A national hero or a Wily Politician? Students’ ideas about the origins of the nation in Sweden

The topic of this article is how primary school students express ideas about the ‘origins of the nation’. The study is based on texts written by Swedish students aged 12–13 about a historical event well embedded in Swedish national mythology, the rise to power of Swedish ‘founding father’ Gustav Vasa. The analysis is inspired by James V. Wertsch's concept of schematic narrative templates. The main finding of the study is that the students mainly structure their answers along one of two different narrative templates; either a kind of historical master narrative with strong foundations in traditional Swedish history culture, or a more generic story about the founding father as a ruthless or corrupt politician, which is arguably influenced by presentism.     

“What’s in it for Me?” A Study on Students’ Accommodation or Resistance during Group Work

This article explores students’ accommodation and resistance while participating in group work. The data collected are from fieldwork observations in several classrooms over the course of four terms in different secondary school classes in Sweden, and also from interviews with the students. Through this data analysis, we report that the students accommodated for such reasons as amusement, compliance, fulfilling expectations, and striving for high marks. The reasons for students’ resistance were blending, inability, stage fright, and vagueness. Macro-sociological concepts from Ziehe's cultural theory were used to capture explanations for students’ behaviour in order to understand why students, on a micro-sociological level, accommodate or resist when using group work as a learning mode. On the basis of results, three models of interpretation were developed, namely, individual, institutional, and structural.     

Do Students Know What They Know and What They Don’t Know? Using a Four-Tier Diagnostic Test to Assess the Nature of Students’ Alternative Conceptions

This study reports on the development and application of a four-tier multiple-choice (4TMC) diagnostic instrument, which has not been reported in the literature. It is an enhanced version of the two-tier multiple-choice (2TMC) test. As in 2TMC tests, its answer and reason tiers measure students’ content knowledge and explanatory knowledge, respectively. The two additional tiers measure the level of confidence of students in the correctness of their chosen options for the answer and reason tiers respectively. The 4TMC diagnostic test focused on the properties and propagation of mechanical waves. It was administered to 598 upper secondary students after they were formally instructed on the foregoing topics. The vast majority of the respondents were found to have an inadequate grasp of the topics tested. Mean scores and mean confidence associated with the answer tier was higher than those associated with the reason tier. The students tended to be poorly discriminating between what they know and what they do not know. Familiarity with the topic tested was associated with greater percentage of students giving correct answers, higher confidence, and better discrimination quotient. Nine genuine alternative conceptions (which were expressed with moderate levels of confidence by students) were identified.     

Students’ Perceptions of the Long-Term Impact of Attending a “CSI Science Camp”

Journal of Science Education and Technology - A science summer camp is a popular type of informal science experience for youth. While there is no one model of a science camp, these experiences...     

What does the teacher do?: Constructivist pedagogies and prospective teachers’ beliefs about the role of a teacher

The constructivist pedagogies that are increasingly part of teacher education course work and expectations emerge from an intellectual world where knowledge is seen as created rather than received, mediated by discourse rather than transferred by teacher talk, explored and transformed rather than remembered as a uniform set of positivistic ideas. Increasingly, teacher educators ask new teachers to learn how to elicit and then use students’ existing ideas as a basis for helping them construct new, more reasoned, more accurate or more disciplined understandings. While the role a teacher plays in developing or shaping students’ thinking via constructivist pedagogies is obvious to teacher educators who advocate such strategies, the case of Taylor, a prospective English teacher, suggests that the role a teacher plays when using these strategies may not be at all clear to prospective teachers. Rather than understanding constructivist pedagogies as techniques for thinking with learners, for teaching them, Tayor saw these strategies as ends in themselves. Faced with models of constructivist pedagogies, Taylor concluded that the teacher's role ends when she has activated learners, invited them to talk, successfully engaged their participation. This article describes how she reached this conclusion and explores the ways in which constructivist pedagogies can lead prospective teachers to project a thin vision of their role as a teacher.     

What’s the problem? Meaning making and learning to do mathematical word problems in the context of digital tools

The general background of this study is an interest in how digital tools contribute to structuring learning activities. The specific interest is to explore how such tools co-determine students’ reasoning when solving word problems in mathematics, and what kind of learning that follows. Theoretically the research takes its point of departure in a sociocultural perspective on the role of cultural tools in thinking, and in a complementary interest in the role of the communicative framing of cognitive activities. Data have been collected through video documentation of classroom activities in secondary schools where multimedia tools are integrated into mathematics teaching. The focus of the analysis is on cases where the students encounter some kind of difficulty. The results show how the tool to a significant degree co-determines the meaning making practices of students. Thus, it is not a passive element in the situation; rather it invites certain types of activities, for instance iterative computations that do not necessarily rely on an analysis of the problems to be solved. For long periods of time the students’ activities are framed within the context of the tool, and they do not engage in discussing mathematics at all when solving the problems. It is argued that both from a practical and theoretical point of view it is important to scrutinize what competences students develop when using tools of this kind.

“Because if we don’t talk about it,how are we going to prevent it?”: Lucidity,a narrative-based digital game about sexual violence

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an interactive, narrative-based, multimedia game to promote learning and communication about sexual violence and health topics. High school-aged participants created the game concept in a three-week workshop, after which assets were assembled and refined by a university-based game design lab. The outcome, Lucidity, was a multimedia game with a nonlinear narrative that led to two different outcomes based on player decisions. The narrative followed the life of one character, an African American woman named Zaria who remembers and grapples with a sexual assault from her past. The player discovers parts of the story by reading comics, watching videos, navigating interactive websites and playing short videogames. The final evaluation consisted of gameplay, a post-game focus group and follow-up interviews. Twenty-four young people participated in three focus group discussions (n = 9, n = 5, n = 10); 23 participated in the follow-up interviews. Salient themes identified in the focus group discussions included: overall approval of the game, the acquisition of new knowledge and minimal past exposure to conversations or education about sexual violence. At follow-up, almost all (n = 22) had initiated a conversation about sexual violence with a parent, peer and/or teacher. Lucidity succeeded in engaging young people and facilitating communication with adults and peers regarding sexual violence and other sexual health topics. Ultimately, a game-based intervention such as this represents a feasible approach for introducing issues of sexual violence, with potential for future implementation in educational settings.     

‘We’re keeping on top of the students’: making sense of test data with more informal data in a grade-level instructional team

Internationally, there has been a policy push for using student data for instruction. Yet, research has noted few examples of actually understanding how this data-use practice takes place. This study presents a case of an instructional data team making sense of student data. The study shares data to show how teachers’ process for using data to inform their instructional choices is an interpretive one. The study also highlights the fact that, to make sense of test data that are often incapable of capturing backstories of students’ work in school, teachers draw upon informal data that they glean from their observations of and interactions with students. The collective data in the heads of teachers emerge through data team discussions. We conclude with implications for policy, professional learning, and teacher development.     

‘What’s in a name? The power of the English language in secondary school science education’

Cultural Studies of Science Education - The global dominance of the English language has led to intense debates with the emergence of studies of English as a lingua franca. These debates can be...     

What’s in a name? That which we call a crisis? A commentary on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory’

Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge-based approach’ (JCS, 45, 2) is discussed from the starting point that the claimed crisis is constructed from a decisive solution, that is the solution determines what is a crisis. But curriculum research and curriculum theory are in need of change. Curriculum research is discussed from an international and historical perspective. The focus is on how economic changes and changes in modes of production have created demands that have been met by an increasing trust in competition between schools and nations. Curriculum construction has been globalized. Curriculum research and curriculum theory ought to problematize and analyse these changes in the conditions for curriculum construction and the politics of education. It is insight into these changes that are needed as well as a serious discussion on the meaning and direction of formation (Bildung) as a framework for research on the knowledge that has to be selected and organized for teaching.     

How can we assess and evaluate the competitive advantage of a country’s human resource development system?

The purpose of this study was to develop an index to assess and evaluate the competitive advantage of a country’s human resource development system. Based on an extensive literature review, a theoretical model of a human resource development system at the national level (named National Human Resource Development: NHRD) was constructed. The model consists of four factors—supply conditions, demand conditions, environment, and supporting systems—and NHRD system competitiveness was measured by the cumulative sum of a country’s achievement in each of these four factors. The four factors were divided into 10 sub-categories, and 45 indicators were selected based on criteria such as relevance, international comparability, reliability, timeliness, and accessibility. Finally, by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the individual weights of the 45 indicators were calculated. In addition, the relationships between the NHRD competitiveness scores of OECD member countries and other relevant variables, including GDP per capita and the scores from other national competitiveness studies, were analyzed to examine the validity of the index.     

‘Catholic schooling with a twist?’: a study of faith schooling in the Republic of Ireland during a period of detraditionalisation

The role of faith-based schools is increasingly debated within a context of school reform, rights and plurality in multi-ethnic societies. The Catholic schooling system in the Irish Republic (always referred to as Ireland in the text) represents an interesting case internationally because of the extent to which Catholic education is structurally embedded as normative across the education system. Yet, Ireland is in a process of detraditionalisation and wider societal change. Drawing on Bourdieu and Bernstein, and a mixed methodological study of Catholic secondary schools, the article presents a typology of Catholic schooling in transition. This identifies a continuum of Catholicity among the study schools that is mediated by dynamics of social class in an increasingly competitive and diverse system. It is argued this has implications for considering the role of a recontextualised model of Catholic faith schooling, underpinned by principles of social justice in a multicultural and more secularly oriented society.     

“Feeling like a Scientist”: Factors Affecting Students’ Selections of Technology Tools in the Science Classroom

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This research looked at the choices that children make in the classroom when offered manual and technological options to measure scientific variables....