Professional status of elementary teaching in Turkey: a Delphi study

This study examines whether elementary teaching can be considered to be a profession in Turkey in comparison to selected characteristics that previous scholars have found to be common to all professions. Evidence was drawn primarily from a Delphi study conducted in three rounds. Educators of various kinds served as Delphi participants. The consensus reached by Delphi participants in that study concluded that elementary teaching met only two of the 11 characteristics analyzed and failed to meet four. Elementary teaching was neutral on four of the remaining five characteristics and reached no consensus at all on the last one.     

Teaching science to visually impaired students： A small-scale qualitative study

Students have long regarded science as a difficult subject because of hard and abstract concepts. Traditional science teaching has been depended mostly on visual instruction. This makes it difficult for visually impaired （VI） or partially sighted students included in regular classrooms to learn the concepts. Blind students on the other hand, have no visual input at all. They need to learn using other senses such as touching and hearing. Classrooms should be adapted and instruction should be adjusted for better science teaching to VI students. The purpose of this study was to investigate how VI students learn science. The results of the data obtained via interviews and observations revealed that VI students need instructional and environmental accommodations to learn science. They need more tactual and audio experiences than visual instruction. Suggestions and implications about teaching science to students with visual impairments are discussed.     

Sixth grade mathematics teachers’ intentions and use of probing, guiding, and factual questions

This case study of a first-year and an experienced teacher presents an analysis of the place and frequency of three types of questions: probing, guiding, and factual. We examined the use of these questions in the course of five lessons, in order to study the relationship between the part of the lesson and types of questions asked. In addition, we interviewed the teachers to gain insights into their reasons for asking different types of questions. Both teachers asked many more factual questions than other types of questions regardless of their teaching strategies. Both asked more probing questions during the summary part of the lessons than in other parts. The first year teacher asked more probing questions overall than the experienced teacher, except in a lesson in which the experienced teacher engaged student with manipulatives. Guiding questions were rarely used by either teacher. In the interviews, both teachers said asking higher order questions was important for better students’ learning, even though they asked relatively few probing or guiding questions. Using the indicators we developed for question types, we found that the two teachers were aware of the functions of questions they used. Even after a considerable amount of time had elapsed, they were able to recall the lesson from a video clip and explain why they used questions with particular students or in a specific situation     

User study of a new smart toy for children's storytelling

This article introduces StoryTech, a smart storytelling toy that offers children a mixed reality environment in which to tell imaginative stories. During usability testing, an empirical study was carried out with 90 child participants. The findings indicated that StoryTech creates a rich storytelling experience, especially for ages five and six.     

Exploring Pre-service Biology Teachers’ Informal Reasoning and Decision-Making About COVID-19

Science & Education - The world has been fighting with the novel COVID-19 pandemic, which has scientific, societal, and ethical components, and thus it can be classified as one of the most...     

Emotional correspondence between preschoolers and teachers: what are the effects on child–teacher relationships?

ABSTRACT

The effects of the emotion regulation skills of the children attending preschool education on their interactions with their teachers are emphasised in recent studies. Therefore, in this study, we examined the effects of emotion regulation skills on the quality of the relationship between the teacher and the child. In total, 39 preschool teachers and 119 preschool children (55 girls and 64) boys from 5 public preschools participated in the study. Teachers were asked to fill Student-Teacher Relationship Scale-Short Form regarding three children in their classrooms and Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for themselves. We conducted four observations by using MPAC-R/S in order to assess child’s abilities to express and regulate emotions. The results showed that children’s emotional states were effective on teacher’s relationship perception, and that teacher’s emotion regulation skills were also effective on his/her relationship perception. In addition, the cognitive reappraisal strategy used by the teacher in emotion regulation has also been found to have an impact on the negative emotional state of children.     

High School Students’ Perceptions of the Effects of International Science Olympiad on Their STEM Career Aspirations and Twenty-First Century Skill Development

Social cognitive theory guided the design of a survey to investigate high school students’ perceptions of factors affecting their career contemplations and beliefs regarding the influence of their participation in the international Science Olympiad on their subject interests and twenty-first century skills. In addition, gender differences in students’ choice of competition category were studied. Mixed methods analysis of survey returns from 172 Olympiad participants from 31 countries showed that students’ career aspirations were affected most by their teachers, personal interests, and parents, respectively. Students also indicated that they believed that their participation in the Olympiad reinforced their plan to choose a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major at college and assisted them in developing and improving their twenty-first century skills. Furthermore, female students’ responses indicated that their project choices were less likely to be in the engineering category and more likely to be in the environment or energy categories. Findings are discussed in the light of increasing the awareness of the role and importance of Science Olympiads in STEM career choice and finding ways to attract more female students into engineering careers.     

Learning to teach in the national curriculum context

Learning to teach is a difficult and challenging process for beginning teachers in the national curriculum contexts due to several pressures that the centralised system presents for school and classroom contexts. This study investigated the difficulties beginning middle school mathematics teachers faced in the Turkish national curriculum context without any structured beginning teacher support through the experiences of six beginning teachers. They were interviewed after their first year teaching and after the fourth year or during the fifth year about factors in the national curriculum, school, and classroom contexts that affected their learning to teach. Findings revealed that the national curriculum context interfered with the school and classroom contexts, often by presenting many additional difficulties. The teacher education period seemed to be ineffective in preparing beginning teachers for the difficulties arising from the national curriculum context. Teacher education programmes in centralised systems should provide pre‐service teachers with knowledge of possible difficulties specific to these contexts that they might face in their first years.     

Training teachers to use new technologies impacts multiple ecologies: Evidence from a national initiative

A pair of papers re-examined the evidence from a national initiative to train all teachers in England to bring them up to the level of newly qualified teachers, who are required to know when to use and when not to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in their professional practice. The first paper confirmed that multilevel evaluation of professional development was robust for ICT teacher training. This second paper contrasts the highest and lowest rated designs for ICT teacher training: an 'organic' approach that provided training in schools was highly rated, whereas a centralised computer-assisted learning approach with online access to trainers was the lowest rated design. The study supports an ecological view of the diffusion of ICT innovations in education and recommends that ICT teacher training be designed to support evolution of each teacher's classroom, school and region, as well as the training of the ICT teacher trainers.     

Teachers' Beliefs and Practices in Relation to their Beliefs about Questioning at Key Stage 2

This study examines the relationship between teachers' beliefs and their practices at Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11) in relation to the use of questioning. Data were collected from interviewing and observing Key Stage 2 teachers at four schools in the West of England. A Straussian approach to grounded theory is followed broadly in order to analyse the data. In contrast to the findings of previous studies, which suggested a mismatch between teachers' beliefs and practices in that teachers, in certain respects, do less than they claim, the research revealed that teachers use a variety of skills during their teaching that they may not always be aware of. It is also argued that teachers do not share researchers' language to express the way they teach.