Developing as a teacher in the fields of science and technology

In universities, development as a teacher may be contradicted with developing as a researcher. Most previous studies have investigated pedagogical development merely as a result of pedagogical training and ignored the dual teacher-researcher identity. This study examines what kind of meaningful experiences are perceived to have triggered and influenced the process of developing as a teacher in the fields of science and technology. The data were gathered by interviewing 10 academics who had participated in a pedagogical training offered by a Finnish technical university between 1999 and 2009. Based on a narrative analysis utilizing dimensions of transformative learning, the results highlight the influence of the working environment and experiences, and imply that teacher development process in the fields of science and technology can be better understood in terms of becoming a teacher, rather than as a continual, conscious development process. The resulting teacher-researcher identity provides a basis for pedagogical development.     

Visualisations as a means for exploring academics’ teacher identities

Academics’ teacher identities is a relatively little explored area. This paper explores this through an analysis of drawings by academics. The data consist of 90 drawings. The participants are academics who have attended basic courses in university pedagogy. The drawings were content analysed. In the drawings, the academics expressed themselves as teachers through the teaching context and the actors, artefacts and activities of teaching and learning. By drawing attention to these elements, academics can be encouraged to reflect on their beliefs about teaching and teacher role.     

Skizze zur Historiographie der Ästhetischen Bildung

This article is focussing on a historical approach to the term of aesthetic education from three different angles: as history of ideas, biographies and images. Aesthetic education is thereby understood as performative and reflective involvement with aesthetics and the fine arts such as arts, theatre and literature etc. A first approach is defining the history of ideas as a theoretical reconstruction of aesthetic concepts and their educational relevance; this history is also discussing educational theories and their aesthetic implications. It is more or less an implicit and compensatory history because the important contexts are not visible at first sight; and the aesthetic and pedagogical theories often need a reciprocal addition. A biographical perspective is hereby concentrated on the biography of artists. Thereby the educational science of biographies are highlighting the situation of the arts and the artists, the development of becoming an artist, the progression as an artist and the artistic institutions in a educational-aesthetic nexus. Such a perspective is supplementing the history of ideas concerning cultural and socio-historical dimensions as well as institutional and biographic aspects. Finally, the history of images is focusing on the thesis that every picture also includes a programme of aesthetic education. In pictures the process of productive and reflective visualisation is expressed: paintings refer to their production and their understanding. For the method of the historical-educational iconography of aesthetic education a historicizing matrix from production aesthetics, work aesthetics and reception aesthetics is suggested. This matrix is combined with a theory of education as transformation of self-relation, of relations to other individuals and the world. The three approaches just mentioned are exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci and his famous picture “Vitruvian Man” from 1492.     

ASSESSING STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF TEACHER KNOWLEDGE IN ASIA, EASTERN EUROPE, AND WESTERN COUNTRIES: DIFFERENTIAL ITEM FUNCTIONING IN TEDS-M

The “Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics” assessed the knowledge of primary and lower-secondary teachers at the end of their training. The large-scale assessment represented the common denominator of what constitutes mathematics content knowledge and mathematics pedagogical content knowledge in the 16 participating countries. The country means provided information on the overall teacher performance in these 2 areas. By detecting and explaining differential item functioning (DIF), this paper goes beyond the country means and investigates item-by-item strengths and weaknesses of future teachers. We hypothesized that due to differences in the cultural context, teachers from different countries responded differently to subgroups of test items with certain item characteristics. Content domains, cognitive demands (including item difficulty), and item format represented, in fact, such characteristics: They significantly explained variance in DIF. Country pairs showed similar patterns in the relationship of DIF to the item characteristics. Future teachers from Taiwan and Singapore were particularly strong on mathematics content and constructed-response items. Future teachers from Russia and Poland were particularly strong on items requiring non-standard mathematical operations. The USA and Norway did particularly well on mathematics pedagogical content and data items. Thus, conditional on the countries’ mean performance, the knowledge profiles of the future teachers matched the respective national debates. This result points to the influences of the cultural context on mathematics teacher knowledge.     

Visual Communication in the Workplace: A Survey of Practice

This article reports the results of a survey of professional writers about the nature and importance of visual communication in their work. The results confirm the suggestions in the field's literature that visual communication is important to workplace practice and that the role of the professional writer has expanded beyond the domain of the verbal. Visual communication responsibilities are complex and varied, but the practitioners surveyed typically engage in substantial amounts of design-related work and value visual communication abilities. The data suggest that visual communication should be a curricular priority in professional writing programs.     

Relationships Among Measures as Empirical Evidence of Validity: Incorporating Multiple Indicators of Achievement and School Context

In this article we examine empirical evidence on the criterion, predictive, transfer, and fairness aspects of validity of a large-scale language arts performance assessment, referred to as the Performance Assignment (PA). We use multilevel models to avoid biased inferences that might result from the naturally nested data. Specifically, we examine the relationships of the assessment with the Stanford Achievement Test, 9th Edition and the California High School Exit Examination. The results indicate that the measures are related, that students demonstrate a degree of transfer, and that the language arts PA is relatively more fair than comparison assessments. The results are robust to various model specifications and demonstrate that benefits do not accrue to all students equally.     

Book review

Brain Research and Childhood Education: Implications for Educators D. Bergen and J. Coscia; Olney, MD: 2001 Association for Childhood Education International. 80 pp. ISBN 0–87173–154–1 (pbk.)