Peer observations among faculty in a college of education: investigating the summative and formative uses of the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP)

Teacher educators piloted the use of the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP), a peer observation instrument associated with increases in learning in science and mathematics teacher education courses. Faculty participants received a series of trainings in RTOP use and rated each other’s teaching during multiple peer observations. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the RTOP would prove useful for formative and summative purposes across teacher education courses in general. While participants saw value in the peer observation process and the RTOP instrument, findings suggest that the perceived formative functions of the RTOP outweighed the instrument’s summative value.     

Reading comprehension interventions for middle school students with learning disabilities: a synthesis of 30 years of research

The authors conducted a synthesis of studies of reading comprehension interventions for middle school students (Grades 6-8) identified with a learning disability. They identified 12 studies between 1979 and 2009 with treatment and comparison designs and 2 single-participant studies. Findings from the studies indicate large effect sizes for researcher-developed comprehension measures. Few studies (n = 4) reported standardized measures of reading comprehension, which indicated medium effect sizes. The majority of study treatments (n = 13) utilized strategy instruction related to main idea or summarization.     

Bookselling Online: An Examination of Consumer Behaviour Patterns

Based upon empirical research, and using a range of methods, this paper examines the behaviour and experiences of consumers in online bookselling settings and offers comparison between online and offline (traditional) bookselling. The research finds that while the convenience of online bookshops is important, the key factors enticing consumers online are a combination of breadth of range, ease of access to obscure titles, as well as ‘personalised’ recommendations and customer reviews. The research is of value to the book trade, highlighting consumer responses to widely adopted online marketing approaches. The research also contributes to scholarly knowledge in the fields of consumer behaviour, e-marketing and e-commerce in online bookselling, as well as providing findings which can be tested in other online settings, informing future theoretical research.     

Attitudinal and motivational variables related to mathematics achievement in Jordan: findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of student-related variables on achievement in mathematics. The sample consisted of 3736 13-year-old Jordanian 8th-graders who participated in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The participants completed a student questionnaire and participated in the mathematics test. Of the matrix of affective variables reported to lead to the variation in mathematics achievement were educational aspiration, attitude, success attribution, confidence in ability and perception of importance of mathematics. A structural equation model was used to estimate and test the hypothesized relationships of the factors with achievement in mathematics. Results from this study indicate that four attitudinal and motivational variables had strong positive total and direct effects; and two variables had negative total and direct effects on mathematics achievement. Recommendations for future research were suggested.     

A Comparison of Aggressive-Rejected and Nonaggressive-Rejected Children's Interpretations of Self-Directed and Other-Directed Rejection

The hypothesis that aggressive-rejected children are unaware of their social status because they are self-protective when processing negative peer feedback was tested in 3 studies. In Study 1, fourth-grade girls and boys were asked to name peers they liked or disliked, as well as peers they thought liked or disliked them. Comparisons of aggressive-rejected, nonaggressive-rejected, and average status groups revealed that aggressive-rejected children were more unrealistic in their assessments of their social status than were nonaggressive-rejected children. In Study 2, rejected and average boys identified in Study 1 were asked to name who they thought liked or disliked other children from their classroom. Comparisons of perceived and actual nominations for peers revealed that aggressive-rejected children were able to assess the social status of others as well as did nonaggressive-rejected and average status children. Because the difficulties aggressive-rejected children demonstrated in Study 1 did not generalize to judging the status of others in Study 2, the self-protective hypothesis was supported. Study 3 provided a parallel test of this hypothesis under more controlled conditions. Subjects from Study 2 viewed other children receiving rejection feedback from peers in videotaped interactions and received similar feedback themselves from experimental confederates. While all subjects rated self-directed feedback somewhat more positively than other-directed feedback, aggressive-rejected subjects had the largest self-favoring discrepancy between their judgments of self- and other-directed feedback. These findings also suggest that aggressive-rejected children may make self-protective "errors" when judging other children's negative feelings about them. Ethnicity differences in evaluating peer feedback emerged in Studies 1 and 3, raising questions about the impact of minority status on children's evaluations of rejection feedback.     

Along the Write Lines: a case study exploring activities to enable creative writing in a secondary English classroom.

This article arises from a four week study of a class of 14‐15 year old students. The study explored students’ perception of themselves as writers and the effects of a variety of teaching and learning strategies on their creative writing responses. The aim of the project was to enhance the students’ creative writing, whilst ascertaining whether there were particular activities or types of writing that would lead to students perceiving more satisfactory outcomes in their writing. It answers the research question: What do I observe, and what do my students say, about the experience of different classroom based creative writing tasks?     

SRA Response to Cannell's Article

The author defends SRA's norms, discusses some of the difficulties in pursuing Dr. Cannell's proposals, and points out that we need to monitor not just student achievement levels but also trends in curriculum.     

Sustainability in open access publishing: The ecancer case study

• Innovative business models to complement or replace traditional models of funding academic publishing are currently proliferating.
• Not relying solely on one source of funding is a key factor in sustainability.
• Pay what you can afford (PWYCA) is a new model for article processing charges (APCs) providing both a revenue stream and an opportunity to raise awareness of the cost of publishing amongst authors.
• Treating a journal as part of an overall enterprise rather than as a stand‐alone business contributes significantly to its sustainability.

     

The Influence of Instructor-Student Rapport on Instructors’ Professional and Organizational Outcomes

Students and teachers have relational goals and needs, yet little research has examined the relational goals of instructors and how achieving those goals may affect instructor outcomes. This study examined instructors’ perspectives on instructor-student rapport. Results revealed that instructors who build rapport with students are likely to experience teaching satisfaction, affective commitment to the institution, and enhanced teaching efficacy. However, instructor-student rapport was not related to instructor morale. The findings in this study highlight the importance of positive instructor-student relationships in the classroom and the implications for both instructors and administrators.     

Biopedagogies and Indigenous knowledge: examining sport for development and peace for urban Indigenous young women in Canada and Australia

This paper uses transnational postcolonial feminist participatory action research (TPFPAR) to examine two sport for development and peace (SDP) initiatives that focus on Indigenous young women residing in urban areas, one in Vancouver, Canada, and one in Perth, Australia. We examine how SDP programs that target urban Indigenous young women and girls reproduce the hegemony of neoliberalism by deploying biopedagogies of neoliberalism to ‘teach’ Indigenous young women certain education and employment skills that are deemed necessary to participate in competitive capitalism. We found that activities in both programs were designed to equip the Indigenous girls and young women with individual attributes that would enhance their chances of future success in arenas valued by neoliberal capitalism: Eurocentric employment, post-secondary education and healthy active living. These forms of ‘success’ fall within neoliberal logic, where the focus is on the individual being able to provide for oneself. However, the girls and young women we interviewed argued that their participation in the SDP programs would help them change racist and sexist stereotypes about their communities and thereby challenged negative stereotypes. Thus, it is possible that these programs, despite their predominant use of neoliberal logic and biopedagogies, may help to prepare the participants to more successfully negotiate Eurocentric institutions, and through this assist them participants in contributing to social change. Nevertheless, based on our findings, we argue that SDP programs led by Indigenous peoples that are fundamentally shaped by Indigenous voices, epistemologies, concerns and standpoints would provide better opportunities to shake SDP's current biopedagogical foundation. We conclude by suggesting that a more radical approach to SDP, one that fosters Indigenous self-determination and attempts to disrupt dominant relations of power, could have difficulty in attracting the sort of corporate donors who currently play such important roles in the current SDP landscape.