How Often and for What Purposes Apprentices Seek Help in Workplaces: A Mobile Technology-Assisted Study

In the ‘dual’ system of vocational training, working in company represents the major part of training. At the workplace, apprentices are expected to acquire the typical skills of their profession but, at the same time, to contribute to the production of the company. For this reason apprentices are expected to carry out activities on their own from early on in their training and to ask for help only when they need it. Learning to ask questions and to seek help appropriately is, therefore, an important competence for learners to acquire during vocational training, just as it is important for the company to offer the learner every opportunity to ask for help when needed. In this study, we used mobile phones to follow at a distance 19 apprentices in car mechanics at the workplace. We then analyzed a corpus of approximately 77 hours of work, in search of all questions and requests they addressed during this time. Data show that requests for information are twice as frequent as requests for assistance (i.e. intervention or physical help) and that all together, requests are introduced more often by more advanced apprentices than by those in the early stages of their training. These findings are linked with the facts that: a) bringing apprentices to be autonomous early in their work is a deciding factor of the philosophy of work in many of the enterprises training apprentices, b) more advanced apprentices are given more complex tasks to work on, c) more advanced apprentices work more is often undertaken in collaboration with an expert car mechanics and d) questions and requests for help are more likely to be addressed when working collaboratively than when working alone. These findings are interpreted as evidences of a natural regulation which takes place at the workplace between the learner’s engagement and the workplace affordances.     

The work of classroom assistants in special and mainstream education in Finland

The contribution of teaching assistants, learning support assistants or classroom assistants is becoming increasingly important in inclusive and specialist classrooms. In this article, Marjatta Takala, professor in special education at the University of Helsinki, describes her research into the work of 14 classroom assistants working in a mix of mainstream and special schools in Helsinki, Finland. The results reveal that the tasks undertaken by assistants are different in mainstream and specialist settings and vary also according to the ages of the children involved. The assistants spent more of their time, for example, working directly with children if they worked in mainstream schools. Assistants in special schools, by comparison, spent more time assisting the teacher. Further, assistants working among older children spent more time waiting or simply listening to the lesson than those working with younger children, who seemed to be more actively involved with supporting learning. Marjatta Takala analyses her results by the full range of tasks encountered; according to three broad types of work; and in terms of the planning and co-operation undertaken by assistants and teachers at the class level. Her discussion will be of interest to anyone concerned with the development of support in the classroom and the education of both teachers and teaching assistants.     

Understanding reforms,school reactions to major changes: the case of Israel

ABSTRACT

Two major education system reforms were introduced by Israel’s government in collaboration with the teachers’ unions. These reforms redefine principals’ and teachers’ roles, increasing teachers’ work hours, and the scope of their work. School principals absent from the reform negotiations, are expected to apply the reform, although their work conditions were harmed. This research examines how principals cope with those reforms, and why they sometimes apply them in ways that seem to contradict their interests? Semi-structured interviews with 30 school principals, and 10 schoolteachers, indicated that the reforms have encumbered school principals’ complex tasks. They have little time or ability to thoroughly apply the reforms, responding to multiple stakeholders, political pressures, the exam regime, human resource management, etc. They often ignore policy directives, delegating authority to others, refrain from using certain resources provided by the reforms and allow internal forces to lead, while remaining uninvolved. Conclusions are presented.     

Scaling,Linking, and Reporting in a Periodic Assessment System

A new entry in the testing lexicon is through‐course summative assessment, a system consisting of components administered periodically during the academic year. As defined in the Race to the Top program, these assessments are intended to yield a yearly summative score for accountability purposes. They must provide for both individual and group proficiency estimates and allow for the measurement of growth. They must accommodate students who vary in their patterns of curricular exposure. Because they are meant to provide actionable information to teachers they must be instructionally sensitive, so item‐operating characteristics can be expected to change relative to one another as a function of patterns of curricular exposure. This paper discusses methodology one can draw upon to tackle this ambitious collection of inferences. We consider a modeling framework that consists of an item response theory component and a population component, as in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and show how performance and growth could be expressed in terms of expected performance on a market basket of tasks. We discuss conditions under which modeling simplifications might be possible and discuss studies that would be needed to fit models, estimate parameters, and evaluate data requirements.     

Learning and using science ideas when doing investigate‐and‐redesign tasks: A study of naive,novice, and expert designers doing constrained and scaffolded design work

This study reports on what naive, novice, and expert designers do and learn when investigating simple mechanical devices and then planning their redesign. Participating in the study were 32 high school and adult subjects who did two investigate‐and‐redesign (I&R) tasks. Same gender pairs of subjects with similar design experiences explored, analyzed, and evaluated different brands of a device, designed experiments to compare them, and then proposed their redesign. Each two‐hour session was videotaped, and portions were analyzed using methods adapted from protocol analysis techniques. Results suggest that when naive designers do I&R tasks, their learning is highly contextualized and device‐specific. Naive designers made few connections from their work to key science ideas, and instead used mechanical advantage preconceptions that they did not spontaneously redress during the I&R sequence. Experts made connections to concepts and cases, inferred key design decisions, and sought “critical design problems” for the devices studied. All groups used strategies involving analysis more than those involving synthesis or evaluation. Notably, during conceptual design, opportunities for using science, present especially when subjects analyze design ideas, went underutilized by nonexpert designers. Scaffolded questions are needed to focus the learning of science embedded in design‐oriented activities. All findings reported are tentative, given the limited number of cases included in this study. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 791–820, 2001     

Authentic Assessment for Student Learning: An ontological conceptualisation

Authentic assessment has been proposed as having potential to enhance student learning for a changing world. Conventionally, assessment is seen to be authentic when the tasks are real-to-life or have real-life value. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s work, we challenge this conceptualisation as narrow and limited. We argue that authenticity need not be an attribute of tasks but, rather, is a quality of educational processes that engage students in becoming more fully human. Adopting the mode of authenticity involves calling things into question, challenging public assumptions and striving to take a stand in the situations encountered. In addition to assessing student achievement, then, authentic assessment can enhance integration of what students know and how they act with who they are becoming.     

Educators at Work in two Sectors of Adult and Vocational Education: an overview of two European Research projects

Adult learning staff play a key role in making lifelong learning a reality. It is they who facilitate learners to develop knowledge, skills and attributes. At the European level there is a lack of information about various aspects of the profession, such as who they are, how they are recruited, what their specific roles and tasks are, what competences and qualifications they are expected or required to possess, what their employment status is, how their professional development is organised, how they are assessed, and how attractive their profession is. This article is meant to bridge this gap and describes the variety of contexts in which adult learning staff are working. Furthermore, it seeks to reveal the factors that promote or affect the quality of the work provided by these practitioners and will address a number of issues that should be on the agenda of policy makers. This article is based on the outcomes of a study that have been carried out by an international research group in the period 2007 -2008, under guidance of Research voor Beleid and PLATO University Leiden under contract of the European Commission (DG Education and Culture).     

Teachers’ Conceptions of Teaching, and the Making of Specific Decisions in Planning to Teach

Teachers’ conceptions of teaching, and broad approaches to teaching reported by teachers are both commonly found to range from teaching as information transmission, through to teaching as supporting students’ own knowledge constructions. Further, conceptions and approaches have been found to correlate, suggesting that there might be some functional relationship between conceptions and actual teaching practices. But in teacher conception research, participants are commonly asked in interview to reflect on teaching generally, and not to report on particular teaching episodes. The conceptions reported might thus actually be post hoc reflections on past experience, and not indications of detailed functional decision steps. In work reported here, teachers described their reasoning when planning recent teaching episodes. Were higher level conceptions of teaching directly involved in these teachers’ detailed planning, then some vestige of that might be expected to manifest. While student-centredness varied, teacher thinking during actual planning seemed more about contextually localised models of what students might do, than about evoking general conceptions of teaching. The constraints that this finding places on the interpretation of conceptions of teaching, and possible implications for teacher development, are discussed.     

Work-Plan Heroes: Student Strategies in Lower-Secondary Norwegian Classrooms

This article explores how individualized teaching methods, such as the use of work plans, create new student strategies in Norwegian lower secondary classrooms. Work plans, which are frequently set up as instructional tools in Norwegian classrooms, outline different types of tasks and requirements that the students are supposed to do during a specific period of time, normally two or three weeks. The current analyses shed light on what strategies girls and boys use when they approach work plans. Analyses of video observations and interviews with 93 students indicate that while girls tend to complete their plan during the first week or distribute the tasks evenly throughout the period, boys either finish the plan during the first week or postpone their work until the last few days. These findings suggest that the use of work plans might give some students, often low-achieving boys, too much responsibility for their own learning.     

Molecular Images in Organic Chemistry: Assessment of Understanding in Aromaticity, Symmetry, Spectroscopy, and Shielding

When students take General Chemistry there are substantially fewer molecular images than they will encounter in Organic Chemistry. The molecular images Organic Chemistry students see in their textbooks are ones that use dashes and wedges to represent 2D and semi 3D views, ball and spoke, ball and wire, and structural formulas, to name just a few. They also use physical models and may also have the opportunity to work with computer generated molecular models. They are expected to understand verbal instruction connected with the images and at the same time how the verbal explanation fits with the visual image. There has been little research that combines the use of molecular images of molecules with questions that require organic chemistry students to understand concepts. This research paper addresses students' understanding of organic chemistry concepts where ball and wire and ball and spoke visual images of molecules are combined with questions related to the areas of aromaticity, symmetry, spectroscopy, and shielding. The intention is to provide a basis for assessing students' understanding.     

May we forever stand: reflections on culture,community and Maroonage

This article presents the work and reflections of two researchers who are searching for models that work for Black children and communities. The present study focuses on their work with the Maroons. Maroons are those African descendants whose ancestors escaped from enslavement and created villages that were hidden away in densely forested regions. This paper unveils the authors' research work among the Maroons as they sought to educe important cultural knowledge that may have utility for Black children and communities worldwide.     

Shifting to a Student-Centered Science Classroom: An Exploration of Teacher and Student Changes in Perceptions and Practices

In this case study, an exemplary seventh grade science teacher’s beliefs, planning decisions, implementation, and student reactions to her student-centered methods were examined over a 4-week unit on genetics. This situation was unique because the teacher was new to the profession and her students had no prior experience with student-centered methods. The teacher designed a learning environment where students were expected to take responsibility for research, but initially students felt unsure about the tasks they were assigned and sought out more structure. As the teacher began to scaffold the material, a balance was achieved that resulted in student engagement during the unit. Findings from the case study can provide teacher educators with factors promoting skillful implementation of student-centered classrooms.     

Prompting undergraduate students’ metacognition of learning: implementing ‘meta-learning’ assessment tasks in the biomedical sciences

To succeed at post-secondary education, it’s essential that students develop an understanding of their own knowledge and learning processes. This metacognition of learning, or ‘meta-learning’, helps students to become more effective learners, as they become more aware of their self-regulatory processes and recognise the effectiveness of their study strategies. To increase biomedical science students’ self-awareness, we have designed and implemented meta-learning assessment tasks across our biomedical science courses. Most students reported that meta-learning tasks had a positive impact on their learning, as they prompted self-regulatory processes of forethought and self-reflection. We found that students were equally likely to change or not change their study strategies across subsequent semesters. Those students that did not change were generally high achievers, believing their study approaches were most effective, but their performance did not improve across semesters. In contrast, students who adapted, mostly by modifying how they appraised and rearranged records or improved planning and time management, performed less well overall but significantly improved their performance across semesters. Meta-learning tasks may prompt students to become more self-reflective and independent learners by affecting their approach to learning, enabling them to reflect on their study strategies, adapt and improve performance, and may enable the development of lifelong learning skills.     

Student Teachers in Primary Schools: the views of mentors and headteachers

Four year initial teacher education courses have recently undergone radical reform, in particular in relation to the time that students spend in schools. Through the introduction of mentorship programmes, teachers have become very much more involved in training the students whilst they are in school. How do teachers view the changes that have been introduced? Do they agree with the principles and models that guided the developments? Headteachers and class teachers who acted as mentors for students from the University of Reading have supplied some answers. They are very committed to the model of student learning upon which the mentorship programme is built, the belief that schools and the university must work in partnership to implement and further develop the mentorship programme and the view that schools need to adopt a whole school approach to their involvement in initial teacher education. These findings indicate that the teachers agree with the underlying principles that guided the development of the mentorship programme in which they are involved and they are supportive of the resulting changes to school experience.     

Reading and writing to learn in secondary education: online processing activity and written products in summarizing and synthesizing tasks

The research reported here employed a multiple-case study methodology to assess the online cognitive and metacognitive activities of 15-year-old secondary students as they read informational texts and wrote a new text in order to learn, and the relation of these activities to the written products they were asked to generate. To investigate the influence of the task, students were required to perform two different tasks which differed in complexity and familiarity. The first task was reading a single text and making a written summary of it, while the second consisted in reading two texts and making a written synthesis of them. To gather information about how students construct meaning from informational texts, we asked students to think aloud as they read and wrote in order to provide us with information about their comprehension and composition processes. We also examined their reading and writing activities during the tasks. The results show that to a large extent secondary school students lack the cognitive and metacognitive processes that would enable them to make strategic use of reading and writing. They also show that, although there are no major differences in the way secondary school students tackle these different tasks, those who create the most elaborate products evidence a more recursive and flexible use of reading and writing. The most obvious conclusion as far as the repercussions of these findings are concerned is that there is an urgent need for work on tasks of this kind in the classroom.     

Language Intervention: Computer Training for Young Children with Special Needs

Three studies that explore the usefulness and effectiveness of computers for training language skills of young children with communication disabilities are reviewed. A study of eight toddlers with Down syndrome compared traditional individual language intervention with computer-based instruction for developing comprehension of vocabulary and early grammatical patterns over a period of three months. Both approaches showed a similar, highly significant effect, indicating that computer-based intervention was as successful as traditional one-to-one language therapy.
A second study used 52 children (ages 4–10) who were enrolled in special education classes for children with severe language, learning and behavioral disabilities. The effectiveness of adding twice a week, 30-minute interactive computer language training sessions to the regular classsroom language curriculum was examined. Children showed significantly more progress in vocabulary, general language ability and social communication during the 10 week period they were receiving the computer training.
Lastly, the effectiveness of using a parent volunteer to work with toddlers on computer-based language tasks was compared with language progress when these children worked with a professional speech language pathologist. Four out of five of the children showed more progress when working with the parent volunteer.
The article concludes with a discussion of educational considerations for planning computer-based language intervention and includes a sample language lesson for the computer as well as software evaluation guidelines.     

Relating self reports of writing behaviour and online task execution using a temporal model

Current theory about writing states that the quality of (meta)cognitive processing (i.e. planning, text production, revising, et cetera) is, at least partly, determined by the temporal distribution of (meta)cognitive activities across task execution. Put simply, the quality of task execution is determined more by when activities are applied than by how often they are applied. Planning and revising are two extreme writing styles, in which (meta)cognitive activities are temporally differently distributed across the writing process. Planners are writers who generate plans before text production. Revisers use text production as a means to arrive at a content plan. The present study investigates the question whether the online (meta)cognitive processing of secondary school students during writing tasks, as measured by think aloud techniques and keystroke logging, can be predicted by their responses to an offline questionnaire which measures to what degree students considered themselves to be planners and revisers. It was expected that different reported writing styles would entail different temporal distributions of six (meta)cognitive activities: reading the assignment, planning, text production, reading own text, evaluating own text and revising. This hypothesis was partly confirmed. The results show that the online temporal distributions of reading the assignment and planning are different for different degrees of reported writing styles. On the basis of these results, the validity of both the questionnaire and the concept of planner and reviser styles are discussed.     

Unemployment,Apprenticeships and Training: does it pay to stay on at school?

Data from the National Child Development Study are used to compare the progress up to age 23 of young people who reached 16 in March 1974 and who left full time education at 16, 17 or 18. Later leavers had higher unemployment rates on first entering the labour market because of rising national unemployment, but in the long term had a clear advantage. More significantly, those who left at 17 or 18 with qualifications no better than those of minimum age leavers suffered no long term disadvantage in comparison with the latter, despite their loss of potential work experience, and some groups had lower unemployment rates in the long term than minimum age leavers with equally good qualifications. Apprenticeships were more common among later leavers than expected, and later leavers compared favourably with early leavers in terms of other forms of in‐work training. It is concluded that the ‘non‐academic sixth’ could have a useful role alongside YTS.     

School Library Media Specialist-Teacher Collaboration: Characteristics, Challenges, Opportunities

The most successful school library media specialists are those who collaborate with teachers as full partners in the instructional process. Without assertive action by the school library media specialist, however, school administrators and teachers are likely to be more aware of the media specialist’s administrative role than the roles of teacher, instructional partner, and information specialist. Reductions to library media staff and finding common planning time are examples of serious challenges, but these are not insurmountable. In the context of well-planned instructional projects, collaboration with teachers is a primary way that school library media professionals can demonstrate that their work is a vital part of the academic life of their schools, and a positive factor in improving student achievement.