Multiple Representation in Learning About Evaporation

There has been extensive research on children’s understanding of evaporation, but representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. This study explored three students’ engagement with science concepts relating to evaporation through various representational modes, such as diagrams, verbal accounts, gestures, and captioned drawings. This engagement entailed students (a) clarifying their thinking through exploring representational resources; (b) developing understanding of what these representations signify; and (c) learning how to construct representational aspects of scientific explanation. The study involved a sequence of classroom lessons on evaporation and structured interviews with nine children, and found that a focus on representational challenges provided fresh insights into the conceptual task involved in learning science. The findings suggest that teacher‐mediated negotiation of representational issues as students construct different modal accounts can support enriched learning by enabling both (a) richer conceptual understanding by students; and (b) enhanced teacher insights into students’ thinking.     

Young Children,Television & Learning: Part I. The effects of children watching a continuous off‐air broadcast

Responses of 21 pre‐operational children, aged between 6#lb6 and 7#lb4 years, to an uninterrupted television programme, viewed in small groups, were surveyed by individual post‐viewing questioning. The indications are that the children viewed the programme passively except when something extraordinary or stimulating occurred; they recalled only isolated aspects that interested them or that they liked. They were unable to deduce the producer's intentions and gained only a vague idea of what the programme was about. Children are limited in what they can take from a broadcast by their own experiences and by how those relate to what is viewed, so teachers have a responsibility to assist young children to internalise and interpret what is viewed from educational television. Continuous ‘programmes’ seem unsuitable as learning media; children should view, via a videorecorder, short sequences or ‘modules’ of television material, linked to activities with which they are involved or familiar, to enable a three‐way interaction between children, teacher and television to be established     

Listening to young children outdoors with pedagogical documentation

If children are to be heard in research and pedagogy, we need to find ways to listen to them. But how do we listen to young children when words are not their primary means of communication? Drawing on research investigating children’s perspectives of outdoor spaces in pedagogical settings, this article discusses the use of pedagogical documentation as a way of listening to young children. This listening involves children and adults working together in a relationship of co-experimentation which requires suspension of judgment, openness and preparedness to be affected by the ‘other’ [Davies, Bronwyn. (2014). Listening to Children: Being and Becoming. London: Routledge; Rinaldi, Carla. (2006). In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, Researching and Learning. London: Routledge]. The article explores ways in which pedagogical documentation can not only lead to insights into children’s thinking, but also to questioning of taken-for-granted assumptions about children, learning and the wider world. Furthermore, the article highlights the way in which the materiality of pedagogical documentation strategies also actively contributes to the research. The study’s findings suggest that in thinking with pedagogical documentation, children, adults and nonhuman elements all work together in an interconnected and ever-changing assemblage which does not result in definitive conclusions but instead leads to more questions.     

Using visual,embodied, and language representations to teach the 5E instructional model of inquiry science

Helping students to use and interpret representations in science is critically important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourses related to understanding scientific issues. The purpose of this case-study is to report on how one Year 5 teacher in a small, city school in Brisbane, Australia used different visual, embodied, and language representations to capture students’ engagement in the inquiry tasks. While the case study showed that the students demonstrated clear understandings of the relationships between the different scientific phenomena they were investigating, there is no evidence that these ways of thinking and talking generalised to other inquiry-science topics.However, the case study does provide insights into how this teacher used different visual, embodied, and language strategies to help the students in his class develop complex understandings of the inquiry-science unit they were studying.     

Children's conceptions of color

An examination of children's notions about light and visual phenomena shows the existence of mental models, that is to say, ways of thinking that are consistent and pervasive. These naive conceptual schemes, used by different children to explain similar phenomena, determine the kinds of responses given by the children in problem-solving situations. In this article we study children's ideas about colored objects and colored shadows, with special attention to the ways in which these ideas are organized into mental models. The elucidation of these models provides valuable instructional tools that serve to assess and to confront students' naive conceptions. This work was carried out in a science museum at the site of interactive exhibits that show unexpected effects. Children who visited the museum were engaged in problem-solving situations that involved predictions, explanations, and manipulations of the exhibit.     

Everyday Phenomena and Teachers’ Training

The Swedish curriculum for the nine-year compulsory school prescribes that the teacher shall work in an investigative way with everyday phenomena. This can be interpreted as working with simple experiments using common materials, and presupposes that teachers themselves have a good and reflected comprehension of the phenomena illustrated. In order to study the ability of our teacher students to explain everyday phenomena, we chose to ask all the students in the fourth term about phenomena where transformations of matter are involved. The students were requested to give their answers in writing and as detailed as possible. The answers have been analysed in different ways. We have categorised them and studied whether there are any systematic patterns between individuah. A very general conclusion is that there is a great need in teacher training to work with conceptual understanding and with ways of expressing oneself as a teacher.     

‘Ahead of all Beaten Tracks’: Ryle,Heidegger and the Ways of Thinking

The purpose of this article is to examine two philosophical accounts of thinking—yet examine them anew by considering what I take to be their under‐examined relationship. These are the accounts of Gilbert Ryle and Martin Heidegger. It is often supposed that these two philosophers belong to differing, even conflicting, philosophical traditions. However, this article will seek to demonstrate that an unrecognised affinity exists between them on account of their shared endeavour to venture ahead of the ‘beaten tracks’ of Modern Philosophy. In this way, I will seek to challenge a number of preconceptions that inform the way these thinkers are interpreted and utilised by philosophers of education—particularly preconceptions about Ryle that appear to be active in much ‘thinking skills’ literature. Through exploring certain under‐attended‐to aspects of Ryle's work (including his early essays on phenomenology and his later reflections on the nature of thinking) this article will seek to offer a renewed investigation into these two philosophical accounts of thinking, in terms of both their limitations and the ways of thinking they open.     

Using Questioning to Guide Student Thinking

This case study analyzes ways in which an experienced physics teacher uses questioning to guide student thinking during a benchmark discussion about measurement. Interactional issues involve ways of speaking: Why the teacher decided to ask what he did, when he did, of whom, in what way, and for what purpose. Conceptual issues involves ways of thinking: How students seemed to understand measurement concepts such as calculating an average value. We define a particular kind of question, a reflective toss, that the teacher uses to try to give students responsibility for thinking. A reflective toss sequence typically consists of a student statement, teacher question, and additional student statements. This unit of analysis directs attention to ways in which a teacher question influences student thinking. We analyze reflective tosses in terms of the immediate action plans they instantiated, the emergent goals they served, anal underlying beliefs they embodied during an episode that involved the public refinement of a student's ideas. We propose that teachers may shift toward more reflective discourse by asking questions that help students to make their meanings clear, to consider various points of view in a neutral manner, and to monitor the discussion and their own thinking.     

Children's conceptions of the changes of state of water

Children are very familiar with water, ice, and steam as these things have been part of their lives since they first crawled into the kitchen. In this study children's conceptions about familiar phenomena associated with water, e.g., evaporating, condensing, boiling, and the melting of ice, were investigated using a clinical interview technique. The prevalence of specific views at particular age levels was also studied. The results of the investigation indicate that children do have ideas about the changes of state of water which are quite different from the views of scientists. It would also appear that these ideas can sometimes be influenced in unintended ways by science teaching. The implications of these findings for teaching are discussed.     

Complex positioning: teachers as agents of curricular and pedagogical reform

We analyse two narratives of teacher‐facilitator teams producing elementary science curricula and disseminating them to their peers. We draw on these stories to interpret how teacher‐facilitators position themselves with respect to other educators (e.g. peer teachers and development‐team members), to real and imagined students and parents, to knowing and learning science, and to pedagogical practices and texts. We read these acts of positioning relationally and responsively. Teacher‐facilitators position themselves and their work in highly complex ways to multiple political and social others. These multiple positions raise a range of anxieties and questions for the teacher‐facilitators and shape their curricular and leadership roles. Our purpose is, first, to tease out these complexities of positioning and subjectivity, and second, to consider how teachers construct their roles as pedagogical and curricular leaders among their peers. This analysis illuminates thinking about how reform is enacted in schools and how leadership roles are constructed.     

Forces and Motion: How Young Children Understand Causal Events

How do children evaluate complex causal events? This study investigates preschoolers' representation of force dynamics in causal scenes, asking whether (a) children understand how single and dual forces impact an object's movement and (b) this understanding varies across cause types (Cause, Enable, Prevent). Three‐and‐a half‐ to 5.5‐year‐olds (n = 60) played a board game in which they were asked to predict the endpoint of a ball being acted upon by one or two forces. Children mostly understood the interactions of forces underlying each type of cause; only 5.5‐year‐olds could integrate two contradictory forces. Children perceive force interactions underlying causal events, but some concepts might not be fully understood until later in childhood. This study provides a new way of thinking about causal relations.     

New teachers’ identity shifts at the boundary of teacher education and initial practice

As teachers enter the school communities of their initial practice, they experience identity shifts that reflect their learning. Throughout teacher education they have constructed an identity informed by their previous school experiences, the ideas and approaches promoted by their teacher education programs, and an ideal of the teachers they hope to become. The complex set of influences at the boundary between their lives as students and their lives as professionals causes them to confront their identities in new and sometimes disruptive ways (Flores & Day, 2006). New teaching situations introduce them to the thinking of experienced teachers, and to the needs of their first groups of learners, challenging the notions they have so far developed about who they are as teachers (Smagorinsky, Cook, Moore, Jackson, & Fry, 2004). This paper reports on interviews with 35 new teachers as they graduate from teacher education programs and enter the profession, and details their learning about agency and role in community resulting in identity changes within this boundary space.     

Children,Gender, and Language Teaching Materials

This subject was at first one of the topics selected for my assignment "Gender and Education." After the teacher told us in class about some of the gender problems that exist in teaching materials, a light seemingly lit up before our eyes: How was it that there were such problems in the language teaching materials that had commanded so much "respect"? We had never noticed or suspected such problems. At the time, the teacher did not say what direct effects these problems had on children, but examined teaching materials from the perspective of feminism supported by many theoretical backgrounds. Since I have always loved children, I like to listen to their voices, am highly interested in their ways of thinking, and am often curious about such things. On top of that, the qualitative (zhi xing) research methods I had once learned gave me confidence that I could convincingly present these interesting things; they were not absurd, and perhaps people could find value in them. Hence, I had a strong desire to know how children saw their language teaching materials. How far from or how close are the children to their textbooks? What do they see in them? Have the gender issues in the teaching materials come to the attention of children? How do these affect elementary school students? We wished to bring attention to the ways teaching materials affected children's gender concepts.     

Developmental Antecedents and Social and Academic Consequences of Stereotype‐Consciousness in Middle Childhood

The present study, which included 124 children ages 5–11, examined developmental antecedents and social and academic consequences of stereotype‐consciousness, defined as awareness of others’ stereotypes. Greater age and more frequent parent‐reported racial socialization practices were associated with greater likelihood of stereotype‐consciousness. Children who knew of broadly held stereotypes more often explained hypothetical negative interracial encounters between White actors and Black targets as discriminatory. In addition, among African American and Latino children who knew about broadly held stereotypes, diagnostic testing conditions led to stereotype threat effects on a standardized working memory task. Findings are discussed in terms of the contribution to our understanding of children’s developing thinking about and response to stereotypes and related phenomena.     

Understanding of epilepsy by children and young people with epilepsy

There is a striking dearth of studies focusing sensitively and in depth on the mainstream educational experiences of children with epilepsy, as viewed by those children themselves. The one‐year project (2006–7) reported here addresses that gap. Children’s perceptions about mainstream teachers’ understanding of epilepsy and school‐based needs are particularly interesting and this work breaks new ground in that connection. The authors report findings from two complementary qualitative methods of data collection: (1) an e‐survey of 44 self‐selected children and young people with epilepsy, and (2) interviews (mainly individual) in mainstream schools with 22 children/young people with epilepsy. Overall, the children and young people (aged 7–18) were clear about the nature of their condition, including seizures. For many, there was an implicit reluctance in accepting epilepsy as a “part of them”; self‐reported feelings of secrecy, stigma and shame abounded. This had repercussions for how schools were seen to need to respond with sensitivity and knowledge‐based understanding. Taking a qualitative methodological approach revealed important insights into complex concepts like stigma in the school context. This was illustrated in children and young people’s readiness to talk about their feelings of “difference” in relation to others when given the opportunity to do so sensitively. The findings have important implications for how schools and services work in a genuinely fully inclusive way with children and young people who have epilepsy.     

Notes on contributors

This article examines how teacher thinking is socially negotiated yet individually enacted. Through a case study approach, the author explores how the identities of a first-year kindergarten teacher were fashioned linguistically as she moved through the contexts of her teacher education program, the elementary school in which she taught and the personal aspects of her life. Using ethnographic techniques, multiple layers of data were gathered in nested contexts. A theoretical framework was developed by juxtaposing the work of the Russian theorists Valentin Volosinov on the concept of ideologies and M.M. Bakhtin on his notions of language to guide the analysis of data. Findings indicate that by providing prospective teachers with the tools for conceptualizing teacher thinking as social, teacher educators can provide future educators with alternative ways to author their identities and help them to understand that they can create possibilities for all children.     

Unfolding lives in digital worlds: digikid teachers revisited

In this paper, I describe ongoing research exploring ways in which young teachers’ digital lives unfold inside and outside classrooms. I first interviewed teachers in 2006, and identified three different routes into digital worlds: serious solitary self‐taught, serious solitary school‐taught and playful social. A number of teachers agreed to be interviewed again in 2010. I outline ways in which I compare and contrast interviews over time, using analytic markers developed in ‘Inventing Adulthoods’, a Qualitative Longitudinal Research project. I also describe ways in which I set my analysis in Adam's concepts of time: ‘biographical time, generational time and historical time’. Case studies are outlined of three teachers, one serious solitary and two playful social. All three were language coordinators in 2006, and already experienced, innovative teachers of literacy. I argue that in 2010, the serious solitary teacher is able to bring new competences to the classroom, but fitting existing ways of teaching. In contrast, the playful social teachers bring new ways of knowing about digital worlds into classrooms, but these new ways are realised only if competences are recognised, communities are supportive and traditional ways of knowing about teaching and the curriculum do not block new ways of thinking.     

Mathematics teachers’ “learning to notice” in the context of a video club

This study examines changes in teachers’ thinking as they participated in a video club designed to help them learn to notice and interpret students’ mathematical thinking. First, we investigate changes in teachers’ talk about classroom video segments before and after participation in the video club. Second, we identify three paths along which teachers learned to notice students’ mathematical thinking in this context: Direct, Cyclical, and Incremental. Finally, we explore ways the video club context influenced teacher learning. Understanding different forms of teacher learning provides insight for research on teacher cognition and may inform the design of video-based professional development.     

3~4 岁幼儿自语现象的叙事研究

幼儿语言是了解幼儿的有效途径,而自语作为言语的一种形式,其在表现形式上属于外部言语,但却实现着内部思维的功能,反映了幼儿内心的所思所想。自语是以内部需求为源头、活动事件为中介而产生的;对于自语行为的发生者来说,自语可促进幼儿语言发展、帮助思维展开、辅助活动进行、调控幼儿身心;对于教育者来说,通过自语可以更加深入地了解到幼儿内心世界,帮助教育者及时调整教育方法。