Dynamics of GeoGebra ecosystem in mathematics education

Education and Information Technologies - The purpose of this study was to investigate the trends of GeoGebra related studies. We focused on the articles published between 2009 and 2021 and existed...     

Exploring an intervention’s impact on everyday school activities

The focus of this paper is on a group of pupils with reading and writing difficulties who have been participating in an intervention study using assistive technology. That intervention study contained supervised training sessions with reading and writing tasks using an iPad with special supportive applications. The current study is a qualitative investigation of whether there has been any transfer from the intervention, to the pupils’ everyday school activities. Interviews with pupils and their teachers and observations during classroom lectures have been used to collect data. The results show that the pupils were positive to the assistive technology (the applications on the iPads), they found the apps easy to learn how to use and they appreciated the benefits they could give. Even so, only a few of the pupils had found use for and continued to use the tools after the intervention period finished. Possible reasons are that when the novelty wore off, students reverted to their usual study habits and that older students with many teachers and different classrooms were less able to adapt to using the apps. To improve transfer, it is suggested to introduce assistive technology earlier to students, in the younger grades, before study habits have been formed and to inform teachers about the use of AT in the classroom, including what is available and how it can benefit students.     

The medicalization of current educational research and its effects on education policy and school reforms

This paper starts from the assumption of the emergence of an educationalized culture over the last 200 years according to which perceived social problems are translated into educational challenges. As a result, both educational institutions and educational research grew, and educational policy resulted from negotiations between professionals, researchers, and policy makers. The paper argues that specific experiences in the Second World War triggered a fundamental shift in the social and cultural role of academia, leading up to a technocratic culture characterized by confidence in experts rather than in practicing professionals (i.e., teachers and administrators). In this technocratic shift, first a technological system of reasoning emerged, and it was then replaced by a medical “paradigm.” The new paradigm led to a medicalization of social research, in which a particular organistic understanding of the social reality is taken for granted and research is conducted under the mostly undiscussed premises of this particular understanding. The result is that despite the increased importance of research in general, this expertocratic and medical shift of social research led to a massive reduction in reform opportunities by depriving the reform stakeholders of a broad range of education research, professional experience, common sense, and political deliberation.     

Is teacher attrition a poor estimate of the value of teacher education? A Swedish case

Far from all who complete teacher education end up working as teachers throughout their entire career. At first sight the value of teacher education, in terms of efficiency, seems to be a failure. In the present article we argue that teacher attrition, when defined as whether one is working as teacher or not, is a too blunt measure to gauge whether teacher education has been valuable. With a unique dataset, where we have detailed information on 87 Swedish teacher graduates’ working life across 23 years, we can consider whether activities and/or experiences point to an apparent use of teacher education. In conclusion, we find that in order to get informative estimates of its value it is important to consider it from different perspectives and to consider attrition related to the total working time spent in educational settings across a career rather than percentage leaving teaching after a set of years     

Educational policy for citizenship in the early years in Australia

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to ‘be a good citizen’. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education.     

ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION OF INTELLECTUALLY GIFTED STUDENTS WHEN CONFRONTED WITH CHALLENGING AND UNCHALLENGING TASKS

Two groups of gifted adolescents solved two similar intelligence tests with differing levels of task difficulty in reverse order. Under both conditions the performance level on the less complex test was much lower, a result not observed in a control group of average intelligence. Behavioural observations revealed that the low performance of the gifted students was combined with lack of effort. This performance pattern is discussed with respect to recent postulates of achievement motivation theory, which empasize the impact not only of the achievement motive, but also of the informational value of a given task for evaluating own level of ability. It is argued that the perceived informational value of the easier test was not high enough to create an incentive for the gifted students to perform at the highest possible level     

Sex education in Spain: the relevance of teachers’ training and attitudes / Educación sexual en España: importancia de la formación y las actitudes del profesorado

Abstract

This research has two main aims: a) the study of Spanish teachers’ training and attitudes towards sex education, as well as the delivery of this subject in classrooms, while also exploring the existence of differences according to personal and professional characteristics; and b) to examine the association between teachers’ training and attitudes, and the extent to which these variables predict the delivery of sex education. A total of 3,695 Infant, Primary, Secondary and High school teachers (66.1% women, 33.9% men) throughout the country completed a voluntary online questionnaire that inquired about their training and attitudes towards sex education, their delivery or non-delivery of this subject in classrooms, and other personal and professional characteristics. Analyses indicate that participants show positive attitudes towards sex education, but that 43.3% are not trained in this issue, and 48.6% do not teach it at school. Some significant differences by sex, educational stage and type of school have been found. In addition, trained teachers show more positive attitudes to sex education. Finally, having more positive attitudes and, to a lesser extent, having prior training, positively predicts the delivery of sex education. These results highlight the importance of reviewing and improving teachers’ training on sexuality and sex education, with particular emphasis on attitudinal contents.