Preservice teachers’ thinking within a research-based framework: what informs decisions?

A research-based framework for teaching science is a heuristic tool used to help preservice teachers conceptualize many complexities of teaching while making explicit the strategy to use a research-based body of professional knowledge to inform instructional decision-making (Clough, 2003, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Education of Teachers in Science, St. Louis, MO). Elementary preservice teachers frequently struggle to apply this knowledge to classroom decisions (Madsen, 2002, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the North Central Association for the Education of Teachers of Science, Bettendorf, IA). This study examined the effects of using a video case-analysis within an elementary science methods course focused on the development of a research-based framework. Students in two course sections completed a unit plan, and students in one section completed the video analysis. Video analysis students’ performance on an oral defense with the instructor was compared with oral defense performance from students in the unit plan group. Video analysis students outperformed their peers on questions related to how learning theories influence decisions of selecting content, explaining the use of questioning, and the use of self assessment strategies. Despite these differences, students in both groups still perceive teaching as primarily accomplished through activities and have difficulties understanding the critical role of the teacher in promoting student goals. This study raises issues regarding teachers’ knowledge development during preservice experiences.     

Constructing knowledge: An effective use of educational technology for teaching Islamic studies in the UK

The 21st century as a digital age is characterized by the increased accessibility of information and knowledge through the medium of sophisticated technological tools. The main aim of this article is to show how educational technology can be used effectively to help students construct knowledge when teaching Islamic studies in the UK. The first part of this paper summarizes the differences between information sharing and knowledge construction with reference to the essence of knowledge as Aristotelian ‘episteme’ (theoretical knowledge) and technê (practical knowledge: know-how); and the extent which the former process is created by the use of Information Technology (IT) while the latter is enhanced by Educational Technology (ET). The second part explores how ET can be used effectively to ‘provide training in critical and creative thinking skills of students’ as an integral part of producing useful tools and generating practical benefit during their learning process (Felder et al. 2000, p. 26; Callaos 2009, p. 3). The third, then, explains why a student centred and research-based teaching is preferred to traditional research-led method in order to support the construction of knowledge. The paper concludes by presenting some reflections and limitations on how effective use of ET and research-based teaching can help students to become critical thinkers while studying Islam and Middle Eastern politics as part of international politics curriculum in the UK.     

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.     

Adaptation of Kirkpatrick’s four level model of training criteria to assessment of learning outcomes and program evaluation in Higher Education

Assessment of educational effectiveness provides vitally important feedback to Institutions of Higher Education. It also provides important information to external stakeholders, such as prospective students, parents, governmental and local regulatory entities, professional and regional accrediting organizations, and representatives of the workforce. However, selecting appropriate indicators of educational effectiveness of programs and institutions is a difficult task, especially when criteria of effectiveness are not well defined. This article proposes a comprehensive and systematic approach to aligning criteria for educational effectiveness with specific indicators of achievement of these criteria by adapting a popular organizational training evaluation framework, the Kirkpatrick’s four level model of training criteria (Kirkpatrick 1959; 1976; 1996), to assessment in Higher Education. The four level model consists of reaction, learning, behavior and results criteria. Adaptation of this model to Higher Education helps to clarify the criteria and create plans for assessment of educational outcomes in which specific instruments and indicators are linked to corresponding criteria. This provides a rich context for understanding the role of various indicators in the overall mosaic of assessment. It also provides Institutions of Higher Education rich and multilevel feedback regarding the effectiveness of their effort to serve their multiple stakeholders. The importance of such feedback is contextualized both in the reality of stakeholder pressures and in theoretical understanding of colleges and universities as open systems according to the systems theory (Katz and Kahn 1966). Although the focus of this article is on Higher Education, core principles and ideas will be applicable to different types and levels of educational programs.     

The relationships and impact of teachers’ metacognitive knowledge and pedagogical understandings of metacognition

We know that metacognitive students are successful in school (Sternberg Instructional Science 26:127–140, 1998). However, despite the recognition of the role of metacognition in student success, limited research has been done to explore teachers’ explicit awareness of their metacognition and their ability to think about, talk about, and write about their thinking (Zohar Teaching and Teacher Education 15:413-429, 1999). Therefore, the current study investigates teachers’ understanding of metacognition and their pedagogical understanding of metacognition, and the nature of what it means to teach students to be metacognitive. One hundred-five graduate students in education participated in this study. The data analysis results, using mixed research method, suggest that the participant’s metacognitive knowledge had a significant impact on his/her pedagogical understanding of metacognition. The results revealed that teachers who have a rich understanding of metacognition report that teaching students to be metacognitive requires a complex understanding of both the concept of metacognition and metacognitive thinking strategies.     

Effect of a Problem Based Simulation on the Conceptual Understanding of Undergraduate Science Education Students

A study of the effect of science teaching with a multimedia simulation on water quality, the “River of Life,” on the science conceptual understanding of students (N = 83) in an undergraduate science education (K-9) course is reported. Teaching reality-based meaningful science is strongly recommended by the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996). Water quality provides an information-rich context for relating classroom science to real-world situations impacting the environment, and will help to improve student understanding of science (Kumar, 2005a; Kumar and Chubin, 2000). The topics addressed were classes of organisms that form river ecosystem, dissolved oxygen, macroinvertebrates, composition of air, and graph reading skills. Paired t-test of pre- and post-tests, and pre- and delayed post-tests showed significant (p < 0.05) gains. The simulation had a significant effect on the conceptual understanding of students enrolled in a K-9 science education course for prospective teachers in the following areas: composition of air, macroinvertebrates, dissolved oxygen, classes of organisms that form a river ecosystem, and graph reading skills. The gain was more in the former four areas than the latter one. A paired t-test of pre- and delayed post-tests showed significant (p < 0.05) gains in the water quality and near transfer subsets than the dissolved oxygen subset. Additionally students were able to transfer knowledge acquired from the multimedia simulation on more than one concept into teachable stand-alone lesson plans.     

Pedagogy for Equity: Teaching in a Hispanic-Serving Institution

Three female tenure-track faculty members at a Hispanic-Serving Institution explored how their cultural backgrounds inform their pedagogical approaches toward equity. They drew upon Mills’s (1959) and Collins’s (1993) frameworks to examine how their personal biographies, local social contexts, and broader systemic institutions affect their teaching processes for diverse students. These teaching processes include limiting assumptions about students, encouraging students to consider their own personal biographies in relation to the social world, welcoming students’ multiple modes of expression, serving as role models, and challenging inequities in schooling. They conclude with recommendations for enhancing inclusivity in student learning and faculty development.     

Analysis of self-regulated learning processing using statistical models for count data

Researchers often use measures of the frequency of self-regulated learning (SRL; Zimmerman, American Educational Research Journal, 45(1), 166–183, 2000) processing as a predictor of learning gains. These frequency data, which are really counts of SRL processing events, are often non-normally distributed, and the accurate analysis of these data requires the use of specialized statistical models. In this study, we demonstrate how to implement and interpret count statistical models in path and latent profile analyses to investigate the role of SRL as a mediator of the relation between pretest and posttest conceptual understanding. Our findings from a sample of 170 college students using a computer to learn about the circulatory system show that SRL does mediate the aforementioned relation, and that count models are a more accurate representation of SRL processing data than standard analysis models based on ordinary least squares estimation. The results of our path analyses revealed which specific SRL processes were related to learning, above and beyond the effect of prior knowledge. Our latent profile analysis revealed two groups of participants, indicative of Brophy’s (2004) model of schematic and aschematic learners. We conclude with implications and future directions for basic and applied SRL research.     

Model construction as a learning activity: a design space and review

Modeling is becoming increasingly important both as a way to learn science and mathematics, and as a useful cognitive skill. Although many learning activities qualify as “modeling”, this article focuses on activities where (1) students construct a model rather than explore a given model, (2) the model is expressed in a formal language rather than drawings, physical objects or natural language texts and (3) the model's predictions are generated by executing it on a computer. Most research on such learning activities has focused on getting students to successfully construct models, which they find very difficult to do. In the hope that new research can find ways to remove this bottleneck, this article attempts to list all the major ideas that have appeared in the literature and might be useful to those developing new learning activities involving model construction. The ideas are organized into a design space with five dimensions: (1) modeling language types, (2) ways for describing the systems that students should model, (3) instructional objectives and their corresponding assessments, (4) common student difficulties and (5) types of scaffolding.     

Embodying emotions: making transactions explicit in science learning contexts

In this Forum paper we synthesize some of the main ideas from three papers: Auli Orlander and Per-Olof Wickman’s (Cult Stud Sci 6, 2011), Bodily experiences in secondary school biology, Roger Sages’ (Cult Stud Sci Educ 6, 2011), About Descartes: Uses and misuses, and Steve Alsop’s (Cult Stud Sci Educ 6, 2011), The body bites back! These papers challenged us to identify how emotions functioned as elements of bodily experiences in classroom transactions and why science teachers often are not responsive to students’ emoting. We also explored how teachers making use of curriculum and companion meanings could support the construction of learning environments that more productively support students’ science learning.     

If We Teach Them, They Can Learn: Young Students Views of Nature of Science Aspects to Early Elementary Students During an Informal Science Education Program

There have been substantial reform efforts in science education to improve students’ understandings of science and its processes and provide continual support for students becoming scientifically literate (American Association for the Advancement of Science in Benchmarks for science literacy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993; National Research Council in Mathematics and science education around the world, National Academy Press, Washington DC, 1996; National Science Teachers Association in NSTA position statement 2000). Despite previous research, it is still unclear whether young children are actually developmentally ready to conceptualize the ideas that are recommended in the reforms (Akerson V, Volrich M (2006) Journal of Research and Science Teaching, 43, 377–394). The purpose of this study was to explore how explicit-reflective instruction could improve young students’ understanding of NOS. During an informal education setting, the authors taught NOS aspects using explicit-reflective instruction. Overall the students participating in the program improved their understanding of the target aspects of NOS through use of explicit reflective instruction. However, the levels of improvement varied across different aspects. Students improved the most in their understanding of the tentative nature of science and the roles of observation in scientific work, although there was still some confusion regarding the distinction between observation and inference. More work needs to be done exploring these specific topics and the role explicit reflective practice can play in identifying the particular problems students have in distinguishing these constructs.     

Identifying Multiple Levels of Discussion-Based Teaching Strategies for Constructing Scientific Models

This study sought to identify specific types of discussion-based strategies that two successful high school physics teachers using a model-based approach utilized in attempting to foster students' construction of explanatory models for scientific concepts. We found evidence that, in addition to previously documented dialogical strategies that teachers utilize to engage students in effectively communicating their scientific ideas in class, there is a second level of more cognitively focused model-construction-supporting strategies that these teachers utilized in attempting to foster students' learning. A further distinction between macro and micro strategy levels within the set of cognitive strategies is proposed. The relationships between the resulting three levels of strategies are portrayed in a diagramming system that tracks discussions over time. The study attempts to contribute to a clearer understanding of how discussion-leading strategies may be used to scaffold the development of conceptual understanding.     

Problem-based learning and argumentation: testing a scaffolding framework to support middle school students’ creation of evidence-based arguments

Students engaged in problem-based learning (PBL) units solve ill-structured problems in small groups, and then present arguments in support of their solution. However, middle school students often struggle developing evidence-based arguments (Krajcik et al., J Learn Sci 7:313–350, 1998). Using a mixed method design, the researchers examined the use of computer-based argumentation scaffolds, called the Connection Log, to help middle school students build evidence-based arguments. Specifically we investigated (a) the impact of computer-based argumentation scaffolds on middle school students’ construction of evidence-based arguments during a PBL unit, and (b) scaffold use among members of two small groups purposefully chosen for case studies. Data sources included a test of argument evaluation ability, persuasive presentation rating scores, informal observations, videotaped class sessions, and retrospective interviews. Findings included a significant simple main effect on argument evaluation ability among lower-achieving students, and use of the scaffolds by the small groups to communicate and keep organized.     

Figured World of History Learning in a Social Studies Methods Classroom

This paper considers how one teacher educator, Dr. Gomez, took up revisionist history and inquiry in her social studies methods classroom. The concepts of figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) [Holland, D., Lachicotte, W. Jr., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press], and artifacts and mediation (Holland & Cole, 1995; Vygotsky 1978, 1986) [Holland, D., & Cole, M. (1995). Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 26(4), 465–490; Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Boston: The MIT Press] are used to present a case study. The study focuses on the artifacts that made up the figured world of history learning in Dr. Gomez’s social studies methods class and the learner identities afforded by this context. The purpose of this study is two-fold: (a) explore how teacher education classes can recruit primarily white, middle class students into a figured world of history learning that is culturally congruent with urban settings, and (b) demonstrate the application of the figured worlds framework to the study of learning in a teacher preparation program. Cecil Robinson is an assistant professor of educational psychology at The University of Alabama. His research focuses on social studies teaching and learning, technology, democracy, and hope. Address correspondence to Cecil Robinson, Campus Box 870231, Department of Educational Studies in Psychology, Research and Counseling, College of Education, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0231, USA; e-mail: crobinso@bamaed.ua.edu     

If We Teach Them, They Can Learn: Young Students Views of Nature of Science During an Informal Science Education Program

There have been substantial reform efforts in science education to improve students’ understandings of science and its processes and provide continual support for students becoming scientifically literate (AAAS, Benchmarks for science literacy, Oxford University Press, New York, 1993; NRC, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1996; NSTA, NSTA position statement: The nature of science, , 2000). Despite previous research, it is still unclear whether young children are actually developmentally ready to conceptualize the ideas that are recommended in the reforms (Akerson and Volrich, J Res Sci Teach 43:377–394, 2006). The purpose of this study was to explore how explicit-reflective instruction could improve young students’ understanding of NOS. During an informal education setting, the authors taught NOS aspects using explicit-reflective instruction. Overall the students participating in the program improved their understanding of the target aspects of NOS through use of explicit reflective instruction. However, the levels of improvement varied across different aspects. Students improved the most in their understanding of the tentative nature of science and the roles of observation in scientific work, although there was still some confusion regarding the distinction between observation and inference. More work needs to be done exploring these specific topics and the role explicit reflective practice can play in identifying the particular problems students have in distinguishing these constructs.     

What is an ‘Interesting Curriculum’ for Biotechnology Education? Students and Teachers Opposing Views

Of concern is an international trend of students’ increasing reluctance to choose science courses in both their final years of secondary school and tertiary levels of education. Research into the phenomenon indicates an influencing factor to be the ‘uninteresting curriculum’ (OECD 2006) of school science. This paper presents an exploration of what biotechnology key ideas students and teachers consider to be interesting. A survey was constructed and completed by 500 Australian students and their 35 teachers. Interviews were conducted with a sample of students and teachers. The Chi-square statistics revealed a significant difference between the student and teacher survey responses in four of the six a priori factors. A rank ordering of the key ideas, based on whole group mean scores, indicates only a small overlap in modern biotechnology key ideas of interest to both the students and teachers. The results suggest the key ideas teachers are interested in and incorporate into their curriculum, are not the key ideas students are interested in learning about. This mismatch is particularly prevalent and problematic in situations where curriculum choice is available within a mandated framework or syllabus, which is the case for these teachers and students. The study also found students withdrawing from biology courses in post compulsory settings due to lack of interest and perceived lack of relevance of the course.     

Developing a ‘leading identity’: the relationship between students’ mathematical identities and their career and higher education aspirations

The construct of identity has been used widely in mathematics education in order to understand how students (and teachers) relate to and engage with the subject (Kaasila, 2007; Sfard & Prusak, 2005; Boaler, 2002). Drawing on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), this paper adopts Leont’ev’s notion of leading activity in order to explore the key ‘significant’ activities that are implicated in the development of students’ reflexive understanding of self and how this may offer differing relations with mathematics. According to Leont’ev (1981), leading activities are those which are significant to the development of the individual’s psyche through the emergence of new motives for engagement. We suggest that alongside new motives for engagement comes a new understanding of self—a leading identity—which reflects a hierarchy of our motives. Narrative analysis of interviews with two students (aged 16–17 years old) in post-compulsory education, Mary and Lee, are presented. Mary holds a stable ‘vocational’ leading identity throughout her narrative and, thus, her motive for studying mathematics is defined by its ‘use value’ in terms of pursuing this vocation. In contrast, Lee develops a leading identity which is focused on the activity of studying and becoming a university student. As such, his motive for study is framed in terms of the exchange value of the qualifications he hopes to obtain. We argue that this empirical grounding of leading activity and leading identity offers new insights into students’ identity development.