Student engagement: students' and teachers' perceptions

This article addresses the question: To what extent do tertiary teachers and students have similar understandings of what engages students in classroom settings? It employs data from a funded research project in Aotearoa New Zealand that draws on selected questions from two surveys. One survey asked students how important nine selected teacher behaviours were in engaging them in learning, the other asked teachers what priority they put on these behaviours and how important they thought they were to students. The selected questions were drawn from an extensive research literature identifying teacher behaviours that engaged students. The article reports that teachers and students had some similar but more dissimilar perceptions about what engages students. Suggested reasons for the differences are discussed.     

I can assess myself: Singaporean primary students' and teachers' perceptions of students' self-assessment ability

Student self-assessment engages the students in purposeful reflection about what they are learning and how they are learning it. This study investigated the perceptions of students and teachers towards the students' self-assessment ability in two Singapore primary schools. A total of 75 students were taught how to use self-assessment. Eighteen students' self-assessments were randomly selected and compared with an independent panel of teachers' assessment. The results revealed both differences as well as similarities between the students' and teachers' perceptions of students' self-assessment ability. The findings and the implications for students are discussed in concluding the article.     

Chinese teachers' perceptions of students' classroom misbehaviour

This study focuses on Chinese teachers' perceptions of students' classroom misbehaviour. A questionnaire was designed to assess teachers' general concerns about classroom management, teachers' perceptions of the most frequent and troublesome types of misbehaviour, and teachers' perceived needs for help with improving classroom management. A total of 244 responses were collected, from lower elementary to high school teachers in two provinces in mainland China. In general, the majority of Chinese teachers (65.6%) do not think that classroom management is a great concern. They perceive ‘daydreaming’ to be the most frequent and troublesome misbehaviour. This contrasts with many prior studies in Western settings where ‘talking out of turn’ has been reported as the biggest concern. In addition, Chinese teachers are eager to understand the psychological reasons behind student misbehaviour. They also suggest that the Chinese system of ‘teaching for testing’ should be reformed.     

SEN students' inclusion in Greece: factors influencing Greek teachers' stance

The present study, based on recent research in secondary education schools in Greece, aimed at recording Greek teachers' attitudes towards inclusion and determining the factors that enhance positive attitudes or negative ones. The findings of this research confirm that Greek teachers, despite obvious infrastructural and institutional hindrances, favour SEN students' inclusion, and this attitude is strengthened when specialised knowledge, further training and incentives for acquiring professional qualifications are provided to teachers.     

Indigenous students' persistence in higher education in Australia: contextualising models of change from psychology to understand and aid students' practices at a cultural interface

The need to address the substantial inequities that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in higher education is widely recognised. Those factors that affect the performance of Indigenous students in tertiary education have been reasonably well documented across different institutions, disciplines, and programme levels but there has, to date, been less consideration of the processes by which Indigenous students either persist or desist in higher education. This paper aims to present a conceptual understanding of academic persistence that can inform the delivery of tailored academic support interventions to Indigenous students who are at high risk of leaving higher education.     

A case study on project led education in engineering: students' and teachers' perceptions

This paper explores the extent to which students and teachers are able to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of a shift in the approach to teaching and learning from a traditional, teacher-centred perspective towards project- and learner-centred education. It reports on a case study aimed at exploring students' and teachers' perceptions of a project-led education course carried out at an engineering course at a Portuguese university. Data were collected through questionnaires, letters and interviews. Findings suggest, in spite of some negative experiences and final results for some of the students, a clear recognition of the benefits of a project-based approach to both the teaching staff as well as the students. Both are able to identify interdisciplinarity, high student motivation and the acquisition of soft skills as key features of project-led education.     

Preservice elementary teachers' views of their students' prior knowledge of science

Pre‐service teachers face many challenges as they learn to teach in ways that are different from their own educational experiences. Pre‐service teachers often enter teacher education courses with pre‐conceptions about teaching and learning that may or may not be consistent with contemporary learning theory. To build on preservice teachers' prior knowledge, we need to identify the types of views they have when entering teacher education courses and the views they develop throughout these courses. The study reported here focuses specifically on preservice teachers' views of their own students' prior knowledge and the implications these views have on their understanding of the formative assessment process. Sixty‐one preservice teachers were studied from three sections of a science methods course. Results indicate that preservice teachers exhibited a limited number of views about students' prior knowledge. These views tended to privilege either academic or experience‐based concepts for different aspects of formative assessment, in contrast to contemporary perspectives on teaching for understanding. Rather than considering these views as misconceptions, it is argued that it is more useful to consider them as resources for further development of a more flexible concept of formative assessment. Four common views are discussed in detail and applied to science teacher education. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 497–523, 2008     

心理健康教育:大学生思想政治教育的有效途径

心理健康教育作为思想政治教育的重要组成部分,在加强和改进思想政治工作中发挥着重要作用。在思想政治教育工作中应该更加注重心理健康教育的作用,要加强工作队伍的心理健康教育能力建设,树立心理健康工作理念,掌握心理健康工作方法,结合学生心理特点、认知特点进行教育引导,确保大学生思想政治教育工作实效。     

Shame Solutions: How Shame Impacts School-Aged Children and What Teachers Can Do to Help

Non-formal learning for urban youth has a long history in the United States; it remains a source of innovation. This essay draws on literature about organizations that use community ties to encourage cognitive development and identity formation. It then describes how one youth organization in Camden, New Jersey uses presentations to the community of its in-house business projects as springboards into further development. Such non-formal learning structures can have wide application to other sites of learning.     

Borders and the borderless Coast Salish: decolonising historiographies of Indigenous schooling

Historians of education wanting to develop culturally responsive historiographies of Indigenous communities should move beyond a reliance on government and church policy documents – with some variegations of testimony from residential school survivors. The unique circumstances of colonisation that were forged by national/settler policies should be investigated in tandem with a traditional knowledge of local meanings of time, landscape and mythos. This work examines the differences in Canadian and American schooling policies – notably the residential schools – from the experiences of the Coast Salish who are a transnational people with a transcendent discernment of their traditional territory bisected by the Canada–US border. Nation-state borders have produced impediments for Indigenous peoples and conceptual problems for historians. This paper, drawing on secondary and primary source documents, oral history recordings and conversations with Coast Salish community members, compares the cross-border educational experiences of the region with suggestions for more place-based historiographies of Indigenous education.     

Students as Virtual Scientists: An exploration of students' and teachers' perceived realness of a remote electron microscopy investigation

Remote access technologies enable students to investigate science by utilizing scientific tools and communicating in real-time with scientists and researchers with only a computer and an Internet connection. Very little is known about student perceptions of how real remote investigations are and how immersed the students are in the experience. This study, conducted with high school students and their teachers, explored the impact of students' perception of ownership and virtual presence during a remote investigation using a scanning electron microscope. Students were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups: students able to select their own insect to use during the remote investigation, and students that did not select their own insects to view during the remote investigation. The results of this study showed that students in the experimental group who had choice and ownership of their insect reported being more present (less distracted) during the remote investigation than students in the control group, whereas students in the control group reported controlling the technology was easier than the experimental group. Students indicated the remote investigation was very real; however, the teachers of these students were less likely to describe the investigation as being real. The results of this study have practical implications for designing remote learning environments.     

Effects of different cue types on the accuracy of primary school teachers' judgments of students' mathematical understanding

To gain insight into how teachers' judgment accuracy can be improved, we investigated effects of cue-type availability. While thinking aloud, 21 teachers judged their fourth grade students' (n = 176) decimal magnitude understanding. Sensitivity (correctly judging what students did understand) did not improve from availability of both answer cues (students' answers to prior practice problems) and student cues (knowledge of students triggered by knowing their names), and was lower when only answer cues were available, compared to only student cues. Specificity (correctly judging what students did not understand) was higher when only answer cues were available, compared to only student cues or both student and answer cues.     

Accuracy of teachers' judgments of students' cognitive abilities: A meta-analysis

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the accuracy of teachers' judgments of students' cognitive abilities. The array of cognitive abilities includes intelligence, giftedness, other cognitive abilities, and creativity. The integration of 106 effect sizes from 33 studies with a meta-analytical multilevel approach led to a mean judgment accuracy of cognitive abilities of r = 0.43. Moderation analyses revealed moderate to large effects for intelligence: r = 0.50, other cognitive abilities: r = 0.42, giftedness: r = 0.36, and creativity: r = 0.34. Lower judgment accuracy was shown for preselected student samples and for judgments without eligible frames of reference. We discuss an academic achievement bias as selected studies revealed higher correlations between judgments of intelligence and academic achievement measures (r = 0.61) than between judgments of intelligence and measures of intelligence.     

Hong Kong tertiary students' conceptions of assessment of academic ability

Students' beliefs, attitudes, experiences and responses towards assessment reflect the ecology of their specific context. The study examines Hong Kong tertiary students' conceptions of assessment using focus group interviews and the content analysis technique. Using six focus groups, 26 Hong Kong university students were interviewed. Hong Kong tertiary students associated assessment with lifelong high-stake examinations. The assessment determined an individual's personal value or worth and achievement was an obligation one had towards one's family. As a legitimate tool for selecting the best candidates for educational and career opportunities, assessment provided upward social mobility, but also served the function of monitoring and surveillance to shape people's behaviour according to societal expectations. Resilience was reflected in both self-regulative agentic responses of effort, persistence and gaming strategy and passive escaping from the oppressive assessment system. The general emotional reaction towards assessment was negative; and participants cast doubts on the assessment validity, accuracy and the limited utility confined by academic-only content. In addition to the portrayal of the Chinese student as an effective, persistent learner, this study shows that Chinese students are very aware of the negative, controlling impact of assessment on their lives.     

From Representation to Emergence: Complexity's challenge to the epistemology of schooling

In modern, Western societies the purpose of schooling is to ensure that school‐goers acquire knowledge of pre‐existing practices, events, entities and so on. The knowledge that is learned is then tested to see if the learner has acquired a correct or adequate understanding of it. For this reason, it can be argued that schooling is organised around a representational epistemology: one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of something that is separate from knowledge itself. Since the object of knowledge is assumed to exist separately from the knowledge itself, this epistemology can also be considered ‘spatial.’ In this paper we show how ideas from complexity have challenged the ‘spatial epistemology’ of representation and we explore possibilities for an alternative ‘temporal’ understanding of knowledge in its relationship to reality. In addition to complexity, our alternative takes its inspiration from Deweyan ‘transactional realism’ and deconstruction. We suggest that ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are part of the same emerging complex system which is never fully ‘present’ in any (discrete) moment in time. This not only introduces the notion of time into our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and reality, but also points to the importance of acknowledging the role of the ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘incalculable’. With this understanding knowledge reaches us not as something we receive but as a response, which brings forth new worlds because it necessarily adds something (which was not present anywhere before it appeared) to what came before. This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curricular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the perspective of the present. The epistemology of emergence therefore calls for a switch in focus for curricular thinking, away from questions about presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement and response.     

The effect of portfolios on students' learning: student teachers' views

This study reports on student teachers' views of portfolios as a learning tool when they are combined with a weekly test conducted at the end of each lesson to help student teachers self‐evaluate. Student teachers' written reflections during the process provided data for the study. Analysis of the data showed that a majority of student teachers initially felt that compiling a portfolio would be time‐consuming and an extra burden added to their already busy schedule. However, later on they all found that the process was a useful learning experience. Moreover, the portfolio process – especially combining self‐reflection with weekly tests – encouraged students to study regularly, increased retention and made learning more enjoyable. Suggestions for the successful portfolio implementation include the following: guiding students both at the beginning of and during the process, providing continuous and prompt feedback during the process and making self‐reflection – especially guided by reflection prompts – an essential part of the process.     

Illusions of consensus: New South Wales stakeholders' constructions of the identity of history

This article analyses the relationships between the perspectives of stakeholders involved in the development of the 1998 New South Wales Stages 4–5 history syllabus. It examined four key issues that emerged in the debates about history education during the review and found that stakeholders' views diverged significantly on three of these issues. While loose coalitions formed around particular issues, stakeholders provided different rationales for their positions, and coalitions re-formed on other debates. The analysis highlights the divergence between stakeholders and between the Commonwealth and state governments and stakeholders on the desirable content and goals of history education. The findings indicate that consultation might not produce consensus, and that even the appearance of consensus can be grounded in substantively and philosophically different premises. In practical terms, the findings suggest that if the purpose of consultation as a method of curriculum development is to produce a syllabus that reflects the diverse perspectives held by stakeholders, then the syllabus structure needs to make provision for content options as well as common core areas of study.     

Conceptualising a pedagogical cultural identity through the narrative construction of early career Aboriginal teachers' professional identities

This paper explores the concept ‘pedagogical cultural identity’ as one that embeds cultural knowledge and lived experience into pedagogical practice. Four narratives were constructed from fifteen in-depth interviews with early career Aboriginal teachers who completed their Aboriginal Studies teaching degree at the University of Sydney. The study found that these teachers enacted their habitus, harnessed their social and cultural capital, and mobilised their relationship building skills in the construction of their professional identity. Significantly, contextual power relations influenced the enactment of a pedagogical cultural identity, challenging assumptions of a presumed identity claim by exploring its potential and limitations.