Students' recognition of educational demands in the context of a socioscientific issues curriculum

Students' difficulties in interpreting what counts as knowledge have been addressed in past research on science education. The implementation of progressivist pedagogy in terms of more student-active classroom practice and the introduction of a variety of discourses into the science classroom deepens students' difficulties. The integration of different forms and demands of knowledge and discourses typified by Science-in-Context initiatives, such as within the socioscientific framework, exemplifies this development in science education. Here, the diffuse boundaries between school subjects and other silos of knowledge lead to considerable difficulties for students to interpret what is expected from them. Such contexts having diffuse boundaries between, for example, subject discourses and other forms of knowledge, have been describes as contexts with weak classification. The present study aims to explore students' interpretation of what knowledge or meaning they are requested to produce in contexts with weak classification, here exemplified within an SSI-task. We use Bernstein's concepts of recognition rules and classification to analyze how 15- to 16-year-old students develop their discussions in groups of 4–6 students. This study reports how students' recognition of the educational demands enabled integration of different discourses in their discussion, and that the use of both universalistic and particularistic meanings can produce new understandings. Students who had not acquired recognition rules were found to keep discourses apart, expressed either as rejection of the relevance of the task, answering questions as in a traditional school task, or just exchange of personal opinions. Furthermore, they included discourses irrelevant to the issue. An important outcome of the study was that socioscientific thinking was hampered when students kept universalistic and particularistic meanings apart. This hampering results from the inhibition of dynamic exploration during SSI discussions. The results provide new insights with relevance for teachers' guiding students toward a fruitful SSI-discourse.     

Challenging Stereotypes of Eating and Body Image Concerns Among College Students: Implications for Diagnosis and Treatment of Diverse Populations

The authors describe a study that was conducted to provide better understanding of eating and body image concerns among clients in university counseling centers. First, they explored the prevalence of such concerns among stereotype‐congruent (White, heterosexual, female) and stereotype‐incongruent groups (e.g., ethnic/sexual minorities, men). Then, because some groups may use compensatory behaviors not adequately captured by current definitions of eating disorders, they specifically examined body image disturbance among these groups.     

Collecting Multidimensional Client Data Using Repeated Measures: Experiences of Clients and Counselors Using the CCAPS‐34

Many college counseling centers do not collect client data at each session because of perceived burdens. This study explored 55 clients’ and 16 doctoral counselor trainees’ experiences collecting and using data on client distress at each session over the course of counseling at a large public university's counseling center. Results indicated that the majority of both clients and counselors found the process convenient and clinically useful. Findings, clinical implications, and future directions are discussed.     

Who teaches mathematics content courses for prospective elementary teachers in the United States? Results of a national survey

This article reports on a national survey of higher education institutions in the United States to answer the question, “Who teaches mathematics content courses for prospective elementary teachers, and what are these instructors’ academic and teaching backgrounds?” We surveyed 1,926 institutions, and a faculty member from each of 825 institutions (42.8?%) participated in the survey. The survey results demonstrate that the majority of institutions are not meeting the recommendations of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (The mathematical education of teachers. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2001), the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (Professional standards for teaching mathematics. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Reston, VA, 2005), and the National Council on Teacher Quality (Greenberg and Walsh 2008) for prospective elementary teachers to take at least nine credits of mathematics content designed specifically for them. Additionally, most instructors for these courses do not have elementary teaching experience and have likely not had opportunities to think deeply about the important ideas in elementary mathematics, and most institutions do not provide training and/or support for these instructors.     

The social competence of highly gifted math and science adolescents

Involving 740 highly gifted math and science students from two different countries, Korea and the United States, this study examined how these gifted adolescents perceived their interpersonal ability and peer relationships and whether there were differences between these two groups by demographic variables. Based on the survey data, results showed that our gifted students perceived their interpersonal ability and peer relationships at levels comparable to or higher than those of their non-gifted counterparts. They were satisfied and confident with their peer relationships and did not identify negative effects of being gifted when forming and maintaining friendships. Differences were found between Korean and American students by gender in their profiles of interpersonal ability and peer relationships. Positive self-portrayal of social competence found for our sample disputed previous studies suggesting that highly gifted students tend to struggle with social relationships. Given that each group of students had different educational, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, the results should also be interpreted with caution.     

The Relationship of Discipline Background to Upper Secondary Students’ Argumentation on Socioscientific Issues

In the present STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)-driven society, socioscientific issues (SSI) have become a focus globally and SSI research has grown into an important area of study in science education. Since students attending the social and science programs have a different focus in their studies and research has shown that students attending a science program are less familiar with argumentation practice, we make a comparison of the supporting reasons social science and science majors use in arguing different SSI with the goal to provide important information for pedagogical decisions about curriculum and instruction. As an analytical framework, a model termed SEE-SEP covering three aspects (of knowledge, value, and experiences) and six subject areas (of sociology/culture, economy, environment/ecology, science, ethics/morality, and policy) was adopted to analyze students’ justifications. A total of 208 upper secondary students (105 social science majors and 103 science majors) from Sweden were invited to justify and expound their arguments on four SSI including global warming, genetically modified organisms (GMO), nuclear power, and consumer consumption. The results showed that the social science majors generated more justifications than the science majors, the aspect of value was used most in students’ argumentation regardless of students’ discipline background, and justifications from the subject area of science were most often presented in nuclear power and GMO issues. We conclude by arguing that engaging teachers from different subjects to cooperate when teaching argumentation on SSI could be of great value and provide students from both social science and science programs the best possible conditions in which to develop argumentation skills.     

SAQ,SSI and STSE education: defending and extending “science-in-context”

Cultural Studies of Science Education - Many scholars suggest that recent major science education initiatives apparently tied to intense economic competitiveness and growth have prioritized...     

Using a Card-Sorting Task to Elicit and Clarify Science-Teaching Orientations

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Understanding and Nourishing Christian Vocation to Higher Education in a Postcommunist Society

ABSTRACT

To understand the concept of Christian vocation within the context of higher education in a postcommunist society, reflection on its communist and postcommunist history is necessary. Thus, the authors first present an analysis of Eastern Europe's Marxist past, specifically focusing on the external and internal impact of that past on attitudes toward higher education of people living in a postcommunist society. Marxist statism, or the total dominance of the state over an individual, remains an external influence more than a quarter of a century since Eastern Europe's 1989 democratic revolution that reshaped much of the continent. In considering the topic of vocation within the context of Eastern Europe, the ethos that works inwardly on members of postcommunist societies must be noted: suspicion leading to self-doubt, passivity kept alive by bureaucratization, and strict compartmentalization of knowledge into science versus religion. In the second part of the article, the authors describe the concept of Christian vocation in a postcommunist society, as understood by contemporary younger and older generations based on data from two recent qualitative investigations. These studies allowed for comparison between the generational views and documented important attitudinal changes. The third section concludes by providing examples of good practices for nurturing an understanding of Christian vocation in higher education in a postcommunist context. Although the effectiveness of some of these practices has been documented over time, most are still in their infancy. Despite the new democratic political system, Christians need to reconsider the former dichotomies (i.e., state–church, public–private, scientific–religious) and become more actively involved in previously inaccessible and challenging areas of influential work such as teaching and managerial positions in higher education institutions. It should be noted that the term vocation, as used in languages of postcommunist European countries has several meanings such as invitation, calling, occupation, or profession; accordingly, the authors use the terms vocation and calling interchangeably in this article.