Regulating the writing process in the teacher training practicum guided by feedback at the University of Barcelona

This is a longitudinal study that focuses on blog-writing for the purpose of self-assessing competencies, and which was carried out within the practicum of a degree course in Primary Education Teaching at the University of Barcelona. Over the course of three academic years, students and a teacher have used a Platform 2.0 program, specially created for the study, to reflect on their learning processes and to self-assess with respect to the benchmark competences selected. The results show, first, a significant increase in students’ levels of awareness of their own competences, thanks to the optimisation of their communicative competency to explain same, and guided by the teacher’s feedback; and second, a growing level of satisfaction that can be observed in the assessment surveys on the process implemented.     

A Measure of Self-Esteem in Singapore Secondary Schools

Stanley Coopersmith (1981. p. 5) defines self-esteem as “the evaluation a person makes and customarily maintains with regard to him- or herself. ‘Self-esteem’ expresses an attitude of approval or disapproval and indicates the extent to which a person believes him- or herself capable, significant, successful and worthy.” This judgement of worthiness of oneself is relatively enduring and general rather than transitory and specific. A person's self-esteem may vary across different areas of experience and role-defined conditions but one will presumably weigh these areas according to their subjective importance and then arrive at a general level of self-esteem. Attitude toward the “self” may or may not be noticed consciously. However, it can be detected through one's behaviour and performance.     

Money versus the soul: neoliberal economics in the education modernisation reform in post-soviet Russia

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the case of Russia’s post-Soviet education reform, the paper explores the interaction between borrowed reformatory solutions and culture codes in the process of neoliberal educational modernisation. Through the examination of the concept of ‘commercial service’ the article shows how bottom-up societal resistance is maintained and normalised in the real-life language of the reform debate among policy-makers, teachers, parents and the general public. Building on policy-as-discourse studies, the analysis unpacks specific conceptual frames behind societal interpretation of educational commercialisation. The article finds that the public debate is stalled by an extreme polarisation and a seeming intractability of such conceptual categories as ‘money’, ‘commerce’, ‘moral upbringing’, and ‘the soul.’ It further argues that instead of mediating borrowed and domestic social meanings, the official reform narrative serves to strengthen the polarisation of opinions, while leaving under-conceptualised a number of important links between market values of competitive individualism, material profit and entrepreneurship and domestic values of egalitarianism, collegiality, moral education and non-materialist values. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of the state in transmitting borrowed policy ideas to the public and the interplay between grassroots resistance and national education policies.     

Practical intelligence and elementary-school teacher effectiveness in the United States and Israel: Measuring the predictive power of tacit knowledge

One important aspect of teacher effectiveness, of course, is formal knowledge of one or more academic disciplines. But another aspect of teacher effectiveness may be informal, or tacit knowledge of how to handle challenging situations, or even crises, that arise in the classroom. Tacit knowledge is what a person needs to know to succeed in an endeavor that is typically not explicitly taught and that often is not even verbalized. It is procedural knowledge, and thus is not just a static form of knowledge, but rather, knowledge in use. We constructed a measure of tacit knowledge for elementary-school teachers, in order to determine the teachers’ likely effectiveness in dealing with problematical classroom situations. In Study 1, our primary goal was to determine whether our measure predicted principals’ ratings of the teachers’ classroom performance as well as teachers’ ratings of their own effectiveness. We found that teachers who scored higher on our tacit-knowledge inventory generally were rated as more effective by their principals, but as less effective by themselves. In Study 2, we investigated whether responses to problematical situations that were viewed as better or worse, respectively, in the United States were also viewed as better or worse, respectively, in Israel. We found a high correlation between responses in the two countries. We concluded that it is possible to measure an important aspect of teacher effectiveness via a measure of tacit knowledge, and that comparable measurements may be possible across at least two cultures.     

The Relationship of Maternal Employment to Early Adolescent Daily Experience With and Without Parents

This study examines how maternal work may shape pre- and young adolescents' daily life experience. According to the procedures of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), 295 10– 13-year-old children carried electronic pagers for 1 week and completed self-report forms in response to random signals sent every other hour. Their daily experience did not differ by maternal employment status, with the following exceptions: full-time maternal employment was associated with more time doing homework with mothers and less time in general leisure, while part-time employment was associated with more time doing sports with parents. Relative to those with nonemployed mothers, youth with part-time employed mothers reported more positive daily moods and higher self-esteem, while youth reported time with full-time employed mothers to be the friendliest. While children with employed mothers spent no less time with family, parents, friends, in class or alone, they spent more time alone with fathers.     

Reading in able and disabled readers from around the world: same or different? An illustration from a study of reading‐related processes in a Swahili sample of siblings

Erratum . Journal of Research in Reading 29:2, 252 In this article, we discuss two characteristics of the majority of current behaviour‐ and molecular‐genetic studies of reading ability and disability, specifically, the ascertainment strategies and the populations from which samples are selected. In the context of this discussion, we present data that we collected on a sample of Swahili‐speaking siblings from Tanzania. With this sample, we (1) explore the efficiency and practicality of the single proband sibpair design and (2) provide data on the predictability of reading and spelling performance using reading‐related componential measures in a novel Swahili‐speaking sample. Specifically, we present the selection criteria, discuss the pattern of behavioural and behaviour‐genetic results obtained on the sample and compare these results with those available in the literature. We report behavioural and behaviour‐genetic correlations in this sample that are comparable with other studied samples in other languages, and discuss the similarities and differences. Thus, we demonstrate the suitability and effectiveness of the single sib ascertainment method for genetic analyses of reading ability and disability in novel samples in previously unstudied languages.     

The Effect of Attitudes on Science Achievement: A Study Conducted Among High School Pupils in Cyprus

The purpose of this study was to examine how pupils' attitudes towards science and their beliefs about themselves affect their achievements in science, and vice versa. Cyprus provided an interesting location for the study, being a developing nation that has adopted educational ideas from a variety of countries, including the US, UK and Greece. The results of this study demonstrated the differential effects that science achievement and science attitudes can have on each other, depending on the characteristics of the educational systems of the country. The findings indicate various directions for future research.     

Some multiplicative structures in elementary education: a view from relational paradigm

Educational Studies in Mathematics - The multiplicative reasoning that students should develop in elementary school is a key area of research in contemporary mathematics education. Researchers...