Strategies for Affecting the Necessary Course of Cognitive Growth as an Integral Part of Curricular and Instructional Planning

This paper explores the public awareness that there presently exists a crisis in mathematics education and a “dumbingdown" of the curriculum, examines the nature of this crisis and argues that there has been a lowering of cultural, pedagogical and cognitive expectations with respect to most learners. The notion of cognitive development in mathematics education is re-examined and a model of how the concepts of learners can be transformed in the very process of engaging with the conceptual revolutions that defined geometry is proposed. The importance of cultivating a meta-narrative in support of metacognition and the development of cognitive growth are stressed.     

A new paradigm for mentored undergraduate research in molecular microbiology

Science educators agree that an undergraduate research experience is critical for students who are considering graduate school or research careers. The process of researching a topic in the primary literature, designing experiments, implementing those experiments, and analyzing the results is essential in developing the analytical skills necessary to become a true scientist. Because training undergraduates who will only be in the laboratory for a short period is time consuming for faculty mentors, many students are unable to find appropriate research opportunities. We hypothesized that we could effectively mentor several students simultaneously, using a method that is a hybrid of traditional undergraduate research and a traditional laboratory course. This article describes a paradigm for mentored undergraduate research in molecular microbiology where students have ownership of their individual projects, but the projects are done in parallel, enabling the faculty mentor to guide multiple students efficiently.     

Picturebook Endpapers: Resources for Literary and Aesthetic Interpretation

In this article, we explore one of the important peritextual features of picturebooks—the endpapers. In order to represent the rich diversity of form and function displayed by endpapers, we group examples along two dimensions: whether the endpapers are illustrated or unillustrated, and whether the front and back end papers are identical or dissimilar. Within the four categories delineated by these two dimensions, we further articulate the various roles that endpapers can play in the construction of meaning from picturebooks. We present quotations from young children that show how they use endpapers as resources for literary and aesthetic interpretation, and provide suggestions for the integration of talk about endpapers within classroom literature discussions.

Exploring the association between teachers’ perceived student misbehaviour and emotional exhaustion: the importance of teacher efficacy beliefs and emotion regulation

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between teachers’ perceived student misbehaviour and emotional exhaustion, and the role of teacher efficacy beliefs (related to handling student misbehaviour) and emotion regulation in this relationship. Additionally, we examined teacher turnover intentions in relation to emotional exhaustion. Data were collected from 610 elementary, middle‐ and high‐school teachers using an online survey. Results indicate that despite the significant direct effect between the two emotion regulation strategies (cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression) on emotional exhaustion, both strategies failed to show a mediating effect between perceived student misbehaviour and emotional exhaustion. However, teacher efficacy in handling student misbehaviour was found to mediate the relationship between perceived student misbehaviour and emotional exhaustion. In turn, a significant relationship was found between emotional exhaustion and turnover intentions. Furthermore, teacher perception of student misbehaviour was found to have a considerable indirect effect on teacher turnover intentions. Findings signify the importance of developing strategies that enhance teachers’ situation‐specific efficacy beliefs.     

Brief Therapy at a University Counseling Center: Working Alliance,Readiness to Change,and Symptom Severity

The authors investigated whether students receiving short–term individual counseling at a university counseling center showed progress as evidenced by perceived client and counselor outcomes and the roles that client readiness to change and working alliance played in this setting. The results indicated that the counselor reports, not the client reports, reflected statistically significant change in client symptoms. Changes in symptom severity were not associated with working alliance and readiness to change.     

Speaking of Supervision: A dialogic approach to building higher degree research supervision capacity in the creative arts

Abstract

In the emergent field of creative practice higher degrees by research, first generation supervisors have developed new models of supervision for an unprecedented form of research, which combines creative practice and a written thesis. In a national research project, entitled ‘Effective supervision of creative practice higher research degrees’, we set out to capture and share early supervisors’ insights, strategies and approaches to supporting their creative practice PhD students. From the insights we gained during the early interview process, we expanded our research methods in line with a distributed leadership model and developed a dialogic framework. This led us to unanticipated conclusions and unexpected recommendations. In this study, we primarily draw on philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogics to explain how giving precedence to the voices of supervisors not only facilitated the articulation of dispersed tacit knowledge, but also led to other discoveries. These include the nature of supervisors’ resistance to prescribed models, policies and central academic development programmes; the importance of polyvocality and responsive dialogue in enabling continued innovation in the field; the benefits to supervisors of reflecting, discussing and sharing practices with colleagues; and the value of distributed leadership and dialogue to academic development and supervision capacity building in research education.