Teachers’ beliefs about low-achieving students and higher order thinking

The goal of this study is to characterize the patterns of teachers’ beliefs regarding low-achieving students and instruction of higher order thinking. Subjects are 40 Israeli teachers. Results show that 45% of the teachers believe that higher order thinking is inappropriate for low-achieving students. Findings suggest that teachers’ beliefs in this context are related to their general theory of instruction: viewing learning as hierarchical in terms of students’ academic level was found to be related to a traditional view of learning, i.e., seeing learning as progressing from simple, lower order cognitive skills to more complex ones. Implications for teacher education are discussed.     

Extending students’ mathematical thinking during whole-group discussions

Studies show that extending students’ mathematical thinking during whole-group discussions is a challenging undertaking. To better understand what extending student thinking looks like and how teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) supports teachers in their efforts to extend student thinking, the teaching of six experienced elementary school teachers was explored. During group discussions, all six teachers created opportunities for extending student thinking about important mathematical ideas and solution methods. Findings on the nature of these episodes include identification of individual instructional actions and the ways in which teachers’ MKT was connected to these actions.     

Conventional or sustainable? Chinese university students’ thinking about feedback used in their English lessons

Feedback has been increasingly conceptualised as a dialogical process where students interpret the provided information through interaction with comment providers and use it to enhance their learning. A major challenge for the development of sustainable feedback is closely related to how students think about it. This study explored how 25 Chinese university students made sense of instructor and peer feedback following their English group presentations. The findings reveal that most of the participants perceived more judging and encouraging functions of feedback than its improving functions, which reflected their conventional thinking about feedback. Variation also existed in the perceived functions of instructor and peer feedback. Imbalanced power relations, face, group harmony and instructors’ feedback practice as well as students’ past learning and assessment experiences appeared to inhibit the participants from viewing feedback in a sustainable way. This study sheds light on college students’ complex thinking about feedback in a non-Anglophone context which has been neglected in the feedback literature, and has implications for educators and researchers in facilitating sustainable feedback in the Chinese context and the non-Chinese contexts where Chinese students study.     

Measuring senior high school students’ self-induced self-reflective thinking

Theoretically, reflection is known to be an essential skill for improving learning on a metacognitive level. In practice, students may not use it of their own accord to improve this kind of learning because it can be mentally demanding. The author reports on the legitimation of an instrument measuring self-induced self-reflective thinking, which is reflection of one's own accord focused on improving general knowledge of the learning process. In 2 studies, the psychometric properties and nomological validity of open-ended self-induced self-reflective thinking questions were examined. Senior high school students responded to these questions and several measures of general knowledge of the learning process. Results showed statistically significant relationships between self-induced self-reflective thinking and general knowledge of the learning process. Implications for educational research are discussed.     

Giving feedback on peers’ concept maps as a learning experience: does quality of reviewed concept maps matter?

Learning Environments Research - Giving feedback to peers can be a powerful learning tool because of the feedback provider’s active cognitive involvement with the products to be reviewed. The...     

Using concept maps to elicit and study student teachers’ perceptions about inclusive education: a Tanzanian experience

In this study, concept map activities were used to trigger group discussions about inclusive education, with a focus on learners with disabilities. The participants were 226 Tanzanian student teachers. This article reports and discusses how the maps were analysed and what they indicate about the students’ thinking about certain aspects of inclusive education. The results also indicate that concept mapping as an activity in teacher education may be useful and engaging for students. It may help them to organise knowledge and make them aware of their own and others’ understanding of inclusive education practices. An analysis of concept maps constructed by student teachers may also help lecturers to identify views, misconceptions, knowledge gaps and insights about inclusion in education settings.     

An analysis of prospective teachers’ knowledge for constructing concept maps

Background: Literature contends that a teacher’s knowledge of concept map-based tasks influence how their students perceive the task and execute the creation of acceptable concept maps. Teachers who are skilled concept mappers are able to (1) understand and apply the operational terms to construct a hierarchical/non-hierarchical concept map; (2) identify the legitimacy of the constructed concept map by verifying its graphical structure and its educational utility; and (3) determine the inherent ‘good’ and ‘poor’ qualities of the resulting graphical structure to reiterate the ‘good’ qualities and to coach and provide feedback to alleviate ‘poor’ qualities.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of prospective teachers’ knowledge underpinning the technique used to construct concept maps and thus, explicate their facility to construct concept maps.

Sample, Design and Methods: Data consisted of 200 concept maps constructed by prospective teachers in an elementary science methods course.

Results: Analysis revealed that the prospective teachers had predominantly constructed either hierarchical and/or non-hierarchical concept maps. It is likely that their maps reflect the teaching that they themselves would have experienced in their science classrooms during their own education. Additionally, most of these concepts maps only contained the root concept and subordinate concepts and lacked directional linking lines, linking phrases, labelled lines and propositions.

Conclusions: We argue that teacher educators need to assess their prospective teachers’ understanding of concept mapping in relation to the legitimacy (the nature and quality) of the end-products (graphical structures) of such practices. Prospective teachers also need to understand the educational utility of concept mapping in terms of how these end-products impact and/or effectuate learning.     

Gender-fair assessment of young gifted students’ scientific thinking skills

This paper describes an Israeli national-level research examining the extent to which admissions of elementary school students to the gifted programmes based on standardised tests are gender-fair. In the research, the gifted students consisted of 275 boys, 128 girls, and additional 80 girls who were admitted to the gifted programme through affirmative action (AA). To assess these young students’ scientific thinking skills, also referred to as science practices, open-ended questions of case-based questionnaires were developed. The investigated scientific thinking skills were question posing, explanation, graphing, inquiry, and metacognition. Analysis of the students’ responses revealed that gifted girls who entered the programmes through AA performed at the same level as the other gifted students. We found significant differences between the three research groups in question posing and graphing skills. We suggest increasing gender-fairness by revising the standard national testing system to include case-based narratives followed by open-ended questions that assess gifted students’ scientific thinking skills. This may diminish the gender inequity expressed by the different number of girls and boys accepted to the gifted programmes. We show that open-ended tools for analysing students’ scientific thinking might better serve both research and practice by identifying gifted girls and boys equally well.     

Predicting students’ satisfaction using a decision tree

Tertiary Education and Management - This research focuses on students’ satisfaction and on how students’ satisfaction relates to their performance and involvement in study activities in...     

The zone of proximal creativity: What dynamic assessment of divergent thinking reveals about students’ latent class membership

Divergent Thinking is a domain-general mental attribute closely associated with creativity that can be quantified through the use of text-mining algorithms. Past research has shown that students’ Divergent Thinking is malleable in response to relatively simple contextual prompts. In addition, there is substantial variance in the degree to which individual students’ Divergent Thinking is malleable, suggesting the presence of a student-specific zone-of-proximal-development in relation to creativity. Here, we adopted a dynamic assessment paradigm that included multiple conditions under which student Divergent Thinking was measured and fit a latent profile analysis model to that dynamic assessment data. We found that, although on average the Originality of student responses can be augmented through a prompt to generate surprising or unusual ideas, three latent classes emerged that differed significantly on their patterns of augmentation. These three latent classes were termed: (a) Conventional Thinkers (7.80% of the sample), whose response to the Divergent Thinking task were highly constrained and unoriginal across all conditions (b) Prompted Shifters (66.56%), whose Originality significantly increased across conditions, and (c) Idea Generators (25.64%), whose responses were highly original across all conditions. These latent profiles were validated in regard to personality characteristics and domain-specific creative activities, with Idea Generators reporting significantly more Openness and Intellect, less Industriousness, and more creative activities across the domains of Literature, Music, Sports, Visual Art, Science, and Cooking than did the other latent classes.     

Instruments to assess students’ critical thinking—A qualitative approach

Critical thinking (CT) skills are essential to academic and professional success. Instruments to assess CT often rely on multiple-choice formats with inherent problems. This research presents two instruments for assessing CT, an essay and open-ended group-discussion format, which were implemented in an undergraduate business course at a large public university. The topics were intentionally chosen to be digitally-related (internet access and social media) since they raise complex issues, are applicable in many disciplines, and students are avid users, thereby making these instruments relevant, multidisciplinary, engaging, and multifaceted. These instruments may be adapted to enable educators to effectively assess undergraduate students’ ability to think critically. Qualitative analysis of the verbatim data with NVivo helps demonstrate the instruments’ efficacy in assessing CT, with (1) high-quality responses receiving high grades, and (2) overarching themes identified by content analysis, that coalesce into the three dimensions of social justice theory (distributive, procedural, and interactional), thus illustrating students’ consideration of complex fairness norms and societal needs. Excerpts of student responses are provided as illustrations of the indicators/evidence of critical thinking. Educators can use these instruments to first assess students’ CT skills, and then devise targeted interventions to improve the quality of students’ thought processes.     

Examining students’ reflective thinking from keywords tagged to blogs: using map analysis as a content analysis method

Reflective learning refers to a learner's purposeful and conscious manipulation of ideas toward meaningful learning. Blogs have been used to support reflective thinking, but the commonly seen blog software usually does not provide overt mechanisms for students' high-level reflections. A new tool was designed to support the reflective thinking process. Beyond writing blog posts, the tool allowed users to attach up to five keywords to each post and link the keywords on a concept map. This study aimed to seek evidence of reflective thinking in participants’ keyword-attaching activities. Data analysis included producing mental maps of the blog texts, calculating nodes of high centrality (most talked-about nodes and most connected nodes) with the help of software including AutoMap and Organizational Risk Analyzer, and comparing student-generated keywords against mental map nodes. Results of keyword analyses revealed that two-thirds of the student-attached keywords matched mental map nodes. Results also indicate that the map analysis method can produce reliable indexes of a given text, which in turn could serve as anchor points for further content analysis. Other findings also uncovered some differences between participant-selected keywords and mental map nodes, indicating different levels of reflective activities.     

Uncovering everyday dynamics in students’ perceptions of instructional quality with experience sampling

Within-student dynamics in perceptions of instructional quality have been neglected, although student states constitute a major share of these perceptions. The present study examined the structure and correlates of student state perceptions of the three basic dimensions, teacher support, cognitive activation, and classroom management. We conducted a three-week experience sampling study using state measures in four subjects (observations: n_mathematics = 2,681, n_physics = 1,555, n_German = 2,026, n_English = 1,835) and analyzed data from 372 German secondary school students (M_age = 15.3 years), conducting two-level confirmatory factor analyses. Against more parsimonious solutions, the postulated three-factor structure was confirmed within- and between-students across subjects, entailing 51% within-student variance on average. Similar to trait-like perceptions, state perceptions were positively related to grades and academic interest. Our results support the factorial and convergent validity of state student perceptions of instructional quality, expanding upon between-person-based literature and uncovering opportunities to enhance teaching effectiveness.     

Characterizing a highly accomplished teacher’s noticing of third-grade students’ mathematical thinking

This study investigated a highly accomplished third-grade teacher’s noticing of students’ mathematical thinking as she taught multiplication and division. Through an innovative method, which allowed for documenting in-the-moment teacher noticing, the author was able to explore teacher noticing and reflective practices in the context of classroom teaching as opposed to professional development environments. Noticing was conceptualized as both attending to different elements of classroom instruction and making sense of classroom events. The teacher paid most attention to student thinking and was able to offer a variety of rich interpretations of student thinking which were presented in an emergent framework. The results also indicated how the teacher’s noticing might influence her instructional decisions. Implications for both research methods in studying noticing and teacher learning and practices are discussed.     

University students＇ conceptions about the concept of gene： Interest of historical approach

Concepts of genetics are often difficult to teach, specifically the central concept of gene. Even the scientists disagree when defining this concept. This paper investigates university students＇ understanding about the gene and its functions. The results show the dominance of two conceptions of the gene： the Neoclassical model and the Mendelian model. The existence of hybrid conceptions and the lack of the modern model show that students are unable to mobilize the knowledge taught in biology. These results suggest to improve the teaching methods of genetics, for instance, by developing activities that bring students face to face with their conceptions.