Assessing levels of student understanding in pre-service teachers using a two-cycle SOLO model

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study concerning the development of higher-order conceptual understanding of Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) among physical education pre-service teachers. The development of such understandings has been seen as problematic among pre-service teachers (Randall, 2003 Randall, L. 2003. Preservice teachers' understanding of teaching games for understanding approach to content delivery. Avante, 9(1): 49–61.  [Google Scholar]). An analysis of the responses given in a high- stakes examination of 165 pre-service physical education teachers was used to investigate varying levels of understanding in TGfU pedagogy. This paper reports specific examples of student responses in a written high-stakes examination and justifies how a two-cycle structure of the observed learning outcome (SOLO) model can discriminate between the demonstrations of surface and deep conceptual understandings.     

Social and analytic scaffolding in middle school mathematics: managing the dilemma of telling

The current reform movement in mathematics education urges teachers to support students as they make sense of mathematics, while also ensuring that they gain specific mathematical skills and knowledge. The tension between these two expectations gives rise to what we call the dilemma of telling: how to ensure that students come to certain mathematical understandings, without directly telling them what they need to know or do. Our study focused on how two middle school mathematics teachers who were incorporating many aspects of reform mathematics into their instruction responded to this dilemma. Data sources include classroom observations and videotapes of lessons over a three-year period. We found that both teachers devoted the majority of class time to student conversations, both small group and whole class; however, the teachers strategically entered the student-dominated conversations by “telling” to meet specific curricular goals.     

The mass media and young people

The study reported below analyzes differences in mass media attention behavior in Des Moines school children in 1950 and 1958. It is interesting to compare its findings with those of Edwin Parker, starting on page 39 of this issue of the Journal.     

Dialogic voices in talk about drinking and pregnancy

Alcohol use during pregnancy poses a significant risk of fetal alcohol syndrome. This study presents the interpretive findings of the formative research phase of a funded grant to develop a community‐based public health media campaign on the topic of drinking during pregnancy. In the initial wave of data collection, 50 rural women were recruited from four Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics in southeastern Iowa to participate in semi‐structured interviews. In the second wave, 10 additional WIC clients were interviewed for member‐checking purposes. Findings revealed two competing discourses that organized these women's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding drinking and pregnancy: the discourse of individualism and the discourse of responsible motherhood. These two discourses offer opposing normative guidelines for talk among their close female relatives and friends. The implications of these findings for designing a community‐based media campaign are discussed.     

Attribution‐based strategies for initiating and terminating friendships

Research in attribution theory has almost exclusively focused on the perception process to the neglect of studying how communicators incorporate attribution‐based information in their message behavior. This study derived a typology of attribution‐based strategies from Kelley's attribution cube and Jones' ingratiation tactics to assess respondent strategies for initiating and for terminating same‐sex friendships. Respondents were 191 persons drawn from fifth grade, high school, college, and post‐college groups. Results of the study included: 1) distinctiveness information was disproportionately employed in the strategy repertoires to the neglect of consistency‐based and consensus‐based information; 2) respondents had greater variety in types of strategies for their initiation repertoires as opposed to their termination repertoires; 3) repertoire variety for both initiation and termination increased from childhood through adolescence.