Outside the library: Early career researchers and use of alternative information sources in pandemic times

Presents findings from a study into the attitudes and practices of pandemic-era early career researchers (ECRs) in regard to obtaining access to the formally published scholarly literature, which focused on alternative providers, notably ResearchGate and Sci-Hub. The study is a part of the Harbingers project that has been exploring the work lives and scholarly communication practices of ECRs in pre-pandemic times and during the pandemic, and utilizes data from two rounds of interviews with around 170 ECRs from the sciences and social sciences in eight countries. Findings show that alternative providers, as represented by ResearchGate and Sci-Hub, have become established and appear to be gaining ground. However, there are considerable country- and discipline-associated differences. ECRs' country-specific level of usage of the alternative providers is partly traceable to the adequacy of library provisions, although there are other factors at play in shaping ECRs' attitudes and practices, most notably convenience and time saving, as well as the fact that these platforms have become embedded in the scholarly dashboard. There is a dearth of evidence of the impact of the pandemic on ECRs' ways of obtaining scholarly papers.     

Children’s Visual Scanning of Textual Documents: Effects of Document Organization,Search Goals,and Metatextual Knowledge

This study examines children’s strategies when scanning a document to answer a specific question. More specifically, we wanted to know whether they make use of organizers (i.e., headings) when searching and whether strategic search is related to their knowledge of reading strategies. Twenty-six French fifth graders were asked to search single-page documents presented on the screen of an eye tracker in order to respond to questions requiring the location of information in either a single paragraph (Location questions) or multiple paragraphs (Comparison questions). Location questions were easier and faster to answer than Comparison questions. The presence of headers led to more selective reading strategies but did not significantly speed up the search. Strong individual differences were observed in children’s scanning strategies: Some systematically fixated headers, whereas others did not. These differences were not significantly related to the participants’ decoding or comprehension skills but rather to their knowledge of reading strategies.     

Experiences Situating Mathematical Problem Solving at the Core of Early Childhood Classrooms

Our goal in this article is to discuss the importance of problems in early childhood education for the child’s development and engagement with the mathematics existing in childhood culture. Our assumption is that an important task for young children’s education is to create a democratic and critical environment, in which multiplicity of perspectives is celebrated, along with diversity of concepts and practices, with movement between imaginary and real worlds. In light of this, the goal of this article is to defend a perspective for curriculum and for the role of the mathematics educator, promoting the learning of mathematics through problem solving in early childhood years. In order to discuss and illustrate this perspective we describe the pedagogical practices of two teachers who teach 4- and 5-years-olds, who create for their students an environment rich in problem solving and investigations. In both classrooms, all children individually succeeded in sharing their unique solutions and new knowledge constructed as a result of their inquiries. The experience provides evidence that problem solving affords children the opportunity to raise conjectures, to discuss possibilities and to draw conclusions, even if partial ones, that are then vetted by the group as the authors share their solutions. In this way, the work with problem solving nurtures cooperative learning and promotes the exploration of a diversity of ideas.     

How can students’ academic performance in statistics be improved? Testing the influence of social and temporal-self comparison feedback in a web-based training environment

The aim of this study was to examine how social or temporal-self comparison feedback, delivered in real-time in a web-based training environment, could influence the academic performance of students in a statistics examination. First-year psychology students were given the opportunity to train for a statistics examination during a semester by doing online exercises in a web-based training environment. Once connected, students received in real-time either social comparison feedback (their score was compared to the mean score of all first-year students) or temporal-self comparison feedback (their score was compared, week by week, with their own previous score). The fact that students were free to connect to the web-based training environment heightened self-regulation differences such as academic procrastination, which was considered as a moderating variable in this study. Because academic performance was measured, the students’ background in mathematics and statistics was also controlled. Irrespective of the students’ background, the results reveal a positive influence of social comparison feedback on statistics exam performance, but only among students who did not delay doing exercises in the web-based training environment. By contrast, temporal-self comparison feedback did not have any effect on performance. Some recommendations for optimizing the efficacy of web-based training environments can be proposed, taking into account both social comparison feedback and academic procrastination.     

Changing views of teachers and teaching in Vietnam

In order for Vietnam to seek better international integration into an increasingly globalised world, the Vietnamese Government has launched educational reforms requiring teachers to adopt ‘Western’ constructivist pedagogies. This paper reports on an action research study in a Vietnamese teacher training institution which found that Vietnamese student teachers were willing to accommodate and accept change and were often very enthusiastic about the ‘Western ideas’ of teaching and learning, but that their unquestioning respect for the authority of their tutors remained firmly fixed. The data also showed that the students’ tutors had a relatively limited exposure to the ‘Western theories’ and their implications and therefore did not model or demonstrate the theories effectively. The paper draws on these findings to argue that the focus for transforming Vietnamese teachers’ practice should be on promoting the responsibility of teacher educators to introduce student teachers to new ideas about the processes of teaching and learning. This strategy is likely to be more supportive of student teachers’ development as it allows them to separate the processes of teaching from culturally dominant beliefs about roles which are part of their established identities.     

Improving High School–College Alignment: A Sociological Reform and New Challenges

This paper analyzes teacher responses to a distinctive reform that sought to ­implement alignment between high schools and colleges. A survey of 225 teachers is used to examine teachers’ perceptions of the reform’s effectiveness, further resources needed, and how perceptions changed over time. The reform was perceived as effective for college-bound students, but not for non-college-bound students, magnifying the discrepant needs of these groups. Steps to improve the program are suggested.     

The Role of Auditory and Visual Speech in Word Learning at 18 Months and in Adulthood

Visual information influences speech perception in both infants and adults. It is still unknown whether lexical representations are multisensory. To address this question, we exposed 18‐month‐old infants (n = 32) and adults (n = 32) to new word–object pairings: Participants either heard the acoustic form of the words or saw the talking face in silence. They were then tested on recognition in the same or the other modality. Both 18‐month‐old infants and adults learned the lexical mappings when the words were presented auditorily and recognized the mapping at test when the word was presented in either modality, but only adults learned new words in a visual‐only presentation. These results suggest developmental changes in the sensory format of lexical representations.     

Development and initial validation of a questionnaire to assess the reading beliefs of undergraduate students: the Cuestionario de Creencias sobre la Lectura

The aim of this research was to develop a new questionnaire for exploring the reading beliefs of undergraduate students, because the only currently available instrument has conceptual and methodological limitations. The paper describes the process of developing the instrument and presents a range of psychometric data obtained from a sample of 558 Spanish undergraduates who were in the first or final year of a degree programme in psychology, language and literature or engineering. The results provide evidence of the psychometric quality of items and reveal a dual structure of two and six factors, both obtained through exploratory and/or confirmatory factor analyses. Adequate reliability based on internal consistency of the factors was also demonstrated. As a measure of criterion validity, differences in reading beliefs by gender, academic year and knowledge area were also explored. The findings support the psychometric adequacy of this new instrument developed through an exploratory piece of research. Overall, the process of constructing the instrument and the results from this study provide a framework for research and intervention, in addition to presenting a tool that both researchers and teaching staff could use in the context of reading and reading comprehension.     

Influence of teachers and schools on students' civic outcomes in Latin America

The authors investigated to what extent teachers' practices and school characteristics can influence students' civic knowledge, civic attitudes, and future participation in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico and how this can be related to their specific curricular structures and educational content. It uses data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. The results show that in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, teacher practices and attitudes relate to the civic outcomes. Although teachers' practices and attitudes significantly predict students' civic knowledge, this relationship does not seem relevant for students' expected participation and students' attitudes toward diversity. Still, the democratic environment of the school is a relevant variable in the case of expected participation of students and their attitudes toward diversity, which shows a possible indirect influence of teachers through the school environment. The results are discussed in relation to the civic education curriculum in place in the countries analyzed.