Telling it How it is: Accounts of Academic Life

Several kinds of account of what academic life is like are available. This article reviews three of these – academic novels, the professional media and 'how to' guides produced for academics – and makes some comparisons with the picture presented by academic research on higher education. These genres convey multiple, partial, diverse and competing accounts. Understanding their messages is interesting, useful and important to those interested in academic life.     

The Effect of Birth weight on Child Development Prior to School Entry

The present study examines variation in the effect of birth weight on children’s early cognitive and socioemotional outcomes by family socioeconomic status (SES). It is hypothesized that not only will lower birth weight children display worse cognitive and socioemotional outcomes prior to school entry, as prior research has found, but that effects will be stronger for lower-SES children. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort, the study compares the age 4 outcomes of twins discordant for birth weight (N ~ 1,400). Twin fixed-effects models are run on the full twin sample and separately for low- and high-SES children. Results support the study’s hypotheses, suggesting that socioeconomic risk accentuates the effects of birth weight on early development.     

School bullying,subjective well-being,and resilience

The aim of the current study was to examine the role of resilience in the victimization experiences of students and their subjective well-being as well as to explore gender and age-related effects. Initially, 558 students (52.15% male) from grades 6 to 10 participated in the study completing The Student Aggression and Victimization Questionnaire, The Mental Health Continuum, and the Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale. One-hundred and twenty-seven (22.8%) students were excluded from the final analysis, as they did not report any victimization experience during the past 3 months. Males in all year levels reported higher levels of well-being and resilience compared with females. No gender differences were found in victimization experiences. Languishing students were found to be at higher risk of experiencing serious victimization. Resilience was not found to moderate the effects of victimization on mental health, but a higher level of resilience appeared to be related to more positive well-being for boys and younger students. Limitations of the study and implications for anti-bullying interventions are briefly discussed.     

Becoming an Insider: Teaching Science in Urban Settings

The discourse of urban science education is often framed by discussions of achievement gaps and limited resources. Although these realities are part of the urban education landscape, they focus on deficits—what urban youth and their teachers and schools lack. We argue that it is more productive to frame urban science education as a function of place. Place, in the urban classroom, accounts not only for the physical spaces of the community but also for the historical and sociocultural dimensions that play out as people interact with and in place. We argue that becoming an insider within the multidimensions of place is critical to science teaching environments that value and sanction their students' unofficial and often non-dominant ways of knowing.     

美国漫游记

小头爸爸带大头儿子去美国华盛顿游玩,一来为了增长他的见识,俗话说“行万里路,读万卷书”嘛!二来为了提高他的英语口语。你瞧!他们刚出机场,正要打的去旅馆呢。你能听懂他们在说些什么吗？[第一段]     

Emotions and values – a case study of meaning-making in ESE

With an interest in the role of emotions and values in students’ meaning-making in Environmental and Sustainability Education a case study was carried out in a Swedish school-class with students, 12 years of age. During a six-week thematic group-work focusing environmental and sustainability issues related to food, the students were observed and interviewed in their daily school practice. The results are presented here through narrative reporting, and analysed with the use of Dewey’s theoretical perspectives on experience, distinguishing three phases in a process: a start, an activity phase and a closure. Martha Nussbaum’s theory of emotions is used to assist in the understanding of emotions and values. The study reports on active and independent meaning-making processes in students’ group work. The results provide examples of students’ meaning-making experiences and the role of emotions and values in them, indicating that more of values are formed and expressed in the concluding phase.     

Effekte videobasierter Trainings zur Förderung der Selbstwirksamkeitsüberzeugungen über Klassenführung im Grundschulunterricht

Self-efficacy in classroom management and knowledge on classroom management are important teacher resources regarding their health. Fostering student teachers in their self-efficacy in classroom management and situated knowledge on classroom management is a promising approach for reducing reality shock at the beginning of in-service teaching. Thus, the present quasi-experimental pre-post control group study investigates whether video-based and practice-oriented coursework in teacher education can promote self-efficacy in classroom management and the professional vision of classroom management. Analyzing own classroom videos as well as analyzing videos from other teachers lead to a significantly higher latent increase in self-efficacy and professional vision than that of a control group. This was only the case for professional vision in a course with own teaching elements but without video analysis.     

Creating Participatory Discourse for Teaching and Research in Early Childhood Science

This paper presents the results of a study conducted with second grade students and pre-service teachers. This study examined the possibilities for engaging children in critical discourse about their classroom science experiences. At the heart of this discussion lies the desire to provide a space for teachers and children to develop relationships and to explore the learning of science together. Themes that emerged include: (1) on-going, focused, critical dialogue between children and teachers supported children in developing agency in the classroom, and (2) on-going conversations created the opportunity for children to reveal their ways of knowing and developing interpretations of the practice of science.     

The concept of validity in theory and practice

The concept of validity, as described in the literature, has changed over time to become a broad and rather complex issue. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if practice has followed theory, or if there is a gap between validity in theory and validity in practice. It compares the theoretical development of the concept of validity with the methodology adopted in validity studies over time. Important phases in the history of validity, and also common arguments for and against traditional and modern validity perspectives, are presented and discussed. Thereafter, three Swedish research projects aiming to validate instruments used for selection to higher education are described. The idea is to use these projects as examples of contemporary practice, and to compare their designs, research questions and outcomes with how validity was theoretically described during their specific period of time. The conclusions from these comparisons are that practices seem to have followed theory when it comes to how the validity research programmes have been designed, but not when it comes to how they then were carried out in practice. This gap between theory and practice seems to have increased with the introduction of broader and more modern validity perspectives. The scope of the research is more extensive but results are fragmented and there is no evidence of a ‘unified’ validity argument, which has been one of the central aspects in modern validity theory. This supports the arguments that validity theory is difficult to put into practice and that there is a need for guidance on how to prioritise validity questions and interpret validity evidence.