Visitation to Natural Areas on Campus and its Relation to Place Identity and Environmentally Responsible Behaviors

This study examined college students’ visits to natural areas on campus and how these visits relate to place identity and environmentally responsible behaviors. The majority (76.5%) of the 115 participants visited the natural areas, and 55.7% of these students visited for a course requirement. Students who lived on campus, were younger, and majored in environmental studies, humanities, or arts made more frequent visits. Among those who had visited the natural areas (n = 88), place identity and environmental responsibility were related to visitation frequency, and were stronger for those who had visited for a course requirement. Place identity mediated the relationship between visiting for a course requirement and environmental behaviors, but did not mediate the impact of visitation frequency.     

Group Work Management in the Classroom

This study aims to provide a better understanding of teachers' managing roles when using group work in the classroom. Building on Granström's 2 concepts of leadership and teachership, a more specific aim is to investigate teachers' managing roles when using group work and how teachers' presumptions affect the way in which they manage the pedagogical mode. The results show that teachers' managing roles influence teachers' willingness to use group work. Teachers may be unwilling to use group work based on their presumption that it teaches students only collaboration abilities and not subject knowledge. This may be a supplemental yet significant explanation as to why group work continues to decrease in classrooms.     

NEGOTIATING POLITICIANS’ RESPONSIBILITIES IN NEWS INTERVIEWS

News interviews are contexts in which political responsibilities are articulated and negotiated. Although the accountability interview is recognized as a commonsense practice in journalism, and the research on political interviews is substantial, it partly remains to explore how responsibilities are negotiated in different forms of questioning in journalism. This study investigates three generic forms of questioning: accountability questioning, the clarifying of promises, and the principal assessments. Key features of the different forms are specified. The empirical study investigates how the questionings are performed in news on industrial crises in Sweden, in the different political regimes in the 1970s and the 2000s. The data consist of 27 news interviews with the formally responsible Ministers. The method is based on Conversation Analysis and includes detailed analyses of questions and answers. The study shows (1) how the forms of questioning differ when it comes to the action agenda and in how responsibilities are invoked and negotiated; (2) how the questionings tend to reproduce particular expectations of Governmental interventions; (3) how increased assertiveness and adversarialness in interviewing coincide with reduced expectations of political responsibilities.     

School–University Action Research: Impacts on Teaching Practices and Pupil Learning

The aim of this article is to describe a design and implementation of a school–university action research project about teaching and learning biology and mathematics in primary school. Nine teachers in grades 1 to 6, in collaboration with two researchers, were using content representation (CoRe) in learning study (LS)-inspired cycle as pedagogical tools when planning, implementing, and reflecting on lessons and pupil learning. By using pre- and post-tests, the teachers acquired knowledge about pupil subject-specific knowledge and learning. Some examples are given on how the tools in the project influenced the teaching practices and pupil learning. This research design brought together university and school practitioners to work collaboratively in a professional learning community, which developed teaching and learning in biology and mathematics.     

Changes in the prevalence of child sexual abuse, its risk factors, and their associations as a function of age cohort in a Finnish population sample

Objective

We examined (1) the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) experiences as a function of cohort and gender, (2) the prevalence of factors associated with CSA as a function of cohort and whether the association of these factors with CSA remained the same irrespective of cohort, and (3) whether any cohort differences could be explainable by cohort differences in reporting bias.

Method

We used the responses of 4,561 men (M = 29, SD = 7 years) and 8,361 female (M = 29, SD = 7 years) Finnish participants who responded to the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form as well as questions regarding family structure.

Results

The prevalence of CSA experiences varied between 0.7-4.6% for men and 1.8-7.5% for women depending on the item. Younger cohorts reported less CSA as well as less of the risk factors (physical neglect and abuse, emotional neglect and abuse, parental substances abuse, not growing up with both biological parents) that were positively associated with the likelihood of CSA. The effects of these risk factors did not vary as a function of the cohort. Also, the declining trend was not explainable by social desirability being higher in the younger cohorts.

Conclusions

The results suggest that there is a real decline in the prevalence of CSA and it is associated with a simultaneous decline in factors associated with CSA.     

A combined approach to strengthen children’s scientific thinking: direct instruction on scientific reasoning and training of teacher’s verbal support

Inquiry-based lessons have been demonstrated to improve children’s scientific thinking (i.e. reasoning abilities and domain-specific knowledge). Although empirical evidence shows that inquiry-based learning requires instruction, research comes from two approaches that have not been bridged yet: direct instruction of scientific reasoning and teacher training of verbal support. We investigated how these two types of instruction separately or combined strengthened children’s scientific thinking by comparing four conditions: baseline, direct instruction, verbal support, and a combined approach. Effectiveness of an inquiry-based lesson series on scientific reasoning abilities, vocabulary, and domain-specific knowledge (near and far transfer) were studied among 301 fourth graders. Results showed that both approaches strengthened different components of scientific reasoning abilities, and that a combination of instructions was most effective for scientific reasoning abilities, vocabulary, and domain-specific knowledge. Domain-specific knowledge acquisition was strengthened only when both instructions were provided. It can thus be concluded that each type of instruction has unique contributions to children’s science learning and that these instructions complement each other. Our study thus showed that inquiry-based lesson series when preceded by direct instruction of scientific reasoning and scaffolded with verbal support are most effective.     

In and out of the STEM pipeline – a longitudinal study of a misleading metaphor

ABSTRACT

The metaphor of the leaking pipeline is sometimes used to suggest that some students are lost for STEM as they advance through the educational system. This paper follows a cohort of upper-secondary school students with an interest in STEM from 18 months before their completion of upper-secondary until three years after their completion. Adopting a mixed-methods design, it follows the students' reflections and interests concerning their choice of higher education programme within and/or outside STEM. Only 22% of the students expressed the same interest during the whole period, and 56% changed between different groups of studies, e.g. between STEM and HEALTH. The students' trajectories showed that the leaking-pipeline metaphor is misleading because it suggests a linear and one-way movement, while there were students moving in as well as out of STEM trajectories. The students’ reflections showed identity issues at the level of ego identity, the personal identity and the social identity (Coté and Levine). Particular incidents in the students’ lives and in the outreach programme they were involved in sparked interests and reflections. These incidents should be considered as elements in a continuous reflection concerning who they are and where they would like to go rather than as critical moments.     

Inclusive and exclusive education in Sweden: principals' opinions and experiences

To support the national and international aims of inclusion, special teacher training in Sweden was replaced in 1990 by special educator training. These special educators would supervise the teachers in their school and would not exclusively teach students. The aim of this study was to investigate what the principals of 14 municipal compulsory schools in Stockholm County thought about the organisation and realisation of special education in 1996 and 2006 respectively. According to the results, there were fewer segregated groups in these schools in 2006, but an increasing number of students were placed in segregated groups that were common to several schools or municipalities. Principals at schools with teaching teams usually saw the special educator as a coordinating and supervising resource while others preferred the special teacher function. The former approach led to a more inclusive school and the latter in the direction of exclusion.     

Wildly wise in the terrible moment: Kant,Emerson, and improvisatory Bildung in early childhood education

Abstract

This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children’s Bildung. The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung. It explores the role of Bildung and self-cultivation in preschools through a philosophy that accounts for children’s ‘Wild wisdom’ by letting Emerson speak to Kant. The paper argues that Kant’s vision of Bildung essentially involves reason’s turn upon itself and that Emerson, particularly in how he is taken up by Cavell, shows that such a turn is already present in the processes of children inheriting, learning, and improvising with language. This improvisatory outlook on moral education is contrasted with common goals of moral education prescribed in early childhood education where the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 is used as an example.