A study of migrant mothers: Return home and role change

For migrant groups moving from one place to another usually means dealing with contradictions between home and host countries and with different cultural norms. Taking into consideration migrant women's previous status in the village and their new one in the host country, it can be said that migration is a turning point in women's lives. Research findings show that increased employability of women in the host country increases their independence and leads to sex role changes and changes within the family.Return migration is the last stage in the migration cycle and it is a rather neglected and little researched topic as yet. The purpose of this paper is to report on research on role changes within the family.Three groups of migrant mothers (two groups living in West Germany and one group repatriated) were compared with a control group in the District of Drama, Macedonia, on work employment and types of responsibilities concerning their children's upbringing.Results showed that mothers who live in West Germany are equally responsible with fathers for the child's social behavior, school performance and expenses and were significantly different from the control group. Return mothers were as much as fathers responsible for the child's school performance in contrast to the control group. More mothers than fathers, however, were responsible for the child's relationships and fewer mothers than fathers were responsible for the child's expenses; in this respect both parents resembled those of the control group. It seems therefore, that migrant mothers take over different roles in the host country than those of the controls, whereas return mothers adopt to a large extent the stereotyped role of control mothers.     

A Review of Play Interventions for Children with Autism at School

Play is an important aspect of children’s development and its value to education has been widely explored. However, play in children with disabilities and especially children with autism may be restricted when compared to that of their non-disabled peers of similar age and abilities. Moreover, play has been neglected to a certain extent in school practice due to the focus many teachers place on academic attainments and the difficulty in engaging autistic children in play activities. Children spend most of their time in schools as opposed to attending interventions individually. School based research can improve the educational outcomes for autistic children and, therefore, there is a pressing need for more research to be conducted in school settings. The current literature review aims to: (i) identify empirical studies using interventions to develop play skills in autistic children at school, and (ii) explore the features of play skills targeted in these studies. A systematic search of two electronic databases: (i) PsycINFO, and (ii) Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) has been conducted between 2000 and 2014. Fourteen papers were collected and the findings suggest that a significant number of studies have been conducted in schools exploring a wide range of play skills. Strengths and limitations of the reviewed studies are given as well as implications for practice and future research. Conclusions are discussed in the light of the high ecological validity of real world studies and the need to bridge the gap between academic research and school practice.     

Recognising and managing pupils with mental health difficulties: teachers' views and experiences on working with educational psychologists in schools

The role and future directions of the educational psychology services are being re‐examined and there is a drive to build a more integrated system of services for children and young people that incorporates education, health and social care. This qualitative study examines teacher’s perspectives on their professional involvement with educational psychology services. The results indicate that while it was clear that educational psychologists are highly valued by teachers, there are a number of issues that teachers believe constrain service provision. We suggest that greater cross‐system consultation is needed in order to more closely examine how the roles of professionals working in education, health and social care services impact on each other.     

Tackling Complexity In Mathematics Teaching Development: Using the Teaching Triad as a Tool for Reflection and Analysis

This paper reports research that attempts tomake sense of the complexity of mathematicsteaching and its development at secondaryschool level. The research was conducted inpartnership between two teachers and twoeducator/researchers over one school term intwo U.K. schools. A theoretical construct, theteaching triad, was used as an analyticaldevice (by the researchers) and as a reflectiveagent for teaching development (by theteachers). The focus of analysis was theinteractions between teacher and students atwhole class and small group level. Both micro-and macro-analyses were undertaken. We presentdetails of the processes involved in examplesfrom the teaching of one teacher as shetranslated theoretical aims into classroompractice. The use of the triad allowed accessto complexity, involving both psychological andsociological elements, and to the position of asincere teacher with respect to competingforces in the educational system. Thepotential of the triad for teacher and teachingdevelopment is discussed.     

Students' argumentation in decision-making on a socio-scientific issue: implications for teaching

This study explores the arguments used by 14-year-old students in making decisions about the design of a road in their area. The whole activity was based on an actual problem at the time the research took place. The procedure was a sequence, where students worked first individually, then in groups and finally they had to take a class decision. Then they had to realize one of the final proposals and design the construction of a bridge that their planning had involved. This paper first elaborates the general perspective of such an approach; it then describes the process of argumentation and analyses the nature of the students' arguments, which are discussed on the basis of a specifically constructed network.     

SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF MATHEMATICAL INDUCTION: STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTICS AND THE PROCESS OF PROOF CONSTRUCTION

In this study, we investigate the meaning students attribute to the structure of mathematical induction (MI) and the process of proof construction using mathematical induction in the context of a geometric recursion problem. Two hundred and thirteen 17-year-old students of an upper secondary school in Greece participated in the study. Students’ responses in 3 written tasks and the interviews with 18 of them are analyzed. Though MI is treated operationally in school, the students, when challenged, started to recognize the structural characteristics of MI. In the case of proof construction, we identified 2 types of transition from argumentation to proof, interwoven in the structure of the geometrical pattern. In the first type, MI was applied to the algebraic statement that derived from the direct translation of the geometrical situation. In the second type, MI was embedded functionally in the geometrical structure of the pattern.     

An examination of middle school students’ representation practices in mathematical problem solving through the lens of expert work: towards an organizing scheme

Representation is viewed as central to mathematical problem solving. Yet, it is becoming obvious that students are having difficulty negotiating the various forms and functions of representations. This article examines the functions that representation has in students’ mathematical problem solving and how that compares to its function in the problem solving of experts and broadly in mathematics. Overall, this work highlights the close connections between the work of experts and students, showing how students use representations in ways that are inherently similar to those of experts. Both experts and students use representations as tools towards the understanding, exploration, recording, and monitoring of problem solving. In social contexts, experts and students use representations for the presentation of their work but also the negotiation and co-construction of shared understandings. However, this research also highlights where students’ work departs from experts’ representational practices, hence, providing some directions for pedagogy and further work.     

JMTE: A Time to Reflect

Editorial Introduction

JMTE: A Time to Reflect     

Mothers’ Experiences of Children in the Autistic Spectrum in Greece: Narratives of Development,Education and Disability Across their Blogs

Autism occupies a prominent place in scientific research both as a medical and as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Autism is studied as a disorder and a diagnostic label, as an experience of people with autism, their parents and their supporters, and finally as a disability related to stigma and rejection. The purpose of this article is to describe the posted experiences on personal blogs of five mothers who have school-aged children in the autistic spectrum in Greece. The qualitative method of content analysis is used for analysing the personal narratives across their blogs because this method focuses on describing and understanding the presented experiences and acknowledges the central role of the researcher in describing and signifying the issues discussed. The results of the content analysis show that the mothers seem to view autism through a developmental perspective and as they lead efforts for their child’s developmental timeline they are worried about their child’s developmental course and tend to experience high levels of anxiety, depression and burnout. The mothers act as practical scientists and co-therapists, taking an active role in educating and raising their children, finding a school and selecting appropriate interventions. The mothers struggle to obtain quality in education and services, while faced with the absence of technical infrastructure and understaffing in schools, lack of funding, covert or overt practices of acceptance and rejection of people with disabilities in the educational system, the attitudes and ignorance of some educators, and the high cost of private services. These mothers, at first, view autism as a tragedy and within their social environment they face covert or overt rejection since their children are stigmatised as “abnormal”. Later on, the mothers accept their child’s disability as a prerequisite for gaining a new life experience. It seems that the mothers have a mixed perception of disability, which sometimes tends to be closer to the medical model, sometimes to the hybrid model, while other times to the social model of disability.     

Revisiting the place value concept in the workplace context: the issue of transfer development

In this paper, we studied the transferring process of five apprentice engineering students concerning the place value concept in a telecommunication workplace setting. In this setting, a physical material, a telecommunication closet (TC), appearing as a concrete representation of the ten-numeration system, supported the process of generating composite units in a sequential way. The data were generated by conducting an interview with each student based on two tasks. In the first task, students were asked to locate the place of a particular wire pair on the telecommunication closet representation (TC representation). In the second task, students were asked to determine the range of values that generate this composite unit. Our theoretical and analytical framework is guided by the three levels of students’ generalization activity by Radford (2003) and the work on developmental transfer by Engeström (2001). By identifying shifts in the students’ activity (from factual to contextual and from contextual to symbolic), we recognized three transferring cases: the immediate transfer case, the developmental transfer case, and the nondevelopmental transfer case. By comparing and contrasting the different cases, we identified four factors that seem to facilitate or constrain the transfer development. These are the use of metaphors, the development of problem solving strategies, the context dependency, and the students’ motivation. In conclusion, we discuss the educational implications of our findings.