Putting counting to work: preschoolers’ understanding of cardinal extension

Preschool children are often good at counting things but seem slow to learn that there is more to counting than simply finding out how many are in a single set. Counting is useful when comparing sets and when creating new sets to match existing ones. This is part of the numerical understanding that educators wish to foster in schools. In two experiments we found that although counting proficiency was necessary to solve these types of arithmetical problems, the best predictor of success was the ability to detect and reason about someone else's miscounts. We argue that these data suggest that a breakthrough in connecting counting with arithmetical problem solving is associated with an explicit representation of the rules governing cardinality and how they are applied correctly or incorrectly. We propose that teaching 4-year-olds to compare sets should include tasks where they judge another's counting proficiency, giving them the opportunity to conceptualise miscounts.     

Using peer assessment of fieldwork to enhance students’ practical training

Fieldwork training is a key component of several practical disciplines. In this study, students’ peer assessment of fieldwork is explored as a method to improve their practical training. Peer assessment theories are first discussed. A framework for peer assessment of fieldwork is proposed, and the steps taken for preparation of students for this task are discussed. A developed marking, feedback and moderation tool of assessment are presented. Application of peer assessment in the field was investigated over a period of two years in one undergraduate unit in the geospatial discipline as an example. Reliability of peer assessment was estimated by measuring the difference between assessments carried out by groups of peer assessors, and its validity was measured by comparing students’ marks with those given by tutors. Results show that students have gained from the peer assessment process, mainly as a formative form of assessment, by better understanding and endeavouring to achieve the objectives of field tasks. Tutors use differences among assessments made by groups of students compared to tutors’ assessments to identify field components that need better explanation of their content and assessment criteria.     

Secondary school students’ attitudes to practical work in biology,chemistry and physics in England

ABSTRACT

Background: In England, practical work is a major part of secondary school science and yet little research has examined students’ attitudes specifically to practical work.

Purpose: To examine students’ attitudes to practical work in biology chemistry and physics in secondary schools in England.

Sample: The study involved 607 students from Year 7 to Year 10 (aged 11–15) drawn from three state-maintained secondary schools in England. The schools were, broadly speaking, representative of schools in England in terms of academic measures such as GCSE outcomes, value-added performance and socio-economic area.

Design and methods: The research considered students’ attitudes in terms of an established analytical framework incorporating the affective, behavioural and cognitive (ABC) domains and used a mixed methods approach involving questionnaires, lesson observations, and focus group discussions.

Results: Whilst secondary students’ attitudes to practical work were, generally speaking, positive they were not constant and homogenous but change over time. The affective value of practical work was found to vary by subject although in all three sciences this value decreased, albeit at different rates, as students approached their General Certificate in Secondary Education examinations (GCSE) taken at age 16.

Conclusion: The affective value of practical work needs to be considered on a subject by subject basis, rather than, as is often the case currently in school, in terms of a generic attitude to science practical work. Furthermore, the affective value of practical work can be maximised by using more at the start of secondary education (Key Stage 3 – ages 11–14) with a gradual, subject-specific, reduction as students approach their summative public examinations (age 16) when their preference for non-practical, exam orientated, teaching increases.     

Lines,roamers, and squares: Oh my! using floor robots to enhance Hispanic students’ understanding of programming

Teaching programming and coding skills in K-12 classrooms is becoming a part of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs across the United States. Often, these opportunities are available through extra-curricular activities such as Robotics club, math club, STEM club, etc. Increasing STEM opportunities for students who are English language learners, culturally and linguistically diverse learners, and/or students from underserved backgrounds is vital. In a pilot study prior to a larger, grant-funded study on the effects of metacognitive strategy instruction on elementary students’ academic performance, the principal investigator (PI) developed an activity with a corresponding assessment instrument. The PI initially incorporated floor-robots into an activity in two fifth grade science classrooms. Pre/post survey analysis provided encouraging results. To follow up on the initial results, the PI and co-principal investigators (co-PIs) introduced floor-robots into eight additional fourth and fifth grade science classrooms over an additional school year, as well as in an after-school setting, to determine how floor-robots might be used effectively to engage elementary students in STEM learning. The investigators introduced over 257 elementary students to three types of floor-robots, and this provided students with opportunities to have hands-on access to programming and coding robots for specific purposes. Of the 257 students who interacted with the floor-robots, approximately 103 were provided with pre/post surveys on Roamer®, one of the floor-robots. Additional data analysis provided surprising and encouraging results.     

Using process drama to enhance pre-service teachers’ understanding of science and religion

I report an action research study that aimed at improving Thai pre-service teachers’ understanding of the relationship between science and religion and at assisting them to respond to this issue in a science classroom. The participants were twelve post-grad students pursuing Master of Art in Teaching Science at Kasetsart University. They took a course, Philosophy of Science, taught by the researcher in Semester A, academic year 2007. Process drama is the teaching strategy employed. The students were fully engaged in the process drama; doing research, producing, distributing, and criticizing the drama. Focus group, student journal, and observation were used to gather the data and the data was analyzed using qualitative analysis techniques. The focus groups revealed that the drama could help students reflect on the complexity and sensitivity of the issue. They found there was no inherent conflict between science and religion since they answered different questions and used different methods to achieve their results. However, the conflicts occurred when people were not aware of the basic differences between the two so they justified one on the basis of purpose and method of one another. The pre-service teachers also found consistency between science and Buddhism. They thought that the teachers of science should respond to the conflicts in a respectful, compromising, and neutral manner.     

Making it work: teachers’ perspectives on inclusion

This qualitative study was designed to investigate teachers’ perceptions of the impact of inclusion of children with special needs on their classes. Twenty participants were randomly selected from the 25 teachers who had volunteered for the study. These teacher participants completed a survey which was composed of 62 items dealing with attitudes and perceptions, incentives for encouraging inclusion, and concerns from a classroom perspective. From these 20 participants, five teachers were then randomly selected for interviews. Findings revealed that some of the teachers’ primary concerns were planning time, meeting the needs of all students, and ongoing professional development to respond effectively to the increasingly diverse needs of students in the classroom.     

In the physics class: university physics students’ enactment of class and gender in the context of laboratory work

This article explores how the doing of social class and gender can intersect with the learning of science, through case studies of two male, working-class university students’ constitutions of identities as physics students. In doing so, I challenge the taken-for-granted notion that male physics students have an unproblematic relation to their chosen discipline, and nuance the picture of how working-class students relate to higher education by the explicit focus on one disciplinary culture. Working from the perspective of situated learning theory, the interviews with the two male students were analysed for how they negotiated the practice of the physics student laboratory and their own classed and gendered participation in this practice. By drawing on the heterogeneity of the practice of physics the two students were able to use the practical and technological aspects of physics as a gateway into the discipline. However, this is not to say that their participation in physics was completely frictionless. The students were both engaged in a continuous negotiation of how skills they had learned to value in the background may or may not be compatible with the ones they perceived to be valued in the university physicist community.     

Primary school pupils’ performances in understanding historical time

This study focuses on the development of the understanding of historical time of pupils in primary school. We present a developmental model with three stages: emergent, initial and continued understanding of historical time. Based on this model, we constructed an instrument to measure how pupils aged 6–12 perform. The participants were 1457 pupils from 7 Dutch primary schools. The analysis of the data showed that in all three stages pupils in higher grades significantly outperformed pupils in lower grades and that pupils’ performances were influenced by the variables gender and parents’ education. In all grades, there seemed to be room for improvement, especially in the lower grades (ages 6–9) where pupils have hardly had any teaching on the understanding of historical time. However, in the higher grades as well (ages 10–12), pupils could improve on the level of continued understanding of historical time.     

Contribution to activity: a lens for understanding students’ potential and agency in physics education

In this paper I argue for using the concept of contribution to activity to understand student engagement with science education and its transformational potential in formal settings. Drawing on transformative activist stance, I explain contribution as how individuals take part in and transform collective practices according to their own life agendas and get transformed themselves. As contribution to science education is a concept based on transformation, not adaptation, it can be especially informative when examining how underrepresented students in science can be more engaged in science education and eventually science. Using survey, interview and group conversations, and field observations in an undergraduate physics course, I put forward Zoey’s case to illustrate my argument and show how her contribution to the activities in the course initiated change in the activity among her peers.     

Students’ use of the interactive whiteboard during physics group work

This paper presents a case study of how the interactive whiteboard (IWB) may facilitate collective meaning-making processes in group work in engineering education. In the case, first-year students attended group-work sessions as an organised part of a basic physics course at a Norwegian university college. Each student group was equipped with an IWB, which the groups used to write down and hand in their solutions to the physics problems. Based on a Vygotskian, dialectical stance, this study investigates how the students used the IWB in the group-work situation. From qualitative analysis of video data, we identified four group-work processes where the IWB played a key role: exploratory, explanatory, clarifying and insertion. The results show that the IWB may facilitate a ‘joint workspace’, a social realm in which the students’ dialogues are situated.     

Reasons and resources: understanding pupils’ aspirations in lower vocational Dutch education

Much research has already been done on the aspirations of young people in lower (vocational) education. As a result, we have learnt more about why students may have high or low aspirations, and to what end their aspirations may lead them. However, there are still some crucial elements missing from the existing academic framework around pupils’ aspirations, which deals with the realisation of pupils’ ambitions. Through the study of ethnographic cases of native Dutch white girls in a lower vocational school, voicing their aspirations, two new concepts will be introduced: reasons and resources. With these two additions, it is hoped that this article will contribute to the existing academic literature on pupils’ ambitions, and it also endeavours to provide useful input for school staff to help them deal with the complexity of the formation and realisation of pupils’ aspirations in vocational schools.     

Supporting pre-service teachers to enhance the effectiveness of their classroom practice through engaging with the ‘voice’ of their pupils

The research reported here was focussed on accessing the perceptions of pre-service teachers regarding the critical factors which support highly effective learning in schools in the United Kingdom. Their perceptions were arranged into a taxonomy so that they can be used as a starting point for their reflections on the observations they make of teaching and learning in schools with the aim of enhancing the effectiveness of their own teaching. The choice of technique used to access the perceptions was driven by the desire to provide the pre-service teachers with a method that they could use themselves to engage with the ‘voice’ of their own pupils regarding the factors which support effective learning. The engagement of pupil voice has become increasingly significant in understanding effective pedagogy and in securing more personalised approaches to learning in United Kingdom school contexts.     

Developing understanding of pupil feedback using Habermas’ notion of communicative action

The focus of this article is to explore the notion of pupil feedback and the possible ways in which it can be understood and developed using Jürgen Habermas’ theory of Communicative Action. The theoretical position adopted is framed within the concept of assessment for learning, and is particularly related to the notion of assessment as learning within AfL. Furthermore, the paper is located within a social constructivist perspective. Jürgen Habermas’ theory of Communicative Action enables us to recognise that feedback, and more importantly the interpretation of feedback, cannot be a one-way process. Without recognition of pupil interpretation, its very purpose (to alter the learning gap) is compromised. This paper offers new ways of exploring feedback, which recognise complexity and the importance of interpretation and relationships in shared negotiated communicative contexts. It further contributes to the ways in which assessment and learning are understood and intersect.     

High school students’ approaches to learning physics with relationship to epistemic views on physics and conceptions of learning physics

Background and purpose : Knowing how students learn physics is a central goal of physics education. The major purpose of this study is to examine the strength of the predictive power of students’ epistemic views and conceptions of learning in terms of their approaches to learning in physics. Sample, design and method : A total of 279 Taiwanese high school students ranging from 15 to 18?years old participated in this study. Three questionnaires for assessing high school students’ epistemic views on physics, conceptions of learning physics and approaches to learning physics were developed. Step-wise regression was performed to examine the predictive power of epistemic views on physics and conceptions of learning physics in terms of their approaches to learning physics. Results and conclusion: The results indicated that, in general, compared to epistemic views on physics, conceptions of learning physics are more powerful in predicting students’ approaches to learning physics in light of the regression models. That is, students’ beliefs about learning, compared with their beliefs about knowledge, may be more associated with their learning approaches. Moreover, this study revealed that the higher-level conceptions of learning physics such as ‘Seeing in a new way’ were more likely to be positively correlated with the deep approaches to learning physics, whereas the lower-level conceptions such as ‘Testing’ were more likely to positively explain the surface approaches, as well as to negatively predict the deep approaches to learning physics.     

Supporting teachers in making innovative changes in the use of computer‐aided practical work to support concept development in physics education

There continues to be a gulf between what have been identified from the literature as the potential benefits of using computer‐aided practical work and the difficulties of realizing them as reported by practising teachers, even from those who are committed to the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This article reports on a pilot study that aimed to explore ways in which teachers could be supported as they explore the extent to which this approach could enhance the development of pupils’ understanding of physics concepts. The study was based on a collaborative partnership between a researcher and a classroom teacher. The indications are that there is the potential for considerable benefits from such an approach, with the need for further development of materials and teaching methods being identified.     

The act of collective worship: pupils’ perspectives

Data gathered as part of a recent research project into the provision of collective worship in schools in England and Wales reveals the existence of a marked variation in approach and provision between schools in the primary and secondary sectors. Consequently, the point of transfer often becomes a watershed in pupils’ experience. This sudden change, which is most apparent in community schools, is accompanied by a slower but pre-existing transition in attitudes which is common to pupils in all types of institution. Using material gathered from interviews with young people, this article examines the issue of participation in school worship from the pupils’ perspective and analyses the reasons they give for their opposition to provision. It then compares these attitudes with those of a previous generation, as demonstrated in the work of Loukes (1961 Loukes H (1961) Teenage Religion (London, SCM)  [Google Scholar]) and Goldman (1964 Goldman R (1964) Religious Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul)  [Google Scholar], 1965 Goldman R (1965) Readiness for Religion (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul)  [Google Scholar]) in order to explore the underlying changes which influence students’ thinking. It concludes with a consideration of the implications of these findings for practice and policy.