Education for the Teaching Profession: Upstart or Start‐up?

Robert Howsam prefaced his paper with the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, a very ordinary, cheap rabbit who was loved by his owner for only an hour on Christmas morning, and spurned by the other toys‐‐those which were expensive, mechanical, very modern, or exquisitely detailed‐‐until he felt very insignificant and commonplace. His only friend was the Skin Horse. The oldest inhabitant of the nursery, he was battered, bald and showed his seams, but he was also wise and experienced.

"What is REAL?”, asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the Nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having that buzz inside you and a stick‐out handle?"

“Real isn't how you are made”, said the Skin Horse. “It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

Rabbit also learned that becoming Real sometimes hurt, and that it takes a long time. “That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.”

Eventually the Boy and the Rabbit became inseparable. One night, when Rabbit was left in the garden, an annoyed Nanny, having had to collect him, chided the Boy for making such a fuss over an old toy.

“You musn't say that’, said the Boy. “He isn't a toy. He's Real.”

And Rabbit was happy.

Real rabbits, who found him one day in the garden, laughed at hint when he said he was Real, but, in time, when he was old and shabby and about to be burned with all the other toys after a scarlet fever infection, the nursery Magic Fairy appeared. She was going to turn him into a Real rabbit.

“Wasn't I Real before?”, asked the little Rabbit.

“You were real to the Boy”, the Fairy said, “because he loved you. Now you shall be Real to everyone.”.     

The Subjectivity of the Teacher and the Subjectivity of the Children: Negative or positive co‐operation

Subjectivity is one of the elemental human needs. It is also significant since it plays a part in educational situations. A particularly important premise of subjectivity is responsibility for one's actions and, associated with this, determination of a direction for one's own activity, the exercise of control and the making of choices.

Human activity takes place principally in a social context. For this reason it is important to pay attention to two‐subject relationships. Their features are above all purposefulness, bi‐directionality and co‐ordination. Two‐subject activity may be of two sorts—negative co‐operation (conflict) or positive co‐operation, co‐ordination of a line of action including dialogue and collaboration.

Educational activity, particularly when directed at younger children, is characterized by different planes of functioning. The adult acts in a longer‐term perspective and formulates his aims in terms of general concepts but a small child acts in a short term perspective and formulates aims in concrete terms.

A system of priorities is put forward here, a two‐task model for the educational situation which makes subjective activity possible both for the child and for the adult. In the last part of the article an experiment is described which illustrates how such a two‐task situation works with a system of priorities and the results that were obtained.

     

Perceptions of academic quality and approaches to studying among technology students in distance education

Primary objective. To examine perceptions of academic quality and approaches to studying in students taking six technology courses by distance education.

Research design. Students taking four courses received an end-of-course questionnaire. The following year, students taking all six courses received a mid-course questionnaire.

Method. The Course Experience Questionnaire and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory were administered in a postal survey to 3539 students of the UK Open University.

Outcomes and results. Across successive levels of study, students were progressively less likely to adopt a deep approach, were more likely to adopt a surface approach and rated their courses less favourably, especially with regard to the workload and materials. Between the middle and end of a course, students were more likely to adopt a deep approach and gave more positive ratings with regard to the materials and amount of choice.

Conclusions. The survey instruments can be recommended as useful tools for monitoring the experiences of engineering and technology students.     

Spatial concepts and young children

This presentation looks at how young children learn basic geometrical concepts. Piaget's developmental levels will be examined to determine how they fit into the current research project. These will be compared with materials from the Soviet States that have recently become available from the NCTP in the USA.

The research project was constructed in a number of early childhood centres in a variety of socio‐economic areas. All of these centres had an early intervention program in operation so that special needs or ‘exceptional’ children could be observed along with mainstream children.

The researcher is investigating children's learning styles to determine the children's preferred learning styles when exploring spatial concepts. The question of whether exceptional children progress through the same stages and in the same order as the mainstream children is also being considered.

Spatial concepts in early childhood is an area that seems to have been neglected by researchers in favour of the development of number concepts. This research project aims to add to our knowledge of how young children learn spatial concepts.

     

Classroom learning and achievement: how the complexity of classroom interaction impacts students’ learning

Background: Complexity models have provided a suitable framework in various domains to assess students’ educational achievement. Complexity is often used as the analytical focus when regarding learning outcomes, i.e. when analyzing written tests or problem-centered interviews. Numerous studies reveal negative correlations between the complexity of a task and the probability of a student solving it.

Purpose: Thus far, few detailed investigations explore the importance of complexity in actual classroom lessons. Moreover, the few efforts made so far revealed inconsistencies. Hence, the present study sheds light on the influence the complexity of students’ and teachers’ class contributions have on students’ learning outcomes.

Sample: Videos of 10 German 8th grade physics courses covering three consecutive lessons on two topics each (electricity, mechanics) have been analyzed. The sample includes 10 teachers and 290 students.

Design and methods: Students’ and teachers’ verbal contributions were coded manual-based according to the level of complexity. Additionally, pre-post testing of knowledge in electricity and mechanics was applied to assess the students’ learning gain. ANOVA analysis was used to characterize the influence of the complexity on the learning gain.

Results: Results indicate that the mean level of complexity in classroom contributions explains a large portion of variance in post-test results on class level. Despite this overarching trend, taking classroom activities into account as well reveals even more fine-grained patterns, leading to more specific relations between the complexity in the classroom and students’ achievement.

Conclusions: In conclusion, we argue for more reflected teaching approaches intended to gradually increase class complexity to foster students’ level of competency.     

Information Skills in Education for Manufacturing Technology: the Case for an Integrated Quality Approach

Considerable ‘user education’ work of high quality has been produced from academic librarians to impart information skills to students on degree-level and diploma BTEC engineering courses. However, in the author's opinion, this lacks a focus on some points of importance for the effective teaching of potential engineers and technologists, This requires the following.

(1) More case-studies of engineering problems highlighting information retrieval aspects.

(2) More accurate grounding in the way engineers actually use information.

(3)Better integration between lectures, information guides, exercises and test material.

(4)Greater emphasis on the analysis stage of technical problems, and linkage to types of available information to help generate solutions—information needs analysis.

Scope exists for packaged teaching material incorporating improvements and drawing upon advances in educational technology such as CAL methods. The author attaches a sample scheme based on advanced manufacturing themes, developed for the BTEC Production Engineering course at Coventry Polytechnic in the UK.     

Woman and family in the African diaspora—mother and the sewing machine in Caribbean literature

‘… Miss Caroline

tell me how you spend your time

I spend all my time

around the Singer machine…’

These lines from a popular song of the nineteen forties sum up what was for many women a new reality. This paper identifies the space at the sewing machine as mother's space and the sewing machine as an important element in the psychological and financial liberation of the woman, here the Caribbean woman of the twentieth century. Evidence in support of this claim is offered predominantly from Caribbean creative writing, where artists have noted the importance of that invention in the lives of their mothers and in the achievements of their families.     

Theme D: interaction between engineering education and industrial development

Within a conference devoted to the interaction between engineering education and society, it was only natural to give a place to the contribution of engineering education to industrial development. This rich and undoubtedly delicate topic has been dealt with from three viewpoints:

— the contribution of educational establishments to the actualization of engineers' technological knowledge.

— the participation of industry in the precise definition of curricula.

— the contribution of engineering education to the industrial growth of developing countries.     

Artistic and Verbal Creative Capacity of 6‐year‐old Children and their Psychopedagogic and Social Conditioning

The subject of the study comprised individual differences of creative achievements among 6‐year‐old children in two basic and qualitatively different kinds of child's activity: verbal and artistic. The aim of the research was both the analysis of the creative capacity level differentiation and pointing out the hierarchy of factors which determine certain inter‐ and intra‐individual as well as inter‐ and intro‐group differences.

The study is based on the concepts of the creativity theory of Wallach and Kogan (1970) and the capacity theory of Renzulli (1986) and Monks (1981) developed within the framework of humanistic and cognitive psychology.

The researcher analysed 6,000 drawings and the same number of oral statements produced by 643 children attending two types of pre‐schools and living in three different habitats. The research also covered teachers working with the 6‐year‐old children.

The following were used in the study: the test ‘Draw‐a‐Man’ of Goodenough; Guilford's tests of divergent thinking; Uszynska's Questionnaire of self‐estimation; The Schaefer's and Aaronson's Classroom Behaviour Inventory Pre‐school to Primary Scale; Popek's Questionnaire of Creative Behaviour ‘KANH’, and Uszynska's Questionnaire for parents.

The results of the research confirm a great differentiation of creative capacity levels of children and suggest that the most significant factors determining them are the pedagogic ones, which may directly or indirectly be influenced by the preschool teacher.     

Communication between Participants and Non-participants in Analytical Capacity Building Projects: Management Advice to Family Farms in Benin

Purpose: Approaches to build farmers' analytical capacities are said to trigger wide-ranging changes. This article reports on the communication process between participants and non-participants in one such approach, related to the technical and management skills learned by participants and the changes these participants subsequently made, and the outcomes in terms of non-participants' learning.

Design/Methodology/Approach: In this study, we analysed the following: (1) participants' learning and changes in social practices; (2) communication between participants and non-participants regarding technical and management skills and changes in social practices; (3) non-participants' learning and changes in social practices. The case study was a management advice to family farm project in three villages in Benin.

Findings: Most participants learned management skills, which led them to reassess their objectives and to reduce traditional social practices they now considered unproductive. Even in the case of frequent communication, non-participants found it difficult to learn management skills, which hindered their experiential learning. Non-participants consequently had difficulty understanding why participants changed their social practices such as reduction of their traditional gift giving, leading to limited well-argued discussion about these changes in practices between participants and non-participants.

Practical Implications: This study shows that, due to the limited learning process of non-participants communicating with participants, there is a need to design and test approaches to achieve capacity-building while including more participants at a similar cost, and to stimulate explicit discussion at village level about the changes in values and social practices that these approaches may trigger.

Originality/Value: The article analyses both participants and non-participants' experiential learning, and looks at the two sides of the interaction between the communication processes and non-participants' learning.     

The Sociology of Education and the National Curriculum

The aim of this paper is to encourage sociologists of the curriculum to contribute more both to curriculum policy advocacy and the curriculum development process. It concludes by suggesting four areas of curriculum policy research around which both sociologists of education and curriculum studies ‘specialists’ could unite and which would go some way towards meeting the demands of the National Curriculum at the level of policy analysis and implementation.

No one should be expected to say all the time, at the same time, everything that is to be said. (Karl Popper[2] [2] Quoted in Schilpp (1974), p. 1167. View all notes)

     

SELF‐CONFRONTATION THROUGH VIDEO‐PLAYBACK: A STUDY OF LECTURERs' REACTIONS

This paper reports a survey of higher education teachers' reactions to taking part in a project which involved them in being video‐recorded while lecturing. The nature of their reactions has importance in the context of using television to enable teachers in higher education to lecture more effectively.

Material is included on teachers' anticipations prior to being video‐recorded, and on their reactions after the session, which include their comments on personal presentation, on the anxiety of the experience and on their teaching.

The findings indicate that:

1. first reactions to viewing the playback often include comment upon aspects of personal presentation (appearance, voice)

2. relatively little comment is made about their teaching as such'(teachers may need a ‘language’ for describing and evaluating their teaching)

3. steps need to be taken by staff developers to act supportively to reduce anxieties

4. the recordings were thought by participating teachers to represent typical samples of their teaching.

Some 471 students of the teachers involved in the project completed a brief questionnaire and the largest single response supports the teachers' view that the recording was typical.     

7th GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF CRE

One of the important events relevant for higher education in Europe which took place in 1979 was the 7th General Assembly of CRE ‐the Standing Conference of Rectors and Vice‐Chancellors of the European Universities (13‐17 August 1979, Helsinki).

The present membership of CRE includes 352 universities and institutes of higher education in 23 European countries.

The following article, written by Dr. Andris Barblan, Secretary General of CRE, reflects major problems discussed during the General Assembly (Editor's Note: This article is based on the paper presented by Dr. A. Barblan at the Seminar “University Today” which was held on 28 August 1979 in Dubrovnik).

For CEPES participation at this conference see page 42 of this Bulletin.     

Effect of Participatory Research on Farmers' Knowledge and Practice of IPM: The Case of Cotton in Benin

Purpose: This study assesses the effect of participatory research on farmers' knowledge and practice of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Benin. The participatory field experiments were carried out during the 2011–2012 cotton growing season, and focused on the development and application of pest management knowledge.

Methodology: A ‘Difference-in-Differences’ methodology was used to document the changes in farmers' knowledge and practices across the following season, 2012–2013. Of the 180 cotton growers sampled, 150 took part in the research, while 30 served as the control.

Findings: Participation in the research increased farmers' ability to recognise pests and natural enemies and how to use thresholds and apply bio-pesticides. Increase in knowledge did not lead to any modification in the farmers' use of neem oil and the entomopathogen Beauveria, but it did lead to a significant change in threshold-based pesticide applications. Farmers seemed to want to reduce pest management costs, whatever the type of pesticide recommended (conventional or bio-based).

Practical Implications: Development practitioners should be aware that changes in practices of IPM are not only knowledge driven. Other factors such as financial consideration and specific input availability are also needed for the success of an effective pest management strategy.

Originality/Value: In any interactive process, the Difference-in-Differences methodology is an appropriate tool for an effective assessment of changes in farmers' knowledge and practices over time.     

Cognitive Style and Problem Behaviour in Boys Referred to Residential Special Schools

The paper considers aberrant behaviour in the context of cognitive style with reference to both diagnosis and treatment.

Aims.

The aims of the study were to investigate whether the style of pupils with behaviour problems was different from that of children with no reported problems, and also to consider how pupils of different style manifested their problem behaviours.

Sample.

The sample comprised 83 male pupils aged 10‐18 years from two residential special schools.

Method.

The sample were given the Cognitive Styles Analysis to assess their positions on the Wholist‐Analytic and Verbal‐Imagery style dimensions. The pupil records of the special school pupils who were at the extreme of the style dimensions were also examined.

Results.

When their style characteristics were contrasted with a Comparison Sample of 413 12‐16‐year‐old males attending 10 secondary schools, the special school pupils had a significantly higher proportion of both Wholists and Verbalisers, than the Comparison Group. Further, the inspection of the records indicated that the types of social behaviour and behaviour problems exhibited varied with style, and particularly on the Wholist‐Analytic dimension.

Conclusion.

The results were considered to have implications for the origins and treatment of problem behaviour.     

Practical Skills Training in Agricultural Education—A Comparison between Traditional and Blended Approaches

Purpose: In this article the use of blended learning multimedia materials as an education tool was compared with the traditional approach for skills training.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This study was conducted in Ireland using a pre-test, post-test experimental design. All students were instructed on how to complete two skills using either a traditional or blended methodology. They were subsequently assessed to determine their ability to perform the practical skills.

Findings: The findings stressed the suitability of blended learning not only when it was found that there was no significant difference between method of teaching and skill acquisition but also when it was revealed that student demographics had no major influence on skill acquisition.

Practical Implications: It can be concluded that blended learning can be used effectively for the instruction of a diverse range of practical skills in agricultural college and benefit in the successful knowledge transfer to a growing and diverse student population with more emphasis placed on the students taking charge of their own learning environment.

Originality/Value: The article demonstrates the value of blended learning as a successful medium for practical skill attainment within the agricultural college environment.

Findings: The findings stressed the suitability of blended learning not only when it was found that there was no significant difference between method of teaching and skill acquisition but also when it was revealed that student demographics had no major influence on skill acquisition.

Practical Implications: It can be concluded that blended learning can be used effectively for the instruction of a diverse range of practical skills in agricultural college and benefit in the successful knowledge transfer to a growing and diverse student population with more emphasis placed on the students taking charge of their own learning environment.

Originality/Value: The article demonstrates the value of blended learning as a successful medium for practical skill attainment within the agricultural college environment.     

SICA: a CAD Tool for System Analysis

In this paper, the main features of SICA are discussed: These include

˙ implementing a bloc diagram of a system using a flexible data structure and a high level language, and

˙ time domain and frequency domain analysis of an implemented system.

The system could be linear, non-linear, continuous or discrete. Also outlined are the main extensions and applications of SICA.     

Socio-economic Factors Affecting Adoption of Modern Information and Communication Technology by Farmers in India: Analysis Using Multivariate Probit Model

Purpose: The paper analyzes factors that affect the likelihood of adoption of different agriculture-related information sources by farmers.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper links the theoretical understanding of the existing multiple sources of information that farmer use, with the empirical model to analyze the factors that affect the farmer's adoption of different agriculture-related information sources. The analysis is done using a multivariate probit model and primary survey data of 1,200 farmer households of five Indo-Gangetic states of India, covering 120 villages.

Findings: The results of the study highlight that farmer's age, education level and farm size influence farmer's behaviour in selecting different sources of information. The results show that farmers use multiple information sources, that may be complementary or substitutes to each other and this also implies that any single source does not satisfy all information needs of the farmer.

Practical implication: If we understand the likelihood of farmer's choice of source of information then direction can be provided and policies can be developed to provide information through those sources in targeted regions with the most effective impact.

Originality/Value: Information plays a key role in a farmer's life by enhancing their knowledge and strengthening their decision-making ability. Farmers use multiple sources of information as no one source is sufficient in itself.     

Measuring Parameter Uncertainty by Identifying Fungible Estimates in SEM

Researchers require methods for evaluating whether statistical results are credible and thus, worthy of interpretation. An examination of fungible parameters estimates is a method in which the veracity of inferences can be strengthened or weakened by quantifying the level of support for individual parameter estimates as measured by the likelihood function. This new approach aims to overcome some of the limitations of previous methods and is based on a simplified computational and conceptual understanding of a fungible parameter estimate analysis. Additionally, this computational approach has been implemented in the R package psindex. This package provides a user-friendly, and free method for statisticians and applied researchers to investigate parameter stability in their own models using an analysis of fungible parameter estimates. Finally, an applied example illustrates fungible parameter estimate analysis in practice using the psindex package. General guidelines for interpretation are provided.