School cultures as contexts for informal teacher learning

This study profiles and compares international social contexts for teacher workplace informal learning from the teachers' perspectives. Set in elementary schools in the U.S. and Lithuania, the study illustrates how teachers make sense of and engage in professional learning within their historical, political and administrative contexts. A socio-cultural framework brings into view different opportunities for teacher informal learning. These evolve from comparing teacher interviews about their learning to ethnographic case studies of the school's cultures that include schools' missions, building structures, classroom environments, organizational arrangements, traditions, and professional relationships. The study illustrates key interrelated cultural qualities of schools that support and hinder informal learning; argues for the importance of acknowledging teacher informal learning as a method of career-long professional development, and suggests further research about how to build and sustain the school infrastructure necessary to maintain such development.     

Adult intervention levels in young children’s free play: an observational study on how Pikler educators combine the instrumental and relational dimensions of their educational activity

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Studies about child development emphasize the importance of play in children’s early years. However, there is an existing controversy about the...     

Losing Staff: The Seven Stages of Loss and Recovery

The loss of co-workers due to retirement has a profound impact on the people who are left to carry on with the work of the unit. The process of recovery from the loss of experienced and long-serving support staff members is analogous to the stages of grief that a person experiences after the death of a loved one. This article describes how the Serials Services unit at the University of Victoria Libraries is coping with the consequences of the retirement of its two most experienced library assistants and discusses the steps taken in order to continue to provide quality service to users.     

Defining Meaningful Literacy: Findings from a Socially-oriented Literacy Intervention for Adults with Developmental Disabilities

The current study is a qualitative analysis of the results of a literacy skills intervention with a group comprising of three individuals with Down syndrome and three individuals with other developmental disabilities. The intervention was developed to address the concern that individuals in this population are often only exposed to functional literacy experiences (i.e. those building only literacy skills required for daily functioning and survival), at the expense of more enriched experiences that engage personal meaning. As a result, it included both reading and writing activities designed to invite personal investment in literacy experiences. In this vein, the data collected derives primarily from the participant’s own writing, and has been supplemented with other qualitative measures (e.g. parental questionnaires, participant focus group responses, field notes). The current article discusses the impact and implications of this intervention for future literacy interventions of this kind, in terms of the themes, which emerged from these data; with a particular emphasis on the participants’ own experiences.     

Phonological awareness predicts activation patterns for print and speech

Using fMRI, we explored the relationship between phonological awareness (PA), a measure of metaphonological knowledge of the segmental structure of speech, and brain activation patterns during processing of print and speech in young readers from 6 to 10 years of age. Behavioral measures of PA were positively correlated with activation levels for print relative to speech tokens in superior temporal and occipito-temporal regions. Differences between print-elicited activation levels in superior temporal and inferior frontal sites were also correlated with PA measures with the direction of the correlation depending on stimulus type: positive for pronounceable pseudowords and negative for consonant strings. These results support and extend the many indications in the behavioral and neurocognitive literature that PA is a major component of skill in beginning readers and point to a developmental trajectory by which written language engages areas originally shaped by speech for learners on the path toward successful literacy acquisition.

Motivational interference in school-leisure conflict and learning outcomes: The differential effects of two value conceptions

It was hypothesized that students' value orientations are connected to their experience of motivational interference in a conflict between a school- and a leisure-related activity as well as to school marks as indicators of learning outcomes. In a self-report study with Italian adolescents (N = 433; M = 14.5 years) using a school-leisure conflict scenario, first, the relations between the 10 values introduced by Schwartz and the Inglehart-based Achievement and Well-being value orientations were investigated. Correlations and multidimensional scaling analysis showed overlaps as well as differences between the two sets of value variables. Regression analyses revealed that the Schwartz values were significantly related to the experience of motivational interference during studying and during leisure as well as to school marks. The inclusion of Achievement and Well-being value orientations explained additional variance of the three dependent variables. The relevance of individual values in explaining students' reactions to motivational conflicts is highlighted.     

Role of vitamin B12 on methylmalonyl-CoA mutase activity

Vitamin B₁₂ is an organometallic compound with important metabolic derivatives that act as cofactors of certain enzymes, which have been grouped into three subfamilies depending on their cofactors. Among them, methylmalonyl-CoA mutase (MCM) has been extensively studied. This enzyme catalyzes the reversible isomerization of L-methylmalonyl-CoA to succinyl-CoA using adenosylcobalamin (AdoCbl) as a cofactor participating in the generation of radicals that allow isomerization of the substrate. The crystal structure of MCM determined in Propionibacterium freudenreichii var. shermanii has helped to elucidate the role of this cofactor AdoCbl in the reaction to specify the mechanism by which radicals are generated from the coenzyme and to clarify the interactions between the enzyme, coenzyme, and substrate. The existence of human methylmalonic acidemia (MMA) due to the presence of mutations in MCM shows the importance of its role in metabolism. The recent crystallization of the human MCM has shown that despite being similar to the bacterial protein, there are significant differences in the structural organization of the two proteins. Recent studies have identified the involvement of an accessory protein called MMAA, which interacts with MCM to prevent MCM’s inactivation or acts as a chaperone to promote regeneration of inactivated enzyme. The interdisciplinary studies using this protein as a model in different organisms have helped to elucidate the mechanism of action of this isomerase, the impact of mutations at a functional level and their repercussion in the development and progression of MMA in humans. It is still necessary to study the mechanisms involved in more detail using new methods.     

Typology of motivation and learning intentions of users in MOOCs: the MOOCKNOWLEDGE study

Educational technology research and development - Participants in massive open online courses show a wide variety of motivations. This has been studied with the elaboration of classifications of...     

Multitrait–Multimethod Assessment of Giftedness: An Application of the Correlated Traits–Correlated (Methods – 1) Model

Although the use of multiple criteria and informants is one of the most universally agreed on practices in the identification of gifted children, few studies to date have examined the convergent validity of multiple informants and objective ability tests in gifted identification. In this study, we illustrate the use of the correlated traits–correlated (methods – 1) or CT–C(M – 1) model (Eid, Lischetzke, Nussbeck, & Trierweiler, 2003) to examine the convergent validity of self, parent, and teacher ratings relative to objective cognitive ability tests in a sample of 145 4th to 6th graders. The CT–C(M – 1) analyses revealed that teacher ratings showed the highest convergence with the objective assessments, whereas self-ratings had the lowest reliabilities and insufficient validity. Parent ratings were more reliable and valid than self-reports, but were outperformed by teacher ratings for most abilities. Overall, the CT–C(M – 1) analyses showed that the convergent validity of the ratings relative to the objective test battery was highest for numerical and lowest for creative abilities. Furthermore, whereas part of the shared variance between parent and teacher ratings reflected true convergent validity, agreement between parent and self-reports was entirely due to a shared rater variance. Our analyses demonstrate the usefulness and proper interpretation of the CT–C(M – 1) approach for examining convergent validity and method effects in multitrait–multimethod data.