Practitioners’ constructions of love in early childhood education and care

Love is rarely mentioned in Early Childhood Education and Care and there is no agreed definition for love in this context. In order to explore love in settings practitioner views on the topic should be sought. Unstructured interviews were carried out with senior practitioners in five contrasting settings. A range of qualitative methods were applied to the constructions over an extended period, and a thematic analysis was carried out at the last. Practitioners talked about wide-ranging aspects of practice in response to the narrative prompt about loving children, including the importance of showing to love through touch, familial and non-familial love, loving to be with children, and love as incorporating teaching lessons for the future. A definition of love is needed to facilitate professional discussions about love in settings, away from children’s own homes.     

Evaluating the alignment of self,peer and lecture assessment in an Aotearoa New Zealand pre-service teacher education course

The ability to reflect and self-assess are essential attributes for graduates to develop during their education. At many tertiary institutions, peer and lecturer-assessment contribute to summative assessment, but self-assessment, whilst recommended for development, does not. In order to make a case for the inclusion of self-assessment as a summative assessment task its reliability needs to be analysed, tested and established. This paper reports a study comparing the alignment of self, peer and lecturer-assessment of 34 pre-service teacher-education students and their lecturer. Students annotated a teaching artefact evidencing their attainment of an Aotearoa New Zealand Graduating Teacher Standard. Peer groups of students and their lecturer also assessed the annotated artefacts using the same collaboratively constructed assessment rubric and feedback sheet. While 59% of self, peer and lecturer-assessments fully aligned, in the remaining 41% many of the participants awarded lower grades to their achievement, indicating less confidence concerning their attainment than their peers and lecturer did. Emerging themes from the annotations of those students whose self-ratings were lower than those of their peers and/or the lecturer indicate a need for further research focussed on the potential influence of self-efficacy and cultural responsiveness on the reliability of self-assessment.     

Evaluate to improve: useful approaches to student evaluation

Many teachers in higher education use feedback from students to evaluate their teaching, but only some use these evaluations to improve their teaching. One important factor that makes the difference is the teacher’s approach to their evaluations. In this article, we identify some useful approaches for improving teaching. We conducted focus groups with award-winning university teachers who use student evaluations to improve their teaching, and we identified how they approach their evaluation data. We found that these teachers take a reflective approach, aiming for constant improvement, and see their evaluation data as formative feedback, useful for improving learning outcomes for their students. We summarise this as the improvement approach, and we offer it for other teachers to emulate. We argue that if teachers take this reflective, formative, student-centred approach, they can also use student evaluations to improve their teaching, and this approach should be fostered by institutions to encourage more teachers to use student evaluations to improve their teaching.     

Teacher evaluation: Research versus practice

Summary From the data one can conclude that the majority of the study's districts over-whelmingly continue to opt for the quick, easy, ambiguous, and traditional Trait/Scale Model of evaluation. It also appears that teachers, although they assert that this approach is ineffective and demeaning to them professionally, continue to sign contracts authorizing this mode of evaluation. The one bright light in this picture is that while the traditional Trait/Scale combination is used in 202 districts (see figure 5), the data also show that the districts in the study's sample used the Trait/Scale Model with one or more of the other models available (see figure 5). The model was used with the Performance Objectives Model in 123 districts and with the Teacher Concern Model in 69 districts. This would imply that in the districts responding there was an awareness that the Trait/Scale Model alone was not the answer to effective evaluation, and that there was a need to develop a system which would better acknowledge and nurture the teacher's sense of professionalism and would provide real assistance. Perhaps as the demand for professionalism is internalized and the concommitant demand for accountability grows, there may actually come a time when districts completely relinquish their attachment to the last vestiges of an evaluation model that answers neither demand.     

Using social psychological theory to understand choice of a pSTEM academic major

Abstract

Various social psychological factors have been proposed as influencing the likelihood of pursuing a pSTEM (physical science, technology, engineering, and math) academic major, but no work examines these simultaneously to ask which make independent contributions in explaining pSTEM gender disparities. Three hundred and fifty-two undergraduates in USA completed survey items comprising nine factors identified from previous research. Mean gender differences were evident on six of these: Males more strongly endorsed Gender Determinism (the belief that differences between the genders are real, meaningful, and largely biologically driven), and STEM-specific gender stereotypes (that men are better at math and science), and were more likely to report having an influential pSTEM role model in high school; females more strongly endorsed the importance of felt belonging in their academic major, communality goals, and stigma concerns regarding gender. As a set, the factors accounted for a significant proportion (34%) of the gender disparity in selection of a pSTEM major. Significant indirect effects partially explaining the gender gap in pSTEM major selection were evidenced for four of the factors: Gender Determinism, Belonging Importance, Communal Goals, and having a pSTEM high school role model. The findings speak to the unique ability of these factors to predict pSTEM major selection, and gender disparities in these.     

Longitudinal Relations among Maternal Self-Efficacy,Maternal Warmth,and Early Adolescents’ Prosocial Behavior

SYNOPSIS

Objective. This article examined two-wave longitudinal paths among maternal self-efficacy, maternal warmth, and early adolescents’ prosocial behavior. Design . Participants were 194 Italian mother/child dyads from 9–13 years at the first assessment and 12–15 years at the second assessment. Using a two-wave longitudinal design, the present study tested cross-lagged paths among maternal self-efficacy, warmth, and early adolescents’ prosocial behavior controlling for the stability of these variables and their concurrent associations. Results . Maternal warmth mediated the link between maternal self-efficacy and adolescents’ prosocial behavior, and bi-directional effects between maternal self-efficacy and maternal warmth were found. Conclusions . These findings support a parent-driven model in the promotion of prosocial behaviors across early adolescence and a general need to consider simultaneously parental cognitions (maternal self-efficacy) and actions (maternal warmth) in explaining adolescents’ prosocial behaviors. Implications for parenting program interventions are discussed.     

Torsions Within the Same Anxiety? Entification, apophasis, history

In Anglophone educational research in the United States, the name Foucault has been more pointedly celebrated in some subfields such as curriculum studies relative to its more noticeable censorship in subfields such as history of education. This paper illustrates how such differential epistemological politics might be accounted for through reapproaching the challenges to historiography that Histoire de la Folie (Madness and Civilization) raised. Through the formalist lens of performative apophasis, and with attention to the dependencies of discourse that characterize narrative prosthesis, this paper re-engages the least referenced of Foucault's major histories in the educational field to bring into noticeability other 'conditions of possibility'—ones that explicate how an apophatic turn might account for divergent reactions to less familiar philosophies of history and/or to 'alternative' approaches to documents through which history is now being narrated and critiqued in education and beyond.     

International technology transfers and international technology payments: Definitions,measurement and firms' behaviour

This paper deals with some methodological issues related to the recording and measurement of international transfers of technology by technological balances of payments. Because technology can circulate internationally under many guises, in the form of goods, services or scientific and technical information it is necessary to define the international transfer of technology, as part of the overall circulation of technology. Furthermore it appears that technological balances of payments include other components beside the technology payments linked to international transfers strictly speaking. But conversely there exist technology transfers which are not recorded at all. Section 2 of the article is devoted to definition and interpretation issues so as to ascertain to what extent technological balances of payments correspond to international transfers of technology. Section 3 examines how technology transfers, once recorded, are measured. Measurement problems cover three issues: the transfer price, the economic value of technology transferred and the national significance of the flows recorded. These issues are examined with reference to the technology market and the firm's behaviour at the international level. Special features of technology as an intangible asset explain the ways in which it is traded and particularly the extent of intra-firm transfers taking place inside the multinational enterprises: this may eventually be related to the “transactional approach” to the multinational enterprises. Recent trends in international technology payments as well as international direct investments are then examined. In conclusion, the article provides some recommendations concerning the possible improvement and interpretation of technological balance of payments as a partial indicator of the international diffusion of technology.