How do Dutch secondary teachers and students conceive the purpose of assessment?

How teachers and students deal with assessment practices is largely influenced by the conceptions they hold about the purpose of assessment. This means that, given the current plea for a paradigm shift from Assessment of Learning to Assessment for Leaning with a balance between the formative and summative purposes of assessment, the study of teachers’ and students’ conceptions of the purpose of assessment is of the utmost relevance. In this study Dutch secondary school teachers’ (n = 351) and students’ (n = 712) conceptions of the purpose of assessment were measured using a translation of the teachers’ conceptions of assessment questionnaire and a translated and shortened version of the students’ conceptions of assessment questionnaire. Maximum Likelihood factor analyses resulted in four teacher and five student conceptions of the purpose of assessment. The results indicate that the teachers in our sample did not distinguish between formative and summative purposes of assessment. They did discern classroom assessment (formative as well as summative) from school accountability. In addition, they conceive assessment as being of bad (in terms of measurement errors) or good quality. In contrast with the teachers, students do make a distinction between the formative and summative purpose of assessment. They also refer to school accountability and the affects that assessment triggers in them as further purposes of assessment.     

How do teachers’ approaches to geometric work relate to geometry students’ learning difficulties?

Various studies suggest that French students (grades 7 to 10) may solve geometric problems within a paradigmatic framework that differs from that assumed by teachers, a situation prone to misunderstandings. In this paper, we study the extent to which secondary school teachers recognise the conflicting paradigms and how they handle the geometric work conducted, in sometimes unintended ways, by their students. This is done by analysing teachers’ reactions to specific answers students offered to the Charlotte and Marie problem, an “ambiguous” problem with various solutions depending on the paradigm adopted. As a result of the study, we found that, beyond similarities due to a shared mathematical background, the way secondary schoolteachers handle students’ answers varies with their conceptions of geometric work. Implications are drawn regarding the teaching of geometry and the training of teachers.     

How do teachers interpret and transform entrepreneurship education?

During the last decade, entrepreneurship education has become a central curricular topic in many locations in the world. In Sweden, entrepreneurship education was implemented in the curriculum for the first time in 2011, as something that should be included in all upper secondary school programmes. In this article, we focus on one of these programmes, the handicraft programme, investigating how entrepreneurship education is formulated in the latest curriculum and how teachers understand and transform such content in their teaching. Drawing on Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing, we illustrate how entrepreneurship education in the Swedish curriculum has a ‘dual definition’, representing very different framing and classification, but still clearly belongs in a ‘market relevance’ discourse. This is expressed through the way in which the concept is transformed by teachers in their teaching. We also find that entrepreneurship education has low legitimacy among teachers, particularly when it is classified weakly. The weak framing and classification, taken together with the low legitimacy among teachers, are likely to lead to very different transformations of entrepreneurship education in different educational contexts. In the long run, this could have a negative effect on the equivalence of teaching at upper secondary school.     

In the eyes of the beholder: students’ and teachers’ judgments of students’ motivation

This study was designed to examine the nature and accuracy of teachers’ judgments about students’ motivation related to mathematics. Seventeen fourth- through sixth-grade teachers and 100 of their students participated in this study. Teachers were asked to rate six target students’ motivation four times during the school year. At each of these times students also rated their own motivation. Teachers’ ratings were more stable over time and across mathematics topics and were less differentiated across motivation dimensions than were students’ ratings. The findings suggest that teachers need to pay careful attention to evidence related to children's motivation that might contradict their perceptions and therefore support more effective interventions.     

How do teachers in Ireland and England conceptualise dyslexia?

This paper presents the findings of a comparative study using data from questionnaire surveys carried out in England (n=57) and Ireland (n=72). The researchers examine how teachers and teaching assistants who are currently teaching pupils with dyslexia in primary schools describe dyslexia and what may have influenced their conceptualisation. The paper examines teachers' responses both in terms of how they view their pupils presenting difficulties in the classroom, and how far they link these to underlying differences in cognitive processing. The researchers suggest ways in which this might influence their teaching in terms of methodology. Findings have been mapped to the Morton and Frith causal modelling framework. The implications of these findings for the training and support of teachers are discussed in the light of recent national initiatives to improve the teaching of dyslexic pupils in both countries.     

Supporting students’ mental health in schools: what do teachers want and need?

There is a growing expectation in the UK for teachers to have an understanding of common mental health problems in young people. This study aims to identify the training needs of secondary school teachers to enable them to adequately support and educate their students around mental health. Nine focus groups, each with between four to eight participants, were conducted with secondary school teachers in the UK. Discussions were centred on the needs and wants of teachers in terms of mental health training, provision and advice. Participants were also shown three online resources as an example of existing training. Thematic analysis was used to structure the data. Participants wanted training on how to identify and provide early support for students who are struggling, without taking on the perceived role of a therapist. Participants also emphasised the strong need for practical, interactive and expert-led training that provides resources that can be adapted to individual settings. Implications and recommendations are discussed.     

How do preservice teachers perceive ‘environment’ and its relevance to their area of teaching?

The environment is not only an ecological entity distinct from people but a cultural, social, and political construct. Understanding how learners conceptualize ‘environment’ may contribute to more effective environmental education (EE). This study investigated, in a paired pre–post design, 215 students’ understandings of ‘environment’ and perceptions of its relevance to their teaching area, at the onset and toward the end of their studies in teacher-education colleges in Israel. While student teachers, regardless of their major, acknowledged the importance of EE to their future function as teachers, they do not demonstrate an adequate understanding of the concept environment: humans are not viewed as part of the environment nor is the environment understood as a complex web of interactions among people, man-made systems and natural ecosystems. The fact that toward the end of studies, student teachers’ understandings of environment remained essentially basic indicates the necessity to reorient teacher-education programs toward EE. The various ways in which students perceived the relevance of environment to their teaching area are the starting points for this change.     

How do teachers perceive environmental responsibility?

Environmental responsibility can be collective or individual. In environmental education, private-sphere responsibility is often promoted. However, emphasising individual pro-environmental behaviour may cause problems, such as feelings of guilt and powerlessness, a focus on ineffective activities, and gendered responsibility. In this article, I discuss the perceptions of 13 environmentally minded Finnish teachers concerning environmental responsibility. Results suggest that the individualisation of environmental responsibility may limit educational possibilities at school. Although the interviewees are well aware of significant environmental behaviours, they perceive their pupils’ range of action possibilities as narrow. Based on the results, I suggest that collective responsibility be promoted in environmental education, and practitioners should develop easy options for youth participation.     

How do students coordinate context-based information and elements of their own knowledge? An analysis of students’ context-based problem-solving in thermodynamics

ABSTRACT

In science education, context-based learning is mostly based on problem-oriented tasks [Gilbert, J. K. (2006). On the nature of “context” in chemical education. International Journal of Science Education, 28(9), 957–976]. Therefore, a relevant question is, how do students integrate the information given in the task into their problem-solving process? The basic assumption is that there is a transition from the situation described in the task to a science model needed to solve the problem [Mestre, J. (2002). Probing adults’ conceptual understanding and transfer of learning via problem posing. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 23(1), 9–50]. The transition needs to be described by parameters of the situation, the science model and the transition process itself. This investigation focuses on the influence of these three elements on the problem-solving process to understand variations in performance [Bennett, J., Lubben, F., & Hogarth, S. (2007). Bringing science to life: A synthesis of the research evidence on the effects of context-based and STS approaches to science teaching. Science Education, 91(3), 347–370]) and the interaction with interest. Despite the large body of research on the mutual influence of context-based problem-solving and interest, research attempting to examine their interplay regarding performance is still lacking. We conducted a hierarchical regression analysis with 178 participants from German high-track schools to investigate three parameters with regard to their influence on affective variables and successful problem-solving: contextualisation of the situation described in the task; the complexity of the scientific model underlying the task; and transparency, which assesses whether and how the learner can identify this model [Löffler, P., & Kauertz, A. (2015). Modellanwendung in kontextualisierten Problemlöseaufgaben [Applying models in contextualised problem solving tasks]. In S. Bernholt (Ed.), Heterogenität und Diversität - Vielfalt der Voraussetzungen im naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht (Vol. 35, pp. 648–650). Kiel: IPN; Durik, A., & Harackiewicz, J. (2007). Different strokes for different folks: How individual interest moderates the effects of situational factors on task interest. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(3), 597–610)]. Our findings suggest that these parameters have different effects on how interest is triggered and maintained. Aspects of transparency exhibit small effects on successful problem-solving processes. The results support the assumption that the transition process is the main aspect of context-based problem-solving and can therefore be operationalised as the use of elements of the scientific model in students’ statements. Surprisingly, the usage of such elements cannot be sufficiently explained by pre-knowledge or cognitive abilities.     

How and why do students of higher education participate in online seminars?

Online education is continuing to gain popularity in educational institutions and organizations. Hitherto, most research has occurred at aggregated levels, while few researchers have studied how and why individuals participate in online education. It is essential to examine individual perceptions and relationships in order to understand how students behave in relation to others. This paper investigates how students of higher education participate in online seminars and why they participate in certain ways. An online class that attended asynchronous and synchronous online seminars was studied. Electronic logs were used to examine how students participated and interviews were used to illustrate why they participated. It was revealed that the participation of students varied between aspects such as exchanging information, managing tasks and providing social support and the emphasis of these aspects were related to the tool they communicated through. A number of participation inhibitors were identified and it was also suggested how these inhibitors can be addressed.     

How do doctoral students experience supervision?

Supervision has been shown to have a high impact on doctoral students' development. However, little is known about how students perceive not only negative but also positive doctoral experiences, as well as their strategies for dealing with perceived problematic situations. The aim of this study is to analyse and relate doctoral students' significant supervision experiences to the strategies they use to cope with these experiences when they perceive them as challenging or negative. A total of 1173 doctoral students from different research-intensive Spanish universities responded to four open-ended questions about their most significant experiences in their doctoral journey, associated feelings and strategies to deal with them. We identified a total of 223 experiences related to supervision that were distributed into five categories: 1) central prerequisites for supervision, 2) supervisor choice, 3) supervision of the research process, 4) coaching and 5) project management. The results showed three distinct ways, as reported by the students, of handling the perceived negative supervision experiences: 1) no strategy, 2) local strategy and 3) regulatory strategy. The results suggest that analysing both positive and negative experiences may better capture variability in students' supervision experiences. A relation between experiences with supervision and students' satisfaction was also detected.     

Teachers’ monitoring of students’ text comprehension: can students’ keywords and summaries improve teachers’ judgment accuracy?

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy. Teachers also judged their students’ learning for each text, while seeing - if present - the keywords or summaries each student had written for each text, and also selected texts for restudy. Overall, monitoring accuracy was low (.10 for students, ?.02 for teachers) and did not differ between cue-prompt conditions. Regulation, indexed by the correlation between JOLs and restudy selections, was significant (?.38 for students, ?.60 for teachers), but was also not affected by cue-prompt condition. In Experiment 2, teachers judged students’ comprehension of six texts without knowing the students’ names, so that only the keywords and summaries, not prior impressions, could inform judgments. Again, monitoring accuracy was generally low (.06), but higher for keywords (.23) than for summaries (?.10). These results suggest that monitoring intra-individual differences in students’ learning is challenging for teachers. Analyses of the diagnosticity and utilization of keywords suggest that these may contain insufficient cues for improving teacher judgments at this level of specificity.     

How do students misunderstand number representations?

We used both student interviews and diagnostic testing to reveal students’ misconceptions about number representations in computing systems. This article reveals that students who have passed an undergraduate level computer organization course still possess surprising misconceptions about positional notations, two's complement representation, and overflow. Contrary to common opinion, these misconceptions are widespread and reveal the need for instruction that specifically targets these misconceptions. In addition, these misconceptions will serve as the basis for the creation of a standard assessment tool called the digital logic concept inventory. This concept inventory will provide a rigorous and quantitative metric to assess the effectiveness of new teaching methods.     

How do students’ accounts of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees?

In this article we examine how students’ accounts of the discipline of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of 86 interviews with 32 sociology and criminology students over the course of their undergraduate degrees, we constituted five different ways of accounting for sociology. These ranged from describing sociology as a form of personal development focused on developing the students’ opinion to describing sociology as a partial way of studying the relations between people and society. The majority of students expressed more inclusive accounts of sociology over the course of their degrees. However, some students’ accounts suggested they had become disengaged with sociology. We argue that the differences in the ways that students were disengaged were not captured by our phenomenographic categories. In conclusion, we argue that our analysis illustrates the crucial role that students’ relations to knowledge play in understanding the transformative nature of higher education.     

University students’ and teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning in the biosciences

In this study we compare university teachers’ and first-year students’ conceptions of teaching and learning at the Faculty of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The conceptions were analysed using data from open-ended questionnaires. The results showed that at the beginning of studies the gap between teachers’ and students’ conceptions of teaching and learning is substantial. This finding has important implications for the educational process. In order to enhance successful studying from the beginning of students’ university careers, it is important for teachers to become aware of the differences between students’ and teachers’ conceptions of learning.     

Addressing the discontinuity of students’ and teachers’ diversity: a preliminary study of preservice teachers’ beliefs and perceived skills

The authors of the present investigation provide baseline data regarding preservice teachers’ beliefs about addressing the needs of students whose backgrounds and abilities differ from their own. These data provide the guidance for subsequent in-depth longitudinal investigations about the ways in which preservice teachers’ beliefs inform their classroom behaviors toward the aforementioned students, as well as suggestions for teacher educators about program improvements.     

Causal discourse and the teaching of history. How do teachers explain historical causality?

In this paper we aim to describe how secondary school teachers explain multicausal historical events. To that end, we recorded and analyzed seven classes on “The discovery and colonization of America”. The results show that secondary school teachers do not simply deal with history as a catalog of actions, characters and dates. On the contrary, historical contents are presented as a mesh of events and factors, explicitly or implicitly interwoven. In the discourse analysed, causal-conditional relationships are predominant, although some intentional and narrative elements are also integrated. The teachers asked some questions specifically aimed at involving students in causal reasoning. In spite of the fact that some students recalled a great deal of information, they were likely to describe the historical accounts without explaining why they were generated. Recall protocols contained many more narrative elements than causal ones. Most of the students only remembered and understood those causal relationships which had been signaled and supported verbally by teachers during the explanation. Implications for future research are discussed.     

How do teachers support their students on the autism spectrum in Australian primary schools?

This study investigated the supports and modifications made available to students on the autism spectrum in Australian schools. Teachers rated the importance of several factors in determining the grades of their students and reported on the frequency of student engagement with a range of instructional materials. Eighty‐seven teachers identified the modifications, accommodations and additional assistance provide to primary school students on the autism spectrum. Teachers also compared the frequency of class engagement and methods of evaluating outcomes for students with and without autism. A range of modifications and adjustments were implemented to support students on the spectrum. There were no significant differences in the frequency of instructional material use of students on the autism spectrum compared to their classmates. However, teachers did report differences in their methods of determining the grades of their students with and without autism. This is an important first step in understanding the experiences of teachers who are educating students on the autism spectrum in Australian schools. The findings reveal that teachers are working to support the diverse learning needs of their students on the autism spectrum. Further investigation of the factors that are driving teachers’ use of school‐based supports is warranted.     

How prepared do newly-qualified teachers feel? Differences between routes and settings

Does it matter whether teachers are trained in schools or universities? In England, there is an ongoing change in the balance of routes to becoming a newly qualified teacher (NQT). Given this, and widely-reported problems with teacher supply, it is important to consider whether there are discernible differences between the routes in terms of their outcomes. This paper is based on a re-analysis of the 2015 Department for Education survey of 7,770 NQTs. The outcomes considered are the levels of reported NQT satisfaction with their overall training, preparedness to help improve pupil reading, whether satisfaction varies between routes, phases, and types of provision, how much of any difference is attributable to the prior characteristics of the students or to the routes alone. Using logistic regression, it was possible to explain around 18% of the variation in NQT responses. Most of the variation remains unexplained – perhaps because key but unknown variables are missing, and certainly because the level of satisfaction is generally so high. The average levels of satisfaction for NQTs are largely un-stratified by sex, disability, age and ethnicity. Within the two main routes of school- and university-led there is almost as much variability as there is between them. Once other factors are taken into account, the differences in reported satisfaction between routes and providers are small. There is, therefore, no particular reason to promote or support one route at the expense of the other – at least in terms of NQT satisfaction.