Supporting pupils in school with social,emotional and mental health needs: a scoping review of the literature

This article reports on a scoping review of the academic and related literature published between 2000 and 2015 that addressed the education provision for secondary aged pupils with social, emotional and/or mental health difficulties (SEMH) conducted over a six week period in 2015. A total of 168 documents met the inclusion criteria for the review, including 110 peer reviewed journal articles. The authors found an emerging evidence base to support more effective provision for pupils with SEMH, but there remains, particularly at the group and individual level a dearth of literature. Underpinning all the successful programmes in this review was a positive approach adopted by teachers and school leaders to pupils with SEMH. There was an overlap in practice between approaches used at universal, group and individual level but the majority of effective approaches were common to mainstream and specialist settings.     

Teachers' concepts in science

Conclusion The basic assumption underlying this study is that science teachers have misconceptions in some selected science concepts. The overall conclusion which can be drawn is that, although the responses were not consistent across the concepts or within the concepts, there are indeed misconceptions. The result is evidence that the graduate trainee teachers have misconceptions in science. The results show that the view of science held by this group of trainee teachers is sometimes little better than the view of science held by students investigated by Osborne et al. The test appears appropriate for use with science teachers. What do these results imply? They suggest that science teachers may have concepts which are little better than the students they teach. If that is the case, then, is it reasonable to urge teachers to probe their students' concepts before teaching them? Should science educators then redirect their efforts in conceptual change to changing teachers' views before changing students' views?     

Valuing epistemic diversity in educational research: an agenda for improving research impact and initial teacher education

Research in education draws upon a wide range of epistemological traditions due in part to the wide range of problems that are investigated. While this diversity might be considered a strength of the field, it also makes researchers who work within it vulnerable to being divided into those worth listening to and those who should be ignored by ‘end-users’. These people and groups who are interested in the outcomes of educational research, such as policy makers and system providers, increasingly expect research findings to be accessible, and to inform questions of the ‘what works’ variety. Under this imperative, research processes that elaborate the complexity of educational problems, and the provisional, partial and contingent nature of solutions, tend to be dismissed as unnecessarily complex and inaccessible. Epistemological diversity in educational research also presents challenges for inducting teacher education students into the profession. We outline some of these challenges in a discussion of epistemological diversity in research in education. We also describe differences in how research traditions construct educational problems. We argue that crossing epistemic boundaries is a necessary condition of the educational practices of teachers and of those preparing to join their ranks. We compare and contrast knowledge-producing processes in education and identify the repertoires of capabilities and habits of mind associated with different epistemologies or ‘angles’. We suggest that the impact of educational research, including its contribution to teacher education programs, policy and public debate about issues in education, might be enhanced through a heuristic suite of four angles that are each understood to be necessary but not sufficient on their own. We provide a brief worked example of how such a heuristic might be applied to make sense of the diverse bodies of research regarding student engagement in school.     

Understanding gaps in research networks: using “spatial reasoning” as a window into the importance of networked educational research

This paper finds its origins in a multidisciplinary research group’s efforts to assemble a review of research in order to better appreciate how “spatial reasoning” is understood and investigated across academic disciplines. We first collaborated to create a historical map of the development of spatial reasoning across key disciplines over the last century. The map informed the structure of our citation search and oriented an examination of connection across disciplines. Next, we undertook a network analysis that was based on highly cited articles in a broad range of domains. Several connection gaps—that is, apparent blockages, one-way flows, and other limitations on communications among disciplines—were identified in our network analysis, and it was apparent that these connection gaps may be frustrating efforts to understand the conceptual complexity and the educational significance of spatial reasoning. While these gaps occur between the academic disciplines that we evaluated, we selected a few examples for closer analysis. To illustrate how this lack of flow can limit development of the field of mathematics education, we selected cases where it is evident that researchers in mathematics education are not incorporating the important work of mathematicians, psychologists, and neuroscientists—and vice versa. Ultimately, we argue, a more pronounced emphasis on transdisciplinary (versus multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary) research might be timely, and perhaps even necessary, in the evolution of educational research.     

Emotional engagement,social interactions,and the development of an afterschool game design curriculum

This formative design study examines how a program curriculum and implementation was emergently (re)designed in dynamic relation to the expressed emotions of teachers and students. The context was a yearlong afterschool game design program for STEM learning at an urban and public all-girls middle school. Using Randall Collins’ (Interaction ritual chains, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004) sociology of emotions framework, our analysis of field notes and video data reveal how the original intended curriculum hindered the generation of positive emotions, mutual foci of attention, and feelings of group solidarity—factors important in the generation of successful group interactions. In response to teacher and student expressed emotions, we took these factors as a guide for redesigning the program curriculum and implementation in order to foster a more positive emotional climate and redirect students’ positive emotions toward engagement in learning goals. This study’s implications point to the possibilities for designing curricula and program implementations to engender more emotionally responsive environments for STEM learning.     

Older learning engagement in the modern city

Abstract

This research employs novel techniques to examine older learners’ journeys, educationally and physically, in order to gain a ‘three-dimensional’ picture of lifelong learning in the modern urban context of Glasgow. The data offers preliminary analyses of an ongoing 1500 household survey by the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC). A sample of 1037, with 377 older adults aged 60+, was examined to understand older learner engagement in formal, in-formal, non-formal and family-learning contexts. Preliminary findings indicate that all forms of older learning participation are lower than younger and middle-age counterparts. However, there is a subset of ‘actively ageing’, socially and technologically engaged older adult ‘learner-citizens’, participating in educational, physical, cultural, civic and online activities (including online political discussions and boycotts). These older learners were more likely to be working, caretakers and report better health overall. Long-term disabilities were associated with less engagement in non-formal learning activities. Additionally, engaged older learners’ GPS trails show more city activity than their matched non-learning-engaged counterparts. Place-based variables, such as feeling safe and belonging to the local area, moderated adult participation in learning activities. The full data-set will be accessible to researchers and the general public via UBDC, providing a complex data source to explore demographically diverse learners’ within an urban context.     

Accountability for Quality: One State’s Experience in Improving Practice

South Carolina recently implemented a new initiative to improve the quality of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms in primary schools. This article describes the initiative and examines evidence that such an effort can have a positive effect on early childhood program quality. Data from both classroom observations using the ECERS-R scale, and from teacher surveys, are used to examine the effectiveness of the quality improvement effort. Results indicate that training and support coupled with accountability requirements can facilitate positive changes within classrooms. Examples of positive changes teachers report they made as the result of this process are included, along with changes in ECERS-R quality rating scores.     

English as a symbol of internationalization in higher education: a case study of Vietnam

Vietnam universities have experienced remarkable changes brought about by their internationalization policies. The switch to English as a medium of instruction (EMI) for some academic programs was one of these critical changes. Literature has reported numerous issues related to EMI, including inadequate language proficiency of teaching staff. This paper looks at a qualitative research study on how a government university from Vietnam employs different strategies to enhance teachers’ English proficiency. The study reveals that the introduction of new supporting systems, assessment bodies, recruitment criteria and institutional strategies on training, monitoring and motivation have created cultural change within the teacher community. This cultural change, which includes elements such as self-directed learning, peer learning, professionalism, and ‘open-to-change’ attitudes, has been perceived by both leaders and teachers to be conducive to teachers’ language learning. The findings presented in this paper seek to contribute to the formulation or adjustment of policies related to educational reforms, such as curriculum reform, teacher recruitment and teacher professional development in non-English-speaking countries.