work” of developing standards for the use of technology and information resources in schools. And, at the same time, I call for a “second generation” of standards that define realistic expectations for teachers based on the subjects and levels they are called upon to teach. I propose that professional organizations from each subject work with ISTE and AECT to complete this huge task, and I propose that we consider as a “next step” the creation of a set of on-line learning experiences through which teachers can gain the identified skills and knowledge by using the very technologies we’re hoping they’ll embrace in their own teaching. There’s an old saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.” As far as educational technologies are concerned, this is also true. For many, the goal seems to have been simply to “get more computers into the schools,” without much thought about purpose. To return to Phil Schlechty’s metaphor, It’s generally been a brief and misguided “Ready” stage (occupied with questions like “How many do we need?” “What type?” “Where?” and “How shall we connect them?”), followed by “Fire!” (the acquisition and installation of equipment). What we need is: “Ready” (the creation of appropriate teams of people who will combine their insights to plan for the district)... “Aim” (a series of discussions about what technologies can accomplish for schools and the students they serve)... “Fire” (acquisition, installation, and professional development according to plan)... “Aim” (an assessment of how well the technologies and related programs met the intended goals, and a new planning effort designed to close the gap)... “Fire” (acquisition and implementation designed to eliminate the gap)... “Aim” (another gap assessment)... “Fire” (another attempt to close gaps)..., And so on.     

Children's choice of drawings to communicate their ideas about technology

This study examines children's choice of drawing to communicate their understanding of the concept “technology”. The study explored whether the children's drawings accurately reflected the depth and range of their understanding of technology in a way that was interpretable by others. Data were collected from 314 primary school children in England and 745 children in Western Australia. Children were invited to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding about technology by responding to a writing/drawing activity and a representative subsample were then interviewed about their responses. About two-thirds of children's responses to the activity included drawings. Children held a wide range of ideas about technology and only rarely was a drawing difficult to interpret. Although overall the drawings reflected the range of children's ideas, sometimes they did not reveal the depth or breadth of an individual child's understanding. Consistent with the ideas represented in the drawings, the interviews found that younger children held simpler ideas about technology, while older children held more complex, and sometimes quite abstract concepts of technology. A notable difference between the two countries was the emphasis on “design and make” and a smaller proportion of no response in the English sample, reflecting the greater length of time technology education has been implemented in England compared to Western Australia.     

Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Voices Describe How Their Teacher Motivated Them to do Mathematics

In this study, data in the form of (preservice teacher) student voices taken from mathematical autobiographies, written at the beginning of the semester, and end-of-semester reflections, were analyzed in order to examine why preservice elementary school teachers were highly motivated in a social constructivist mathematics course in which the teacher emphasized mastery goals. The findings suggest that students entered the course with a wide variety of feelings about mathematics and their own mathematical ability. At the end of the semester, students wrote about aspects of the course that “led to their growth as a mathematical thinker and as a mathematics teacher…” Student responses were coded within themes that emerged from the data: Struggle; Construction of meaning [mathematical language; mathematical understanding]; Grouping [working in groups]; Change [self-efficacy; math self-concept]; and the Teacher’s Role. These themes are described using student voices and within a motivation goal theory framework. The role of struggle, in relation to motivation, is discussed.     

The (Embodied) Performance of Physics Concepts in Lectures

Lectures are often thought of in terms of information transfer: students (do not) “get” or “construct meaning of” what physics professors (lecturers) say and the notes they put on the chalkboard (overhead). But this information transfer view does not explain, for example, why students have a clear sense of understanding while they sit in a lecture and their subsequent experiences of failure to understand their own lecture notes or textbooks while preparing for an exam. Based on a decade of studies on the embodied nature of science lectures, the purpose of this article is to articulate and exemplify a different way of understanding physics lectures. We exhibit how there is more to lectures than the talk plus notes. This informational “more” may explain (part of) the gap between students’ participative understanding that exists in the situation where they sit in the lecture on the one hand and the one where they study for an exam from their lecture notes on the other. Our results suggest that in lectures, concepts are heterogeneous performances in which meaning is synonymous with the synergistic and irreducible transactions of many different communicative modes, including gestures, body movements, body positions, prosody, and so forth.     

Primary Teachers’ Literacy and Attitudes on Education for Sustainable Development

This paper reports on research concerning Greek in-service Primary teachers’ perceptions about environmental issues and attitudes towards Education for Sustainable Development. A questionnaire with multiple-choice and open-ended questions was used in order to gain more comprehensive understanding of their thoughts. The analysis of data revealed that teachers hold misunderstandings or misconceptions of the conceptual meaning of the terms “sustainability” and “renewable source of energy”. Furthermore, the implementation rate of environmental programs in schools is relatively low considering teachers’ interest in the issues. This is due to lack of familiarity with new methodological approaches which promote environmental matters. By taking into account these research findings, possible implications arising from supporting teachers to implement environmental programs in schools are discussed and suggestions for overcoming the outlined difficulties are made.     

Students' application of a biological concept: Factors affecting consistency

This study investigated factors affecting students' ability to apply consistently the concept of adaptations (i.e., characteristics which suit an organism to its environment). Individual interviews were carried out with 74 Year 10 students, of whom only 47% showed an understanding of the concept. These students were asked to indicate on a list of living and non-living items which ones whould have adaptations. It was found that they were more likely to apply the concept to vertebrates than to other types of living things. In addition, many students appeared to be unable to separate consistently the idea of “adaptations as characteristics” from the other everyday and scientific meanings of the terms “adapt” and “adaptation”.     

Class, Identity, and Teacher Education

This paper explores the possibilities of working with White, working-class teacher education students to explore the “complex social trajectory” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 19) of class border crossing as they progress through college. Through analysis of a course that I have developed, Education and the American Dream, I explore political and pedagogical issues in teaching the thousands of teacher education students who are the first in their families to attend college about social class. Arguing that faculty in teacher education too often disregard the significance of deep class differences between themselves and many of their students, I propose that teacher education include coursework in which upwardly-mobile students (a) draw upon their distinctive perspectives as class border-crossers to elucidate their “complex social positioning as a complicated amalgam of current privilege interlaced with historic disadvantage” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 25) and (b) complicate what Adair and Dahlberg (Pedagogy 1:173–175, 2001, p. 174) have termed a cultural “impulse to frame class mobility as a narrative of moral progress”. Such coursework, I suggest, has implications for the development of teacher leaders in stratified schools. The paper draws upon the literatures on social class and educational attainment, on the construction of classed identities in spite of silence about class in public and academic discourse, and on pedagogies for teaching across class differences.     

The limited value of planning in education: Getting back to the basics isn't all about curriculum

In these times of tight budgets and political intoleance for taxation, public schools, particularly urban public schools, will continually have to look for ways in which to spend less while dealing with ever-increasing societal problems. While the ability of schools to improve the overal “product” with less resources is highly suspect, this article addresses one way in which spending less might actually improve school perfomance. The best planners in the best schools should be the administration, techers, students, parents, and the comminitu at large, and not outside esxperts hired to improve a school's “comprehensive” or “strategic” plan. By forcing the segments of the public that have the largest stake in the educational outcomes of schools to work together to plan for the future, schools will improve the efficacy of their staffs, their students, and allow parents the self-satisfaction of playing an important role in their children's education. An improtant side effect of such a method may be an increasing awareness by the public of the difficulties that schools face, and perhaps a better understanding of the important need for higher expenditures. His research interests include professionalism, collective bargaining, and educational reform. His articles have appeared inPeople and Education, and a recent article has been aceepted for publication in theJournal of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector.     

Reconceptualizing the relationship between universities and schools: a dialectic and polysemic approach

This review essay adds to the conversation to which Allison Skerrett and Hannah Sevian contribute in their article, Identity and biography as mediators of science and mathematics faculty’s involvement in K-12 service. Here we address the need to reconceptualize faculty service in public schools and traditional notions of scholarship. We discuss the importance of transforming university structures that envision service as less important than “scholarship” and “teaching” while mediating hierarchical ideas of what “service” entails. We share a dialectical view of social life and an ethical stance that values polysemy and polyphony both in research and in our daily interactions. Here we employ a dialectical lens that seeks multiple perspectives as we engage in a dialogue about these issues.     

Educational reform in Singapore: from quantity to quality

In 2004, Prime Minister Lee called teachers to “teach less” so that students might “learn more”. In 2005, the Ministry of Education clarified this philosophical statement to mean transforming learning from quantity to quality—“more quality and less quantity” in education. This is in line with the national vision of ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’. This policy initiative, which began in 2004, is set to change the fundamental nature of education in Singapore. This article discusses this initiative, its major implications for schools in Singapore and the challenges to be addressed in the implementation of the policy. In particular, the article discusses the issues of understanding an engaged learning paradigm, establishing signposts for the shift from quantity to quality and the difficulties of system-wide transformation. The challenge for schools is to go beyond the form of the initiative to bring real, substantial and sustainable educational change through this movement.     

Rethinking historical and cultural source of spontaneous mental models of water cycle: in the perspective of South Korea

This review explores Ben-Zvi Assaraf, Eshach, Orion, and Alamour’s paper titled “Cultural Differences and Students’ Spontaneous Models of the Water Cycle: A Case Study of Jewish and Bedouin Children in Israel” by examining how the authors use the concept of spontaneous mental models to explain cultural knowledge source of Bedouin children’s mental model of water compared to Jewish children’s mental model of water in nature. My response to Ben-Zvi Assaraf et al.’s work expands upon their explanations of the Bedouin children’s cultural knowledge source. Bedouin children’s mental model is based on their culture, religion, place of living and everyday life practices related to water. I suggest a different knowledge source for spontaneous mental model of water in nature based on unique history and traditions of South Korea where people think of water in nature in different ways. This forum also addresses how western science dominates South Korean science curriculum and ways of assessing students’ conceptual understanding of scientific concepts. Additionally I argue that western science curriculum models could diminish Korean students’ understanding of natural world which are based on Korean cultural ways of thinking about the natural world. Finally, I also suggest two different ways of considering this unique knowledge source for a more culturally relevant teaching Earth system education.     

Is there a gap between students’ preference and university presidents’ concern over college ranking indicators?: a case study of “College Navigator in Taiwan”

In order to help students make well-informed choices, reliable college ranking systems with comparable information about higher education institutions worldwide have been welcomed by many students. Because traditional college rankings had many methodological problems, a new type of user-based ranking, called “personalized college ranking” started to develop in many nations in the late 1990s. In 2008, Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT), launched a ranking project called “College Navigator in Taiwan” which developed the first Asian student-based college search engine to provide local and international students with transparent information on Taiwan’s higher education institutions. The main objective of this paper, therefore, is to compare the rational, strategies and pathways for establishing personalized college rankings. In order to analyze the gap between students’ preferences and university presidents’concerns over ranking indicators, HEEACT’s “College Navigator in Taiwan” is adopted as a case study at the end of paper.     

The art of being fully in the present with young children

The different ways caregivers engage themselves with toddlers can transform daily interactions, for it is the quality of these innumerable experiences that form the basis of the very young child's “curriculum.” The authors discovered that “being fully in the present” has many benefits and rewards. They became more mindful and reflective using this technique, and their sensitivity toward caring for children grew.     

Atomic orbitals, molecular orbitals and related concepts: Conceptual difficulties among chemistry students

Students start the undergraduate quantum chemistry course with incomplete knowledge and many conceptual difficulties about quantum-chemical concepts. This work investigated the impact an undergraduate quantum chemistry course has on students’ knowledge and understanding of atomic orbitals, molecular orbitals and related concepts. A “post-factum” analysis of examination data from this course reveals that students; do not have a clear understanding of the concepts of atomic and molecular orbitals as well as of Slater determinants; have difficulty in understanding the conceptual similarity between real and complex mathematical forms of atomic orbitals; confuse the various atomic orbital representations; and, do not realise the approximate nature of atomic orbitals for many-electron atoms. Difficulties with other related concepts are revealed also. Some promising strategies for instruction and suggestions for secondary and general chemistry curricula are discussed.     

Sample, Random and Variation: The Vocabulary of Statistical Literacy

This paper considers the development of school students’ ability to define three terms that are fundamental to statistical literacy: sample, random, and variation. A total of 738 students in grades 3, 5, 7, and 9 were asked in a survey to define and give an example for the word “sample.” Of these, 379 students in grades 7 and 9 were also asked about the words “random” and “variation.” Responses were used to describe developmental levels overall and to document differences across grades on the understanding of these terms. Changes in performance were also monitored after lessons on chance and data, emphasizing variation for 335 students. After 2 years, 132 of these students and a further 209 students who were surveyed originally but did not take part in specialized lessons, were surveyed again. The difference after 2 years between the performance of students who experienced the specialized lessons and those who did not was considered, revealing no differences in performance longitudinally. For students in grades 7 and 9, the association of performance on the three terms was explored. Implications for mathematics and literacy educators are discussed.     

Students’ Persistence in a Distributed Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership in Higher Education: A Mixed Methods Study

The purpose of this mixed methods sequential explanatory study was to identify factors contributing to students’ persistence in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Distributed Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership in Higher Education by obtaining quantitative results from surveying 278 current and former students and then following up with four purposefully selected typical respondents to explore those results in more depth. In the first, quantitative, phase, five external and internal to the program factors were found to be predictors to students’ persistence in the program: “program”, “online learning environment”, “student support services”, “faculty”, and “self-motivation”. In the qualitative follow up multiple case study analysis four major themes emerged: (1) quality of academic experiences; (2) online learning environment; (3) support and assistance; and (4) student self-motivation. The quantitative and qualitative findings from the two phases of the study are discussed with reference to prior research. Implications and recommendations for policy makers are provided.     

深刻反省我国教育的"重点制"

Since the 1980s, “key school system” (KSS) in basic education has contributed to teaching quality and the development of some schools. However, at the same time it brings about many serious problems such as failure to attain educational objective, being away from the goal of education equity, arising students’ mental or emotional problems, lack of moral education, vicious competition among schools and so on. It can be said that the present educational problems are tied closely to “KSS”. As a result, this paper attempts to do a deep reflection on it to promote the education reform of China. Translated from Jiaoyu Xuebao 教育学报 (Journal of Education Studies), 2006, 2(2): 36–42