Academic Mobbing in Relation to Leadership Practices: A New Perspective on an Old Issue

Abstract

Constant pressures emanating from internal and external environments of the academy have resulted in many changes, one of which is the workplace mobbing, an old issue for the broader field of organization science but a relatively new phenomenon in the academic context. This study investigated the relationship between workplace mobbing and academic leadership and the results indicated that the more positive leadership there is in an institution, the less mobbing behaviors are observed.     

History teaching as a nation-building tool in the early republican period in Turkey (1923–1938)

Nation-states needed various ideological apparatuses when they wanted to eliminate traditional loyalties to the pre-modern era and establish a new superordinate identity. As frequently emphasised in conceptual discussions, two elements among these ideological apparatuses come to the fore: historiography and education. While social values that create a national identity have been constructed by historiography continuously from the past to the present, it aims at spreading such values through education. History education at the intersection of these two concepts has occupied a privileged place in the nation-building process. The most concrete examples of this phenomenon are the developments experienced in the context of history teaching in Turkey from 1923 to 1938, also known as the early republican period. The present study, using history textbooks, analyses changes in history teaching and expectations of it between 1923 and 1938, which were the most active years of the nationalisation period in Turkey. The findings of this study indicate that the historiography of the early republican period adopted an anthropology-based understanding in line with the conjuncture between the two world wars and that, in accordance with this understanding, a national identity with ethnic, religious, and political dimensions was intended to be promulgated through history teaching.     

Effects of the Integrated Online Advance Organizer Teaching Materials on Students’ Science Achievement and Attitude

This two-group quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of the Online Advance Organizer Concept Teaching Material (ONACOM) integrated with inquiry teaching and expository teaching methods. Grade 7 students’ posttest performances on the light unit achievement and light unit attitude tests controlled for gender, previous semester science grade, and pretest scores were analyzed. No significant treatment effects were found between the inquiry and expository approaches. However, both groups demonstrated significant pretest–posttest gains in achievement and attitude. Independent from the method used, ONACOM was judged effective in both groups as students demonstrated increased achievement and attitude scores. ONACOM has a social and semantic network-aided infrastructure that can be adapted to both methods to increase students’ achievement and improve their attitude.     

Are we all in this together?: mathematics teachers’ perspectives on equity in remote instruction during pandemic

Educational Studies in Mathematics - The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented situation that influenced all aspects of society, including education. Millions of students found themselves adjusting...     

Which One Is More Effective in Teaching the Phases of the Moon and Eclipses: Hands-On or Computer Simulation?

Research in Science Education - The aim of this study is to comparatively investigate the effects of hands-on models (HMs) and computer simulations (CSs) on teaching the phases and eclipses of the...     

The PISA Tasks: Unveiling Prospective Elementary Mathematics Teachers’ Difficulties with Contextual,Conceptual, and Procedural Knowledge

The aim of this mixed methods study was to investigate the difficulties prospective elementary mathematics teachers have in solving the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 released items. A mathematics test consisting of 26 PISA items was administered, followed by interviews. Multiple data were utilized to provide rich insights into the types of mathematical knowledge that a particular item requires and prospective teachers’ difficulties in using these knowledge types. A sample of 52 prospective teachers worked the mathematics test, and 12 of them were interviewed afterwards. The data-sets were complementary: the quantitative data showed that PISA items could be categorized under contextual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge and indicated the most frequent difficulties in the combined contextual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge items. The qualitative data revealed that few prospective teachers could give mathematical explanations for conceptual knowledge items, and that their contextual knowledge was fragmented. Educational implications were discussed.     

Argumentation-based learning with digital concept mapping and college students’ epistemic beliefs

We designed an educational activity for undergraduate students and assessed how this newly-constructed activity promoted students’ argumentation skills, thereby fostering their epistemic beliefs. This argumentation-based learning activity involved digital concept mapping. A quasi-experimental design involved pretests and posttests that were administered to 52 research participants in a group and 61 participants in a control group. Students’ argumentation skills were qualitatively examined by analyzing the structure of their arguments before and after the activity. Their perceptions of the activity and epistemic belief types (from absolutism to evaluativism) were measured with the Epistemic Beliefs Scale and the Concept Mapping for Problem-Based Learning Scale. The designed activity evoked epistemic change toward evaluativism among the students who were enrolled in the activity, whereas nonsignificant results emerged for the control group. However, for both pretest and posttest, the highest score was for Absolutist, followed by Multiplist, and Evaluativist had the lowest mean. The technology-enabled concept-mapping tool supported the research group’s online argumentation design. This tool helped students mainly at the cognitive level to discern between the arguments and better learn the topic. These findings are interpreted in relation to student characteristics.

     

Pre-service English language teachers’ collaborative development: the emergence of research,rehearsal and reflection (3R) model from an activity theory perspective

This study aims to understand how pre-service teachers’ activities shape (and are shaped) by the norms of schooling embedded in the national educational system from an activity theory lens. The data are obtained from video-recordings and bi-weekly reflective journals in microteaching sessions, lesson plans, classroom observations, and post feedback sessions. The analysis points to the stages, micro- and macro-networking levels that lead to the collaborative teacher development, and the emergence of a model in the growth of pre-service teachers. Overall, it is found that the development of pre-service teachers depends largely on the norms of schooling embedded in the national curriculum and the nature of training they received at undergraduate level. The paper concludes by confirming Engeström’s statement that understanding the evolution and historical change of pre-service teacher education in a special context might help investigate how activities change, develop, and interconnect with social and material structures.     

Participation in online courses from the students’ perspective

The purpose of this study is to uncover factors that affect participation in online classes from the student’s perspective. Interest in the online environment has been increasing and renders the opinions of students participating in online courses more important since the opinions of students in this environment are closely related to interaction. It has been seen that lack of interaction creates a sense of loneliness, which causes students to drop their classes. For this reason, a qualitative study has been conducted about student experiences on the use of methods that increase interaction in an online environment and participation. Participants were given tasks based on collaboration, special attention was paid to make sure that the setting in which the participants found themselves was in accordance with the principles of the community of inquiry, computerized equipment was used to facilitate online interactions. 15 students worked based on collaboration and 15 students worked individually. Data was collected with interviews and reflection reports. Open, axial and selective coding was made by using the theorizing method. At the end of the study, it was determined that participation in online environment was affected in both groups by factors such as personal approaches, changing variables, mediated attributes.     

Constructivist learning and openness to diversity and challenge in higher education environments

The increasing calls for diversity research signal a need to explore contemporary learning and instruction strategies that respond to diversity in courses and curricula. The major objective of this research was to measure the level of openness to diversity and challenge (ODC) among college students as a function of their perceived constructivist learning environment in traditional lecture-based courses (LBE) and seminars (SM). The study included 243 undergraduate students. Data were gathered using the Constructivist Learning in Higher Education Settings scale (CLHES), which measures students’ perceptions of the occurrence of constructivist practices in learning environments along three dimensions of constructive activity, teacher–student interaction and social activity, and the Openness to Diversity and Challenge scale. Structural equation modelling (SEM) results indicated a positive connection between the general factor of CLHES and ODC over and above several pre-entry variables such as gender and culture. According to a further SEM analysis, the social activity variable mainly explained the ODC variable whereas the teacher–student interaction factor was mainly connected to the constructive activity variable. Multivariate analysis of variance results indicated that students enrolled in SM perceived this environment as more constructivist and reported having higher levels of feelings of ODC than LBE students. Interpretation of these findings, in conjunction with theory, applications, and implications for future research are discussed.