Preferences for teaching styles matter in academic achievement: scientific and practical implications

The two primary objectives of this study were: to identify the preferred teaching styles of secondary‐school students and to compare these preferences with those of university students from past research; and to examine the contributions of students’ preferred teaching styles to their academic achievement. A sample of 298 students from a Catholic boys’ school completed the Preferred Thinking Styles in Teaching Inventory and the Self‐rated Ability Scale. Participants’ achievements in 12 school subjects were obtained. Results indicated great similarities between the preferred teaching styles of the present sample and those of university students in previous studies. Achievement scores in all 12 subjects were predicted by students’ preferred teaching styles beyond their self‐rated abilities. Some of these predictive relationships were domain‐specific, while others were not. The findings’ scientific and practical implications are discussed.     

Teachers’ Workplace Learning and the Learning Portfolio

During the years 1994‐1996 the Federal Government of Australia conducted the National Professional Development Program (NPDP) for teachers. This paper reports on a project concerned with investigating the views of significant stakeholders about the issue of accreditation of teacher learning in NPDP projects and developing a means by which such accreditation could take place. The project was carried out in the final year of the NPDP and sought to provide a vehicle for teachers to gain university credit for their workplace learning in many of the projects conducted during the three years of the NPDP.     

What were the processes and outcomes of involving secondary school pupils transitioning from primary to secondary school in pre-arrival shared-reading? A case study

ABSTRACT

Coombe Boys’ School in New Malden worked with Kingston University to establish a ‘Big Read’, a scheme of pre-arrival shared-reading for boys transitioning from local primary schools into year 7 of the Coombe Boys’ secondary school. A novel was chosen for shared-reading, and all arriving pupils were given a copy at their Induction Day (at the end of the summer term). Copies were also made available to all staff. The book was the basis of group-based activities during the school’s Summer School (three weeks before of the start of the autumn term) and of cross-curricular individual and group-based activities during the early teaching weeks of the new school year. Outcomes were monitored using online surveys of pupils, staff and parents/guardians, and through face to face interviews with individuals from representative groups. Here outcomes are reported, both direct and indirect, comparisons made with similar schemes within higher education, and recommendations are made for how the scheme might be adapted for greater effectiveness in future.     

Tasks and trajectories in learning to teach

University‐based teacher‐education programmes in the USA confront mounting pressure to demonstrate that graduates will have a significant and positive impact on student achievement. Such pressure has forced teacher educators to wrestle with the question of what constitutes compelling evidence that teacher candidates will indeed have such an impact. This paper presents the deliberations and resulting investigation of a team of university faculty members seeking to account for preservice elementary‐school teachers’ learning and development. It offers a preliminary articulation of a trajectory of learning, and a critique of the tasks and the programmatic experiences from which this trajectory is constructed.     

Foreign Cinema

Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979 – $19.50/ $9.75)

Peter Cowie, Dutch Cinema: An Illustrated History (South Brunswick, New Jersey: A. S. Barnes, 1979–$12.00)

Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (244 pp.)

Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930s (256 pp.)

Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1978–$19.95/$7.95)