Planning for Reform-Based Science: Case Studies of Two Urban Elementary Teachers

The intent of national efforts to frame science education standards is to promote students’ development of scientific practices and conceptual understanding for their future role as scientifically literate citizens (NRC 2012). A guiding principle of science education reform is that all students receive equitable opportunities to engage in rigorous science learning. Yet, implementation of science education reform depends on teachers’ instructional decisions. In urban schools serving students primarily from poor, diverse communities, teachers typically face obstacles in providing reform-based science due to limited resources and accountability pressures, as well as a culture of teacher-directed pedagogy, and deficit views of students. The purpose of this qualitative research was to study two white, fourth grade teachers from high-poverty urban schools, who were identified as transforming their science teaching and to investigate how their beliefs, knowledge bases, and resources shaped their planning for reform-based science. Using the Shavelson and Stern’s decision model for teacher planning to analyze evidence gathered from interviews, documents, planning meetings, and lesson observations, the findings indicated their planning for scientific practices was influenced by the type and extent of professional development each received, each teacher’s beliefs about their students and their background, and the mission and learning environment each teacher envisioned for the reform to serve their students. The results provided specific insights into factors that impacted their planning in high-poverty urban schools and indicated considerations for those in similar contexts to promote teachers’ planning for equitable science learning opportunities by all students.     

Exploring Gender and Phenomenography

A critical feature of phenomenographic study is its generation of the “outcome space” which constitutes the results of the study. The central idea underlying this article is that women may be “lost in space" — the phenomenographic outcome space. First, women seem to be literally missing in the majority of phenomenographic studies. These studies have usually been in fields in which women are poorly represented and in research samples in which women have not been present. Second, the traditional disciplines of study, the values of which largely determine the structure of the typically hierarchical outcome space, are patriarchal. Without attention to the hidden as well as the explicit aspects of what learners are coming to know, the understanding that we gain from the outcome space may be distorted. Third, the outcome space tends to be defined in many studies in cognitive terms, excluding or neglecting the affective dimension often associated with women's ways of knowing. This article explores the implications of looking for and elaborating on women's experience in phenomenographic research and suggests several ways in which women's experience might be recognised: by ensuring that women are included in research; by questioning in gender‐sensitive ways; by collecting and analysing the data with attention to the gendered construction of disciplinary knowledge and gendered ways of knowing.     

好东西是用来分享的

很早很早以前,没有网络的时候,如果我们看了有趣的书和文章,遇到了好看的电视剧,吃到了美味的食物,想和朋友分享时,是通过写信或者电话或者当面聊天,而且这种分享只能局限在几个亲密好友之间。但是有了网络之后,一切都不同了,可以写博客写QQ空间,可以发微博,而如今,有越来越多的分享性网站,可以让我们把自己所爱的东西与他人分享。     

A new approach to evaluating the well-being of PhD research students

This study describes the development of an assessment to evaluate the well-being of PhD researchers using a clinically approved methodology that places the perceptions and experiences of the subject population at the heart of its construction. It identifies and assesses the range and relative importance of seven distinct dimensions which are shown to impact adversely on the perceived well-being of student researchers across all stages of their studies. According to the findings, the well-being of doctoral students comprises needs relating to development, facilities, home and health, research, social, supervisor and university. The instrument was found to demonstrate good content validity and internal reliability. Its use offers new insights into the experiences of early career researchers and may inform efforts to better support them. This, in turn, may have a positive impact upon retention levels and future career choices for this research population.     

An investigation into the capacity of student motivation and emotion regulation strategies to predict engagement and resilience in the middle school classroom

Although most of the initial research on self-regulated learning focused on cognitive and meta-cognitive aspects, there has been a growing interest in the emotion and motivation domains of self-regulation. This article reports on research undertaken to investigate specific motivation and emotion regulation strategies used by middle school students and the relationship between the use of such strategies and student engagement and resilience. The research targeted one type of motivation regulation??goal-oriented strategies??and two types of emotion regulation: antecedent and stress release strategies, together with avoidance strategies. Students who used goal-oriented motivation regulation strategies were more likely than others to be resilient. Contrasting results were obtained when investigating the ability of each emotion regulation strategy type to predict engagement and resilience. As expected, students who used avoidant strategies were less likely than others to develop resilience. This article discusses the implications of the research for the classroom, including the teaching of particular motivation and emotion regulation strategies to students and providing the right classroom environment for strategy development.     

Rethinking library service to distance education students: analyzing the embedded librarian model

Since fall 2009, reference librarians at The George Washington University's Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library have been embedded in online classes through Blackboard within the School of Nursing and School of Medicine and Health Sciences. The authors sought to determine the types of questions asked of the librarian, with the goal of informing future interactions with distance education classes to help develop a standard "protocol" for working with this population of students. Eighty-two questions were categorized and qualitatively analyzed. The findings have prompted librarians to explore tools such as Elluminate Live!, a tool that allows librarians to provide synchronous instruction within the Blackboard environment.     

Quantile Regression in the Study of Developmental Sciences

Linear regression analysis is one of the most common techniques applied in developmental research, but only allows for an estimate of the average relations between the predictor(s) and the outcome. This study describes quantile regression, which provides estimates of the relations between the predictor(s) and outcome, but across multiple points of the outcome's distribution. Using data from the High School and Beyond and U.S. Sustained Effects Study databases, quantile regression is demonstrated and contrasted with linear regression when considering models with: (a) one continuous predictor, (b) one dichotomous predictor, (c) a continuous and a dichotomous predictor, and (d) a longitudinal application. Results from each example exhibited the differential inferences which may be drawn using linear or quantile regression.     

Co-thought gestures: Supporting students to successfully navigate map tasks

This study considers the role and nature of co-thought gestures when students process map-based mathematics tasks. These gestures are typically spontaneously produced silent gestures which do not accompany speech and are represented by small movements of the hands or arms often directed toward an artefact. The study analysed 43 students (aged 10–12 years) over a 3-year period as they solved map tasks that required spatial reasoning. The map tasks were representative of those typically found in mathematics classrooms for this age group and required route finding and coordinate knowledge. The results indicated that co-thought gestures were used to navigate the problem space and monitor movements within the spatial challenges of the respective map tasks. Gesturing was most influential when students encountered unfamiliar tasks or when they found the tasks spatially demanding. From a teaching and learning perspective, explicit co-thought gesturing highlights cognitive challenges students are experiencing since students tended to not use gesturing in tasks where the spatial demands were low.     

Relations among home literacy environment,child characteristics and print knowledge for preschool children with language impairment

To contribute to the modest body of work examining the home literacy environment (HLE) and emergent literacy outcomes for children with disabilities, this study addressed two aims: (a) to determine the unique contributions of the HLE on print knowledge of preschool children with language impairment and (b) to identify whether specific child characteristics (oral language ability, print interest) moderated these relations. The sample consisted of 119 preschool children with language impairment. HLE was conceptualised as frequency of storybook reading and literacy teaching during book reading. Frequency of storybook reading was a unique predictor of print knowledge, which is consistent with research on children with typical language. Literacy teaching did not predict print knowledge, which diverges from research on children with typical language. No interactions between the HLE and child characteristics were significant, but language ability and print interest play a role in understanding individual differences in literacy development.     

Component processes in reading: shared and unique variance in serial and isolated naming speed

Reading ability is comprised of several component processes. In particular, the connection between the visual and verbal systems has been demonstrated to play an important role in the reading process. The present study provides a review of the existing literature on the visual verbal connection as measured by two tasks, rapid serial naming and isolated (or discrete-trial) naming speed, as they relate to reading ability. For each identified study, a secondary data analysis was conducted using the provided correlations between serial naming, isolated naming, and reading. The same analysis was repeated for average population-level correlations among these constructs using meta-analytic weighting techniques. Results suggested that isolated naming acts as a suppressor variable in the relation of serial naming with reading, indicating that there exists at least one cognitive component of the serial naming task that is predictive of reading but is not shared with isolated naming speed. The effect has several implications for understanding the underlying cognitive components reading ability, which are discussed.