Cybersupervision: Further Examination of Synchronous and Asynchronous Modalities in Counseling Practicum Supervision

The authors used an intensive single‐subject quantitative design to examine cybersupervision of counseling practicum students in a university setting. Five female supervisees volunteered to receive their required weekly supervision online during a 14‐week, semester‐long counseling practicum. Following a face‐to‐face orientation meeting, all remaining interactions among the supervisees and with the supervisor occurred electronically. Data were collected about the utility of the synchronous and asynchronous modalities, changes in supervisee competence and confidence during the practicum, and supervisee attitudes about the cybersupervision approach. The findings offered evidence that the web‐based modality could be used in similar settings.     

Developing a ‘leading identity’: the relationship between students’ mathematical identities and their career and higher education aspirations

The construct of identity has been used widely in mathematics education in order to understand how students (and teachers) relate to and engage with the subject (Kaasila, 2007; Sfard & Prusak, 2005; Boaler, 2002). Drawing on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), this paper adopts Leont’ev’s notion of leading activity in order to explore the key ‘significant’ activities that are implicated in the development of students’ reflexive understanding of self and how this may offer differing relations with mathematics. According to Leont’ev (1981), leading activities are those which are significant to the development of the individual’s psyche through the emergence of new motives for engagement. We suggest that alongside new motives for engagement comes a new understanding of self—a leading identity—which reflects a hierarchy of our motives. Narrative analysis of interviews with two students (aged 16–17 years old) in post-compulsory education, Mary and Lee, are presented. Mary holds a stable ‘vocational’ leading identity throughout her narrative and, thus, her motive for studying mathematics is defined by its ‘use value’ in terms of pursuing this vocation. In contrast, Lee develops a leading identity which is focused on the activity of studying and becoming a university student. As such, his motive for study is framed in terms of the exchange value of the qualifications he hopes to obtain. We argue that this empirical grounding of leading activity and leading identity offers new insights into students’ identity development.     

Validity in teachers’ summative assessments

This paper describes some of the findings of a project which set out to explore and develop teachers’ understanding and practices in their summative assessments. The focus was on those summative assessments that are used on a regular basis within schools for guiding the progress of pupils and for internal accountability. The project combined both intervention and research elements. The intervention aimed both to explore how teachers might improve those practices in the light of their re‐examination of their validity, and to engage them in moderation exercises within and between schools to audit examples of students’ work and to discuss their appraisals of these examples. This paper reports findings, arising from this work, of the research that aimed to study how teachers understand validity, and how they formulate their classroom assessment practices in the light of that understanding. The paper also considers how that understanding might be challenged and developed. It was found that teachers’ attention to validity issues had been undermined by the external test regimes, but that teachers could re‐address these issues by reflection on their values and by engagement in a shared development of portfolio assessments.     

Levels of social complexity and dimensions of peer experiences in youth sport

We assessed young adolescent female soccer players' perceptions of their peer group experiences. Data were collected via interviews with 34 girls from two youth soccer teams (M age = 13.0 years). Following inductive discovery analysis, data were subjected to an interpretive theoretical analysis guided by a model of peer experiences (Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 2006). Five categories of peer experiences were identified across three levels of social complexity. At the interaction level players integrated new members into the team and learned to interact with different types of people. At the relationship level players learned about managing peer conflict. At the group level a structure of leadership emerged and players learned to work together. Findings demonstrated interfaces between peer interactions, relationships, and group processes while also simplifying some apparently complex systems that characterized peer experiences on the teams studied.