Students’ growth mindset: Relation to teacher beliefs,teaching practices,and school climate

To effectively cultivate students' growth mindset, it is important to identify contextual factors that may communicate mindset messages to students. The present study examined the association of students' growth mindset with various dimensions of teacher beliefs (mindset, self-efficacy), teaching practices (guided inquiry, group work, task differentiation, in-class ability grouping, mastery and normative evaluations), and school climate (holistic development, in-school ability grouping). Participants were 2200 ten-year-old students, 358 teachers, and 65 principals from Finnish elementary schools that participated in the OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills. Multilevel analyses show that students endorsed more of a growth mindset in classrooms where teachers used guided inquiry and in schools that emphasized students' social-emotional development. In contrast, students endorsed more of a fixed mindset when teachers assigned different tasks to different students based on ability. Implications for how to combine teaching practices to support students’ growth mindset are discussed.     

Leading in the Context of Immigration: Cultivating Collective Responsibility for Recently Arrived Immigrant Students

Although school based discourses often frame immigrant students as in need of intervention, leaders can challenge this exclusionary logic, encouraging educators to help students develop linguistic and academic skills while affirming students' rich transnational experiences. This article provides ethnographic images from schools that are effectively serving recently arrived immigrant youth to consider the dimensions of leadership that engender collective responsibility for immigrant youth. In doing so, it considers how school leaders influence how immigrant students are positioned within the sociocultural practices of schools, as well as structures and practices that empower teachers to develop rigorous and responsive curriculum and to support students varied needs.     

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.     

Differential relations of constructivist and didactic instruction to students' cognition,motivation, and achievement

This study examined how constructivist and didactic instruction was related to students' cognitive, motivational, and achievement outcomes in English classrooms, using a sample of 3000 Grade 9 students from 108 classrooms in 39 secondary schools in Singapore. Results of hierarchical linear modeling showed differential cross-level relations. After controlling for students' prior achievement, constructivist instruction was a significant positive predictor of students' deep processing strategies, self-efficacy, task value, and English achievement, whereas didactic instruction was a significant positive predictor of students' surface processing strategies and a negative predictor of English achievement. Our findings underscore the importance of linking instructional practices with multiple outcomes, including psychological factors that are important for student learning.     

Imagined Communities,School Visions,and the Education of Bilingual Students in Japan

The purpose of this study is to analyze the policies and practices of schools in Japan that serve large numbers of bilingual students. Using the notion of imagined communities (Anderson, 1991; Norton, 2001), I examine the relationship between the schools' visions for their students, their current policies and practices, and the students' identities. Based on the ethnographic data collected at four schools in Japan that cater to very different groups of bilingual children, I argue that schools have visions of the communities and societies in which their students will grow up to participate. Moreover, these visions condition the schools' current policies and practices and ultimately affect the identities of the students. Because the students at the four schools are expected to lead different futures, they are being prepared for different kinds of bilingualism. In this stratification process, it is the least privileged bilingual children who are socialized into the most impoverished imagined communities.     

Transforming practice in Design and Technology: evidence from a classroom-based research study of students' responses to an intervention on inclusive design

This article offers evidence from a classroom-based research study in English secondary schools which developed an innovative approach to teaching in Design and Technology based on inclusive design (also known as universal design). The research evidence highlights how creative, problem-solving approaches in Design and Technology can be used to provide authentic, engaging learning experiences for students. This study, entitled ‘Designing our Tomorrows', introduced secondary school teachers and students to the principles and practices of inclusive design through an intervention using specially designed resources. In this article, findings from the study's qualitative pre- and post-intervention interviews are presented to illustrate how this type of approach can stimulate students' creativity and understanding of design.     

Effects of Classroom Assessment Practices on Students' Achievement Goals

This study examined the effects of classroom assessment practices on students' achievement goals. The study included 1,636 ninth grade students and 83 science teachers from Muscat public schools in Oman. Results from hierarchical linear modeling techniques showed that class contextual features and teachers' teaching experiences and assessment practices interacted significantly with students' characteristics in influencing students' achievement goals. Recommendations, implications, and suggestions for practice and future research are discussed.     

Understanding students' use and value of technology for learning

Despite significant research in the field of educational technology, there is still much we do not fully understand about students' experiences with technology. This article proposes that research in the field of educational technology would benefit from a sociological framing that pays attention to the understandings and lives of learners. Within a broader study that aimed to investigate students' use and value of technologies guided by Bourdieu's sociological theory, this article reports on qualitative embedded case study data of 12 students in years 9 and 10 from two Australian secondary schools. The article provides detailed accounts of students' experiences with technologies in various contexts with consideration of the milieu in which technology use occurred, illustrating the heterogeneous and complex network of influencing factors on students' technology practices. The findings and discussion augment the application of Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and capital as a tool to view and understand students' varied and complex experiences and relationships with technology.     

Organizational Characteristics of Schools That Successfully Serve Low-Income Urban African American Students

A prerequisite for correcting ineffective education is the examination of research on the learning environments of successful schools and the conditions and processes that enable quality outcomes. The research described in this article supports the Talent Development philosophy, which rejects deficit-based "talent sorting" models of schooling and promotes widespread academic success in appropriately supportive environments. The study delineates the common organizational characteristics of schools in low-income areas that defy the odds by producing high numbers of high-achieving African American students. Specifically, it explores how urban elementary schools that successfully serve primarily low-income African American students are configured to support students' academic and personal growth.

Participating schools were selected based on test scores evidencing their students' sustained mathematics and reading achievement. The data for the analysis was obtained from questionnaires mailed to the schools' principals. Patterns in the data and discernable trends across schools are described.     

Pasifika students: teachers and parents voice their perceptions of what provides supports and barriers to Pasifika students' achievement in literacy and learning

The changing ethnic population of schools in New Zealand challenges our educators to respond proactively in reviewing how students from minority groups develop effective literacy and learning skills. Pasifika students' achievement levels in literacy, particularly reading and writing literacy, has been an area of national focus for the Ministry of Education, teachers, teacher educators and the Pasifika community. For many students from a minority ethnic group, the interpretation of texts from a different culture provides challenges for teachers that require mediation in the construction of meaning. Our previous research accordingly asked Years 5–9 Pasifika students in mainstream schools in the South Island of New Zealand to tell us what they saw as supports and barriers to their literacy learning. The study that is the subject of this present article built on that research by asking the teachers and parents of Pasifika students in a cluster of schools to state what they thought supported or hindered literacy learning for these youngsters. Our particular aim was to enhance identification and understanding of pedagogical practices and family/community factors which influence literacy learning outcomes for Pasifika students during the primary school years. The research found that Pasifika students' literacy learning, and overall learning, was more likely to be enhanced when Pasifika values, language identities and cultural knowledge were made an implicit part of teaching and learning practices.     

‘Teachers should be like second parents’: affectivity,schooling and poverty in Mexico

The paper highlights the importance of affectivity in school retention in public secondary schools in Guadalajara, Mexico, in a socioeconomic context where the students themselves often decide whether to stay in school or to drop out. In such contexts, students' feelings towards the school and the teachers can become crucial in deciding whether to persist with school or not, especially when they are already under pressure due to economic difficulties and other family pressures. Yet currently, pressures to achieve efficiency in schools limit staff capacity to establish more personal contact with students. The article looks at how three key spaces within Mexican secondaries could potentially reinforce one another to help attend to students' emotional well‐being, but also points to obstacles that currently prevent these spaces from being used in a constructive way.     

Making Sense out of Incentives: A Framework for Considering the Design,Use, and Implementation of Incentives to Improve Attendance

ABSTRACT

Accumulating evidence indicates that student attendance is closely tied to a range of educational outcomes, and yet millions of students are chronically absent each year. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), schools are now held accountable for their students' attendance at a scale this country has never before seen. As such, this is a crucial time to understand what research and evaluations suggest about what schools can do to move the needle on student attendance. As researchers work toward understanding the impact of different interventions and practices, and how results vary by grade level, on-the-ground experiences in schools highlight the pervasive use of incentives from pre-K to grade 12. Schools have employed a wide range of incentives to improve attendance, with varied levels of success. Unfortunately, there is little guidance on what policymakers and practitioners ought to consider when deciding if incentives are an appropriate intervention, and then how to design incentives in ways that align with the nature of specific attendance barriers and problems. This article presents a framework to fill that gap. We outline the design considerations when creating attendance incentives and offer guidance to practitioners deciding what to implement in their school.     

The problem with international students' ‘experiences’ and the promise of their practices: Reanimating research about international students in higher education

The increasing number of people studying abroad has drawn significant scholarly attention to the experiences of international students. While these works have productively informed policy and practice regarding how international students may be better supported, they have not always considered the active ways international students contribute to higher education. This article suggests that adopting the notion of experience as a conceptual starting point is problematic because it only partially illuminates international students' agency and reproduces understandings of them as a vulnerable group. The more active notion of practice, by contrast, suggests a more agentive subject who is a pivotal actor in spaces of education. The main argument in this article is that the abiding focus on international students' experiences will be productively unsettled by orienting attention to their practices and theorising the notion of practice in more fluid and dynamic ways. After critically engaging with the existing literature, the article outlines four ways that a focus on international students' practices may reanimate debates. A focus on practice will: (1) show how international students actively contribute to spaces of higher education, including classrooms, campuses and other sites of sociality; (2) demand that researchers theorise agency in more expansive ways and consider the practices of a broader set of social groups; (3) encourage researchers to make use of a wider set of qualitative research methods; and (4) create a stronger political foundation from which to defend the interests of international students in a post-COVID-19 world.     

Identity Traps or How Black [1] Students Fail: The interactions between biographical,sub-cultural,and learner identities

The enduring inequities experienced by African-Caribbean students in UK schools has been well documented. This paper aims to better understand how these inequities have come to be so enduring. Through detailed analyses of data generated through a school ethnography, this paper demonstrates the processes through which African-Caribbean students are identified as undesirable, or even intolerable, learners. The paper builds on the insights offered by earlier school ethnographies while deploying and developing a new theoretical framework. This framework suggests that the discursive practices of students and teachers contribute to the performative constitution of intelligible selves and others. Drawing on this framework, the paper demonstrates how African-Caribbean race and sub-cultural identities, and further intersecting biographical identities including gender and sexuality, are deployed within organisational discourse as evidence of these students' undesirable learner identities.     

Instructional practices in secondary science: How teachers achieve local and standards-based success

This article reports on analyses of the instructional practices of six middle- and high-school science teachers in the United States who participated in a research-practice partnership that aims to support reform science education goals at scale. All six teachers were well qualified, experienced, and locally successful—respected by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators—but they differed in their success in supporting students' three-dimensional learning. Our goal is to understand how the teachers' instructional practices contributed to their similarities in achieving local success and to differences in enabling students' learning, and to consider the implications of these findings for research-practice partnerships. Data sources included classroom videos supplemented by interviews with teachers and focus students and examples of student work. We also compared students' learning gains by teacher using pre–post assessments that elicited three-dimensional performances. Analyses of classroom videos showed how all six teachers achieved local success—they led effectively managed classrooms, covered the curriculum by teaching almost all unit activities, and assessed students' work in fair and efficient ways. There were important differences, however, in how teachers engaged students in science practices. Teachers in classrooms where students achieved lower learning gains followed a pattern of practice we describe as activity-based teaching, in which students completed investigations and hands-on activities with few opportunities for sensemaking discussions or three-dimensional science performances. Teachers whose students achieved higher learning gains combined the social stability characteristic of local classroom success with more demanding instructional practices associated with scientific sensemaking and cognitive apprenticeship. We conclude with a discussion of implications for research-practice partnerships, highlighting how partnerships need to support all teachers in achieving both local and standards-based success.     

Homophobia and Heterosexism in Public School Reform: Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in California's Single Gender Academies

This article examines heterosexist assumptions and the role of homophobia in students' experiences in California's public "Single Gender Academies," in an effort to include issues of sexuality in current discourses on adolescent gender identity and public school reform. Interviews with students, conducted as part of the most comprehensive research on public single-sex schooling in the U.S. to date, reveal a critical link between students' notions of sexuality and definitions of masculinity and femininity. Alongside dichotomous, static notions of gender, the ideology and structure of the Single Gender Academies largely promoted heterosexist assumptions of students' sexuality. Such assumptions pervaded school policies and practices as well as peer relations and students' sense of gender identity. Students, in turn, both actively constructed and resisted a theory of gender which framed boys and girls in opposition and promoted heterosexuality as the norm. This article provides an analysis of homophobia among students and the influence of academy assumptions on students' attitudes. Such a focus allows for an investigation of gender and sexuality at both individual and institutional levels. While the research is based on data collected at public single-sex schools, the findings provide insight into students' articulations of gender and sexuality across a variety of school contexts.     

Technology Readiness, Learning Goals, and eLearning: Searching for Synergy

More and more business schools are offering classes online or classes using a mix of face‐to‐face and online elements. In this article, we focus on how technology readiness and learning‐goal orientation influence students' preference toward these mixed classes. We conducted a large‐scale survey to determine whether students who are technology ready would place higher utility on enrolling in mixed classes and/or whether there exists a participation bias such that students with low learning‐goal orientation place higher utility on enrolling in mixed classes. We found that overall students who are more technology ready do place higher utility on enrolling in mixed classes, but that learning‐goal orientation does not influence this decision. We conclude with implications and recommendations for business schools that are interested in offering mixed classes.     

Models of power and the deletion of participation in a classroom literacy event

This article uses the analytic lens of power relations and models of power to examine how the participation of two students in an urban US eighth‐grade English language arts class was symbolically and literally deleted. The researcher asks why do some students fail despite being placed in a technologically rich educational environment that ostensibly draws on best practices? Drawing on data collected during an academic year, the author uses a telling case of a dyad engaged in on‐line research and the creation of a PowerPoint presentation to illustrate how the students try to participate and complete the assignment but experience failure. The author raises questions about the context of the students' lives as well as the nature of the classroom instruction and assessment structure. It is argued that further research into the nature of participation is needed to address the lack of student success in urban schools.     

Primary school students' metacognitive beliefs about religious education

So far scholars have researched beliefs about knowledge, knowing, and learning mainly in the areas of science and mathematics and among secondary school students. In this article, we explore primary school students' metacognitive beliefs about religious education. The article reports on a study involving 656 fifth- and sixth-grade students. We investigated their metacognitive beliefs, how these beliefs interrelate, and which students agree with which beliefs. In the minds of young students 7 categories are discernible: realistic learning, the transformative power of religion, social learning, intrinsic task value motivation, learning satisfaction motivation, the teacher's empathic orientation to learning, and the teacher's respect for students' contributions. These categories and their interrelationships open up new perspectives for the construction of a metacognitive beliefs system and for an interconnected network of beliefs across domains. We also outline implications for religious education in schools.     

Responding to external accountability in high-performing,high-capacity public secondary schools in Chile

The qualitative study on which this article reports explored how senior leaders, mathematics and Spanish language teachers (N = 72) in four high-performing, high-poverty, public secondary schools in Chile enact performance-based accountability policies related to standardised assessments. These four public schools were selected because prior to when the study was conducted all were part of the Bicentennial Schools Programme led by the Ministry of Education from 2010 to 2014. The aim of the programme was to develop effective secondary schools to serve low-income students. A thematic analysis of data produced through individual and group interviews and observations of departmental meetings shows that the enactment of performance-based accountability involved two dimensions of learning-centred leadership, distributed among senior leaders and department heads. An aim shared by parents, students, teachers and senior leaders was to ensure students' access to, and completion of, studies in higher education. Attaining good scores in national standardised SIMCE tests was key to meeting the vision. Collective trust among all actors and macro level trust in standardised testing served as a resource for strong collaboration to improve instruction and learning as well as teachers' collective efficacy. The discussion focuses on school-level practices and policy-level decisions that create conditions for the effective use of information produced from standardised assessments. A key point supported by our findings is that successful performance in external assessments is resourced by, and fosters, trust formation in schools.