Tasks and trajectories in learning to teach

University‐based teacher‐education programmes in the USA confront mounting pressure to demonstrate that graduates will have a significant and positive impact on student achievement. Such pressure has forced teacher educators to wrestle with the question of what constitutes compelling evidence that teacher candidates will indeed have such an impact. This paper presents the deliberations and resulting investigation of a team of university faculty members seeking to account for preservice elementary‐school teachers’ learning and development. It offers a preliminary articulation of a trajectory of learning, and a critique of the tasks and the programmatic experiences from which this trajectory is constructed.     

Globalization,values education,and school music education in China

This paper examines music education’s legitimation of values as a means of preparing students for entry into the new ‘knowledge society’ of the People’s Republic of China in a global age. It explores the ways in which values education relates to the teaching of both musical and non‐musical meanings in the dual context of nationalism and globalization, and discusses some problems that values education faces in school music classrooms. It examines the ways in which globalization has pressured values education into resolving the apparent contradiction between national identity and national unity in the ever‐changing play of Chinese history and politics. It concludes with a discussion of how music education might juggle three pairs of apparently contradictory relationships in the curriculum: between contemporary cultural and social values on the one hand, and traditional Chinese and Communist ideologies on the other; between collectivism and individualism; and between national and global cultures.     

Towards a theory of school leadership practice: a Bourdieusian perspective

Despite the ‘practice’ turn in the broader management literature, very little work in educational administration has engaged in a theoretical discussion about what constitutes leadership practice. Theoretically informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper contributes to the long-established critical tradition in the educational administration literature, to argue that: (i) ‘leadership’ is a label of the managerialist project of the state; (ii) leadership should be thought of as a disruptive practice; and (iii) Bourdieusian theory can enable this thinking, but not as it is frequently mobilised in the educational administration literature. The alternative put forth in this paper is not merely replacing one external narrative (managerialism) with another (Bourdieusian), but rather advancing a theoretical position on what is leadership that paves a way forward for a research programme.     

Exploring the Boundary Conditions of the Redundancy Principle

This experiment investigated whether study of a scientific text and a visual display that contained redundant text segments would affect memory and transfer. The authors randomly assigned 42 students from a university in the southwestern United States in equal numbers to 1 of 2 conditions: (a) a redundant condition, in which participants studied a scientific text that described plate tectonics and a corresponding visual display that contained redundant segments from the text; or (b) a nonredundant condition, in which participants studied the scientific text and a corresponding visual display that lacked the redundant text segments. Embedding redundant text segments within the visual display enhanced performance on 3 measures of memory but not on a measure of transfer. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications using the cognitive theory of multimedia learning.     

Emotional arousal of beginning physics teachers during extended experimental investigations

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry‐based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations (EEIs) produced emotional states that mediated their teaching practices. Against rhetoric of fear expressed by their senior colleagues, three of the four teachers were surprised by the positive outcomes from their supervision of EEIs for the first time. Two of these teachers experienced high intensity positive emotions in response to their students' success. When student actions/outcomes did not meet their teachers' expectations, frustration, anger, and disappointment were experienced by the teachers, as predicted by a sociological theory of human emotions (Turner, J. H. (2007). Human emotions: A sociological theory. London, England: Routledge). Over the course of the EEI projects, the teachers' practices changed along with their emotional states and their students' achievements. We account for similarities and differences in the teachers' emotional experiences in terms of context, prior experience, and expectations. The findings from this study provide insights into effective supervision practices that can be used to inform new and experienced teachers alike. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 50:137–161, 2013     

DEN HERBARTSKE PEDAGOGIKKS INNFLYTELSE I NORGE

Gill, P. E. 1976. The Relationship Between Mental Ability and Eight Background Variables. Scand. J. educ. Res. 20, 135‐145. Multiple regression is seen as a search technique when applied to IQ. test data. The results from such a search are stochastic rather than deterministic. Because of this it is imperative that comprehensive samples be studied. The sample in this study (n = 3,695) was representative of the population of Irish 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds. The results are surprising in that the total variance explained by predictors such as SES, sex, family size, position in family, absenteeism and urbanity is never more than 8 %. Differences in how predictors behave with IQ and Vocabulary are noted. SES, family size and urbanity are the most significant predictors. When Vocabulary is the criterion, sex differences (in favour of girls) emerge consistently. It is contended that pupils of low intelligence go absent more often than their peers. The total variance explained was increased when homoscedasticity was reduced by stabilizing criterion variance (by reducing age span).     

Book Reading in Leisure Time: Long‐Term changes in young peoples' book reading habits

In this study, the merit of using deliberative democratic evaluations is studied in light of ten questions asked by House and Howe, which defined the approach and raise issues of interests, representation, and choice of stakeholders, power balances and procedures for controlling them, participation, reflection and deliberation. Suggestions by Clark and Moss for using a mosaic approach were followed. This indicates, when listening to children, many fragments integrate into a whole picture. The emphasis here was on listening to children's views and defining values and evaluation criteria so that they reflect our definition of childhood and quality of childcare. Children had other priorities than parents and staff in some instances, for example regarding length of stay and autonomy. Greene's issues of power, core matters, and biases were utilized for reflection on issues.