Organisational and training factors affecting academic teacher training outcomes

University teacher training has become an important topic in recent years due to the curricular and methodological reforms introduced by the Bologna process. Despite its acknowledged importance, evaluations have been limited to measures of participants’ satisfaction, and little is known about its impact on teaching practices. This study seeks to analyse the effects of the different delivery methods used during workshops that aim to enhance academic teachers’ pedagogical competence and teaching practices. Moreover, the study analyses to what extent individual characteristic and job requirement also have an effect on training outcomes. The study draws on data collected through a self-reported questionnaire administered to academic teachers two years after they participated in training workshops at a Spanish university (n?=?204). The results show that specific delivery methods have a significant effect on the outcome variables, especially those related to the design of learning activities and assessment tools.     

Measuring affective outcomes from a visit to a Science Education Centre

One of the problems in measuring affective outcomes from visits to science education centres like the CSIROSEC laboratories, is that different students have quite different experiences. They attend to different sets of activities or exhibits for different lengths of time, they have different amounts of previous knowledge and they may interact in different ways. Measurement of affective outcomes must take account of this diversity and, if it is to be useful for teachers, a measuring instrument must be brief, easy to understand and to score. This paper reports the results of a pilot study which devised a way of measuring affective outcomes from visits to a CSIROSEC. Specifically, students responded in terms of how easy they found various aspects of the activities, their enjoyment of what they did, and how helpful they found the visit in terms of their wider views and understanding about science and scientists. Specializations: gender issues and assessment in science and technology education.     

Minority Serving Institutions: Incubators for Teachers of Color

This article explores the role of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) in producing teachers of color. Specifically, it looks at larger national trends and highlights individual MSIs that have experienced success in the area of teacher education and the production of teachers of color. Recommendations are made to assist colleges and universities across the nation.     

Prospective teachers' initial conceptions about pupils' understanding of science and mathematics

Earlier reports have shown that prospective teachers' conceptions about teaching science to a high degree are resistant and do not change substantially during the teacher‐training programme. In our investigation we elucidate the prospective teachers' initial conceptions about pupils' understanding of science and mathematics. We applied ‘The Lesson Preparation Method' and used a phenomenographic approach in order to reveal the range of conceptions that the prospective teachers hold. A third of the prospective teachers did not consider pupils' conceptions when planning lessons. The rest of the 32 participants expressed awareness; some of the prospective teachers even referred to subject‐specific teaching experience. Also regarding the prospective teachers' conceptions about pupils' knowledge and beliefs, as well as about pupils' difficulties, there was a significant diversity. By raising these issues about pedagogical content knowledge the prospective teachers' conceptions can be extended and developed during the education.     

The open method of coordination and the implementation of the Bologna process

In this paper the authors argue that the use of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the implementation of the Bologna process presents coordination problems that do not allow for the full coherence of the results. As the process is quite complex, involving three different levels (European, national and local) and as the final actors in the implementation process higher education institutions (HEIs) have considerable degree of autonomy, assuming that the implementation of Bologna is a top–down linear policy implementation process does not account for the developments taking place, which produce implementation difficulties at several different levels. Constraints resulting from economic concerns at European and national levels may be an obstacle for the Bologna’s contribution to a social Europe.     

The Relationship Between School Composition,School Process and Mathematics Achievement in Secondary Education in Argentina

Using data from the 1998 High School National Census from the Ministry of Education and Culture of Argentina, the present study examines relationships between school composition, some characteristics of schooling (such as institutional culture and climate), and students’ achievement in Mathematics in the last year of high school. The study applies multilevel linear modeling on the levels of student, school and state. It finds a close relationship between achievement in Mathematics and the variables of school composition and schooling processes. It shows that when both variables act together, the effect of all other variables significantly decreases. The variables of schooling processes, however, even when diminished in influence, nonetheless notably continue to affect students’ achievements. The study also identifes a reference model for future studies evaluating other institutional factors of learning.     

Studying activities that take place in speech interactions: a theoretical and methodological framework

The paper proposes a theoretical and methodological framework based on a pluralistic, concerted approach to the study of activities that take place in and through speech interactions. The framework has a general scope, applying to any collective activity taking form through language interactions. It contributes to a fuller understanding of the dynamics of activity and the emergence of the phenomena observed. The framework fits a constructivist and interactionist paradigm. It allows an approach to different dimensions of the activity: communicational, functional, discursive and interlocutory. The theories, models, concepts and methods chosen to address each of the dimensions are presented. From the study of a collaborative philosophical inquiry produced in the first year of a French primary school, we illustrate the use of the framework and show how it can be enriched according to the nature of the activity studied and researchers’ aims.     

Analysis of the cognitive unity or rupture between conjecture and proof when learning to prove on a grade 10 trigonometry course

We present results from a classroom-based intervention designed to help a class of grade 10 students (14–15 years old) learn proof while studying trigonometry in a dynamic geometry software environment. We analysed some students’ solutions to conjecture-and-proof problems that let them gain experience in stating conjectures and developing proofs. Grounded on a conception of proof that includes both empirical and deductive mathematical argumentations, we show the trajectories of some students progressing from developing basic empirical proofs towards developing deductive proofs and understanding the role of conjectures and proofs in mathematics. Our analysis of students’ solutions is based on networking Boero et al.’s construct of cognitive unity of theorems, Pedemonte’s structural and referential analysis of conjectures and proofs, and Balacheff and Margolinas’ cK¢ model, while using Toulmin schemes to represent students’ productions. This combination has allowed us to identify several emerging types of cognitive unity/rupture, corresponding to different ways of solving conjecture-and-proof problems. We also show that some types of cognitive unity/rupture seem to induce students to produce deductive proofs, whereas other types seem to induce them to produce empirical proofs.     

Developing and implementing a robust and flexible framework for the evaluation and impact of educational development in higher education in Chile

ABSTRACT

This article describes the development of an evaluation and impact framework to assess the effectiveness of educational innovations. It can be utilized within a single program, as well as at institutional and national levels. While it is contextualized in a Chilean university, it is argued that it is widely applicable as it is informed by international best practice.

The rationale that informed the development of the evaluation framework is described and is illustrated using two programs: Faculty Learning Communities; and Student Learning Assistants. These demonstrate how the framework can be customized utilizing indicators and outcomes relevant to specific programs and stakeholders.     

Search behavior of dogs (Canis familiaris) in invisible displacement problems

Gagnon and Doré (1992) showed that domestic dogs are able to solve a Piagetian object permanence task called the invisible displacement problem. A toy is hidden in a container which is moved behind a screen where the toy is removed and left. Dogs make more errors in these problems than they do in visible displacement tests, in which the object is hidden directly behind the target screen. In Experiment 1, we examined components of the standard procedure of invisible displacements that may make encoding or retention of the hiding location more difficult than it is in visible displacements. In Experiment 2, we compared dogs’ performances in visible and invisible displacement problems when delays of 0, 10, and 20 sec were introduced between the object’s final disappearance and the subject’s release. The results revealed that dogs’ poorer performance in invisible displacement tests is related to the complex sequence of events that have to be encoded or remembered as well as to a difficulty in representing the position change that is signaled, but not directly perceived.