Agents and subjects: schooling and conceptions of citizenship in early nineteenth-century Sweden

This article aims to analyse how the emerging Swedish school system in the early nineteenth century can be understood within the context of a gradual break-up of the estate society and its replacement with a class society in which citizenship was an important foundation. This is done through the discussion of the conceptions of citizenship on two levels. The first is the national level, focusing the national debate on education, and the second is the local level, investigating the local schools and the school setting. The main result is that the conceptions of citizenship in the school context were formed along two major lines: an inclusive social and civil citizenship and an exclusive, active and political citizenship. Consequently, the emerging Swedish school system simultaneously fostered these two citizenship conceptions, which coexisted in an educational system that was able to cast pupils as either subjects (comprehensive citizenship) or agents (designated citizenship).     

解读《爱弥儿》中的自然教育

《爱弥儿》成书于1757年,是世界上第一本小说体教育名著。书中,卢梭通过对爱弥儿的教育,阐述了他的自然教育思想,这在当时的法国社会,具有反对封建教育的重大意义。然而用现代人的眼光审视,这种教育却存在一些瑕疵。尽管如此,卢梭的自然教育思想对我国当前教育而言仍具有深远的影响和重大的借鉴意义。     

Making sense of iconic symbols: a study of preschool children conducting a refuse-sorting task

This article is part of a larger project focusing upon explanatory illustrations that children encounter in pre- and primary school education. The research questions concerned (a) how preschool children make sense of iconic symbols when placing items of refuse on illustrations of refuse bins in a sorting task and (b) what stumbling blocks they encounter when interpreting these symbols. Video data were collected with 30 children between four and five?years of age. From the children’s verbal and non-verbal interactions, four different categories of sense-making were constructed: by material, by object type, by appearance and by function. Three stumbling blocks were identified. The first had to do with giving the symbols a different logical meaning to the intended one; the second related to what materials the different refuse items were made of; the third was being able to stick to one correct way of interpreting each symbol.     

Students’ individual and collective efficacy: joining together two sets of beliefs for understanding academic achievement

In this paper, we assume that students’ achievement is influenced not only by a set of individual appraisals such as beliefs about their personal efficacy but also by a set of more systemic factors related to beliefs about their class efficacy as a group. Literature and research review supports that students’ beliefs about their efficacy, both as individuals and as groups, are important predictors of their achievements at school. However, little research has been presented to date that jointly explores the impact of these two sets of beliefs on academic achievement. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present an integrated view of individual and collective efficacy beliefs, exploring the relationship between them and their causal relationship with students’ achievement. Two cross-sectional studies were developed in the Portuguese secondary school context with 385 and 1,794 students, using Academic Self-Efficacy Scale and Students Collective Efficacy Scale to assess individual and collective efficacy beliefs. The main results showed that individual efficacy beliefs were stronger predictors of students’ grades than collective efficacy beliefs, especially when the specific domain of achievement they refer to was considered (for instance, levels of mathematics self-efficacy had a stronger impact on mathematics grades than on Portuguese grades). Moreover, moderating effects of gender and type of school (public vs. non-public) were found, suggesting that collective efficacy beliefs play a more significant role among boys and among students from public schools.     

THE EFFECTS OF A SOCIAL–EMOTIONAL LEARNING PROGRAM ON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN: THE ROLE OF PUPILS’ CHARACTERISTICS

This quasi‐experimental exploratory study investigated whether a social–emotional learning program, implemented during a 1‐year period, could lead to gains in social–emotional competencies and a reduction in internalizing and externalizing problems. Furthermore, it showed which pupils would benefit most from the program. The program was applied to 213 fourth‐grade Portuguese pupils. One hundred five controls followed an Origami curriculum during the same period. Sixteen teachers also participated in this study. Self‐report (pupils) and hetero‐report (teachers) questionnaires were administered before and after the intervention. There were significant intervention gains in some social–emotional competencies, namely, peer relations and social competence, but no gains were found in internalizing and externalizing problems. Intervention pupils with average pre‐test scores profited more in self‐management and peer relations than controls. Boys showed greater gains in self‐management, aggressiveness, and social problems than girls. There were no significant differences regarding socioeconomic status.     

Navigating the Complexity of Socio-scientific Controversies—How Students Make Multiple Voices Present in Discourse

Research in Science Education - In this article, we argue that students’ unfolding discourse on socio-scientific issues (SSI) can be fruitfully analyzed by using dialogical theories of...     

The individual education plan: a gendered assessment practice?

The focus of this study is gendered differences and similarities in the distribution of individual education plan (IEP) targets given to pupils in Swedish schools. IEP writing is seen as part of teachers’ formal assessment practice. Through qualitative content analysis of data, two main target types emerged: learning targets, related to school subject learning; and being targets, related to personality, behaviour and attitude. Whilst the distribution of learning targets in the different sub-categories was similar for boys and girls, clear differences were found in the distribution of different types of being targets. Possible reasons for the gendered distribution of being targets are discussed from a doing-gender perspective. In addition, the paper discusses what is actually assessed in IEPs, whether there is a relation between the ‘ideal pupil’ and gender and whether the strong focus on being aspects detracts from focus on learning aspects.     

Expounding on physics: a phenomenographic study of physicists talking of their physics

Physicists and physics students have been studied with respect to the variation in the ways they expound on their topic of research and a physics problem, respectively. A phenomenographic approach has been employed; six fourth‐year physics students and 10 teacher‐researcher physicists at various stages of their careers have been interviewed. Four qualitatively distinct ways of expounding on physics have been identified, constituting an outcome space where there is a successive shift towards coherent structure and multiple referent domains. The interviewed person is characterized as expressing an ‘object of knowledge’, and the interviewer is characterized as a willing and active listener who is trying to make sense of it, constituting a ‘knowledge object’ out of the ideas expressed and personal experience. Pedagogical situations of analogous character to the interviewer–interviewee discussions are considered in the light of the analysis, focusing on the affordances for learning offered by the different forms of exposition.     

Preverbal Infants' Attention to Manner and Path: Foundations for Learning Relational Terms

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty‐six English‐learning 7‐ to 9‐month‐olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a path, and then tested on events that changed the manner, path, both, or neither. Infants detected each type of change, but only the girls showed evidence of processing manner and path as independent features. This gender difference provides clues about the universal development of manner and path concepts from more basic perceptual skills. Results have implications for how representations of linguistically relevant semantic elements develop conceptually.