Beliefs about teaching and uses of technology among pre‐service teachers

In the current learning environments, technology is integrated in different ways. Teachers acting in the capacity of main change agents bring with them beliefs about teaching which effects their use of technology in the classroom. This study aims to examine the possible relationship between teachers' beliefs about teaching and uses of technology. Unlike past research on this issue, the results from this study show that belief in constructivist teaching correlates significantly with both constructivist and traditional uses of technology. However, a belief in traditional teaching is only significantly correlated (negatively) with constructivist use of technology. Implications for teaching training and future research are discussed.     

Teaching strategies to improve students’ vocabulary and text comprehension

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Good readers use various comprehension strategies to understand texts. However, many students lack knowledge on how to purposefully and effectively use...     

Do students’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing predict their judgement of texts’ trustworthiness?

We examined whether epistemic beliefs predict students’ evaluation of documents. Undergraduates read two texts on climate change. Participants judged the trustworthiness of each text and then indicated the criteria for their rating. We found that readers who believe strongly in relying on personal interpretations rather than on authorities trusted both documents less and used the document’s content or their own opinion as criteria for judging trustworthiness. We also found that readers who believe that knowledge claims should be critically evaluated through logic and rules rated the science text as more trustworthy and used the criteria of their own opinion, author and content more than readers who believe in relying on their own experiences. These effects hold true while controlling for readers’ prior knowledge and text comprehensibility.     

Component skills affecting elementary students’ informational text comprehension

This study was conducted to examine the factors that influence informational text comprehension and to determine how these vary for students with higher and lower component skills. The sample included 177 students in grades 3–5. Regression analyses were used to predict informational text comprehension with decoding efficiency, vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, and intrinsic motivation. This model, that also included age and grade as control variables, explained 62.5 % of the variance in informational text comprehension. Each component skill explained unique variance, and vocabulary knowledge accounted for the largest portion. Next, we examined whether the factors contributed differently to informational text comprehension for students with higher and lower component skills. Overall, the regressions were better predictors for students with higher than those with lower component skills. For students with lower component skills, motivation and vocabulary were consistent predictors, whereas vocabulary and decoding efficiency were consistent predictors for students with higher component skills. The findings indicate multiple factors are important for informational text comprehension, particularly vocabulary, and research should examine this topic for different types of readers.     

Correction to: What do upper‑elementary and middle school teachers know about the processes of text comprehension?

Reading and Writing -     

Students’ and teachers’ monitoring and regulation of students’ text comprehension: Effects of comprehension cue availability

For regulation of text learning to be effective, students need to accurately monitor their text comprehension. Similarly, to provide adaptive instruction, teachers need to accurately monitor and regulate students’ text comprehension. Performing generative activities prior to monitoring has been suggested to provide students with diagnostic cues, improving monitoring accuracy; an open question is whether this would also help teachers. We investigated whether two generative activities, diagram completion and diagram drawing, improved secondary education students’ (n = 248) monitoring and regulation accuracy of text comprehension (Experiment 1) and whether viewing students’ diagrams improved teachers’ (N = 18) monitoring and regulation of students’ text comprehension (Experiment 2). Students’ monitoring and teachers’ regulation accuracy was higher in the diagramming conditions than in the no-diagramming condition. Students and teachers used diagnostic cues when judging students’ text comprehension: Improving students’ monitoring and teachers’ regulation of students’ text comprehension relies on improving accessibility of diagnostic cues.     

Teacher-education students’ views about knowledge building theory and practice

This study investigated the effects of engaging students to collectively learn and work with knowledge in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment called Knowledge Forum on their views about knowledge building theory and practice. Participants were 24 teacher-education students who took a required course titled “Integrating Theory and Practice in Teaching.” Data mainly came from (1) student discourse recorded in a Knowledge Forum database, (2) a survey that examined students’ views about knowledge building, and (3) interviews with regard to students’ perceived barriers to implementing knowledge building theory in teaching. Findings suggest that with sustained discourse to construct their collective understanding of the relationships between theory and practice in teaching for a semester, the participants were able to attain more informed and practical views about knowledge building theory. In addition, students’ perceived barriers to implementing knowledge building in teaching were identified and strategies to help overcome these barriers discussed.     

Expository text comprehension in secondary school: for which readers does knowledge of connectives contribute the most?

The present study examined whether knowledge of connectives contributes uniquely to expository text comprehension above and beyond reading fluency, general vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive knowledge. Furthermore, it was examined whether this contribution differs for readers with different language backgrounds or readers who vary in reading fluency, general vocabulary knowledge or metacognitive knowledge levels. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that knowledge of connectives explained individual differences in eighth graders' text comprehension (n = 171) on top of the variance accounted for by the control variables. Moreover, the contribution of knowledge of connectives to text comprehension depended on a reader's level of metacognitive knowledge: more metacognitive knowledge resulted in a larger association between knowledge of connectives and text comprehension. Reading fluency, vocabulary knowledge and language background did not interact with knowledge of connectives. Findings are interpreted in the context of the strategic use of connectives during expository text reading.

What is already known about this topic?

• Connectives (words such as moreover, because and although) help the reader in establishing coherence between text parts.
• In primary school, for fifth graders, knowledge of connectives has been shown to be uniquely related to English text comprehension controlling for reading fluency and general vocabulary knowledge.
• For fifth graders, the relationship between knowledge of connectives and English text comprehension was higher for English‐only students than for their peers who learned English as a second language.

What this paper adds:

• The present study found that knowledge of connectives also has a unique relation with Dutch expository text comprehension for eighth graders above and beyond reading fluency, general vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive knowledge (about text structure and reading and writing strategies).
• The relationship between knowledge of connectives and text comprehension was not moderated by reading fluency, general vocabulary knowledge and language background (monolingual versus bilingual Dutch).
• Metacognitive knowledge did impact the relationship between knowledge of connectives and text comprehension: the higher the metacognitive knowledge, the higher the association between knowledge of connectives and text comprehension.

Implications for theory, policy or practice

• Secondary school readers are assumed to benefit from knowing connectives because these words are frequent in expository texts and signal relationships that students may often not infer without the help of these devices (i.e., with the use of background knowledge). This seems to apply in particular for expository texts that are intended to convey new information and relationships to students (see also Singer & O'Connell, 2003 ).
• We found a significant interaction between knowledge of connectives and metacognitive knowledge, which seems to indicate that knowing more connectives does not help much in improving expository text comprehension when metacognitive knowledge about text structure and reading strategies is low. This result suggests that it may be wise to couple instruction on the meaning of connectives with instruction about the structure of expository texts and ways to strategically deal with these texts.
• More specifically, besides instruction on the meaning of connectives, we advise teachers in secondary school to get students to understand the importance of connectives as markers of local and global coherence in texts, and to teach them how to strategically use connectives during reading.

     

General and special education teachers’ knowledge about reading comprehension processes and instructional practices

Reading and Writing - The study investigated teachers’ knowledge of reading comprehension processes and reading comprehension instruction. The study was carried out among teachers...     

Hong Kong senior secondary students’ reading motivation and classical Chinese reading comprehension

Reading and Writing - This study investigated Hong Kong secondary students’ Classical Chinese (CC) reading comprehension, reading motivation, and the effects of different types of motivation...     

Between ideology and institution: the curriculum of upper‐secondary education

This study examines apparently similar historical phenomena in 19^th‐century Prussia and Switzerland: the establishment of modern foreign languages in the curriculum of upper‐secondary education. Through the course of the 19^th century, there appear to have been great transnational European affinities with regard to both the differentiation of the upper‐secondary education into types and the development of the curriculum. However, the contextualization of the curriculum within the overall organization of the school system raises doubts as to whether the similarity is more than only quantitative. A second contextualization of the overall organization of education within cultural convictions also reveals fundamental differences rooted in different political convictions, such as monarchism and republicanism. As a result, despite the formal similarities, the establishment of the foreign language education in Switzerland and Prussia could not have been more different.     

What do upper-elementary and middle school teachers know about the processes of text comprehension?

Reading and Writing - Teachers’ knowledge of reading comprehension processes is underresearched relative to teachers’ knowledge of word identification and phonological awareness. In...     

Finnish pre-service teachers’ and upper secondary students’ understanding of division and reasoning strategies used

In this paper, we focus on Finnish pre-service elementary teachers’ (N?=?269) and upper secondary students’ (N?=?1,434) understanding of division. In the questionnaire, we used the following non-standard division problem: “We know that 498:6?=?83. How could you conclude from this relationship (without using long-division algorithm) what 491:6?=?? is?” This problem especially measures conceptual understanding, adaptive reasoning, and procedural fluency. Based on the results, we can conclude that division seems not to be fully understood: 45% of the pre-service teachers and 37% of upper secondary students were able to produce complete or mainly correct solutions. The reasoning strategies used by these two groups did not differ very much. We identified four main reasons for problems in understanding this task: (1) staying on the integer level, (2) an inability to handle the remainder, (3) difficulties in understanding the relationships between different operations, and (4) insufficient reasoning strategies. It seems that learners’ reasoning strategies in particular play a central role when teachers try to improve learners’ proficiency.     

Teachers’ monitoring of students’ text comprehension: can students’ keywords and summaries improve teachers’ judgment accuracy?

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy. Teachers also judged their students’ learning for each text, while seeing - if present - the keywords or summaries each student had written for each text, and also selected texts for restudy. Overall, monitoring accuracy was low (.10 for students, ?.02 for teachers) and did not differ between cue-prompt conditions. Regulation, indexed by the correlation between JOLs and restudy selections, was significant (?.38 for students, ?.60 for teachers), but was also not affected by cue-prompt condition. In Experiment 2, teachers judged students’ comprehension of six texts without knowing the students’ names, so that only the keywords and summaries, not prior impressions, could inform judgments. Again, monitoring accuracy was generally low (.06), but higher for keywords (.23) than for summaries (?.10). These results suggest that monitoring intra-individual differences in students’ learning is challenging for teachers. Analyses of the diagnosticity and utilization of keywords suggest that these may contain insufficient cues for improving teacher judgments at this level of specificity.     

Developing culturally responsive mathematics teachers: secondary teachers’ evolving conceptions of knowing students

Research advances in teaching, learning, curriculum, and assessment have not changed the continued underperformance of marginalized students in mathematics education. Culturally responsive teaching is a means of addressing the needs of these students. It is sometimes challenging, however, to convince secondary mathematics teachers about the importance of culture in mathematics education. To contribute to what is known about supporting secondary mathematics teachers in developing a culturally responsive teaching practice, we studied the impacts of a graduate course called Culture in the Mathematics Classroom on 13 teachers enrolled in the course. The course was designed to guide secondary mathematics teachers in understanding and growing their capacity to enact culturally responsive teaching in their classrooms. The purpose of our research was to explore how teachers’ perceptions changed as a result of their engagement in the class with respect to understanding the role of culture in knowing and being responsive to their students. Specifically, we examined how each of the four course projects seemed to individually and collectively influence teachers’ thinking. Overall, teachers appeared to expand their cultural awareness and dispositions for cultural responsiveness that would support them in knowing and supporting their students in the manner of a culturally responsive teacher. Teachers did not, however, develop some more “advanced” understandings related to power and privilege in society. This study provides researchers and mathematics teacher educators with a potential analytic framework for understanding teacher change with respect to culturally responsive teaching.     

The incremental variance of morphological knowledge to reading comprehension in grades 3–10 beyond prior reading comprehension,spelling, and text reading efficiency

We know that knowledge of word structure—morphology—relates to reading, but there is limited research on its unique contribution to reading comprehension, especially with students in middle and high schools and with the nesting of students within classrooms taken into account. In this study with 4780 students in grades 3 to 10, we examined how students' winter scores in morphological knowledge, spelling, text reading efficiency, and reading comprehension predicted spring scores in reading comprehension. Reading comprehension was measured by a computeradaptive, interim reading assessment. Bivariate relations were examined and a strong relation between morphological knowledge and reading comprehension was observed in all grades except grade 10. Multilevel analyses showed that morphological knowledge added 2%–9% unique variance beyond the autoregressor in predicting spring reading comprehension at the student level and that over 90% of the large variability between classrooms was explained by performance on these component skills. Educational implications were discussed.     

First‐year secondary school mathematics students’ conceptions of mathematical proofs and proving

The aim of this study is to investigate students’ conceptions about proof in mathematics and mathematics teaching. A five‐point Likert‐type questionnaire was administered in order to gather data. The sample of the study included 33 first‐year secondary school mathematics students (at the same time student teachers). The data collected were analysed and interpreted using the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results have revealed that the students think that mathematical proof has an important place in mathematics and mathematics education. The students’ studying methods for exams based on imitative reasoning which can be described as a type of reasoning built on copying proof, for example, by looking at a textbook or course notes proof or through remembering a proof algorithm. Moreover, they addressed to the differences between mathematics taught in high school and university as the main cause of their difficulties in proof and proving.     

Educating voters: political education in Norwegian upper‐secondary schools

Research on political education in schools suggests that an emphasis on formal structure, constitutional principles, formal citizen rights, and debates on current issues is common. The Norwegian national curriculum on political education envisions a different political education emphasizing that students should be critical of political life and social structures, that they should be familiar with democratic ideals, learn how they may influence by means of various forms of political participation, and be motivated to do so. I examine whether these ambitions are realized at the classroom level. Based on qualitative interviews and classroom observations I conclude that Norwegian political education is centred on political parties and on an attempt to help students find out which party is closest to their preferences. Political education takes the form of voter training for competitive élite democracy.