Preparing teacher-students for twenty-first-century learning practices (PREP 21): a framework for enhancing collaborative problem-solving and strategic learning skills

With regard to the growing interest in developing teacher education to match the twenty-first-century skills, while many assumptions have been made, there has been less theoretical elaboration and empirical research on this topic. The aim of this article is to present our pedagogical framework for the twenty-first-century learning practices in teacher education. We will first review the current status of policy frameworks for the twenty-first-century learning skills. Based on our previous work and current understanding in the field of learning sciences, we will next elaborate the processes and strategies for collaborative problem-solving skills and strategic learning skills to specify current, rather general claims presented regarding the discussion on twenty-first-century skills. We will also provide concrete case examples facilitating strategic learning skills, collaborative problem-solving skills, and the skills to use information and communication technologies in contexts of our previous studies.     

Learning about learning

The aim of this study has been to explore possible developmental differences in conceptions of learning amongst a group of people with very different learning experiences. The data consist of interviews with 90 people concerning their approach to learning. The sample was selected according to two criteria: age (which ranged from 15 years 7 months up to 73 years 3 months) and level of formal education (with a minimum of 6 years and a maximum of 16/17 years).Analysis of the interviews revealed that there are distinctive differences between people in terms of their subjective conceptions of learning, the nature of which has been described elsewhere. In the present article, the focus is on describing what seems to be an important developmental process: for some people the phenomenon of learning has become thematized — it has been made an object of reflection — while for others it represents an activity the nature of which is taken for granted.     

Student teachers’ feelings of anxiety and exhaustion: can self-regulated learning skills function as an antidote?

This study examines first-year student teachers’ (N?=?310) self-evaluated, study-related anxiety and exhaustion, and self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. Our presumption is that feelings of anxiety and exhaustion can be reduced with cognitive and motivational SRL skills. The association of cognitive and motivational SRL skills with feelings of anxiety and exhaustion were analysed with multiple multivariate regression analysis. The results indicate that high time- and study-environment management strategies and high self-efficacy beliefs reduced experienced feelings of anxiety and exhaustion. In addition, effort regulation had a reducing effect for anxiety. However, high extrinsic goal orientation predicted higher levels of anxiety and exhaustion and high task value predicted higher anxiety among student teachers. Particularly, female students had a stronger tendency to experience anxiety and exhaustion. The implications of the results for higher education and for teacher education are discussed.     

Confidence in performance judgment accuracy: the unskilled and unaware effect revisited

Since its introduction in the late 1990s, the unskilled and unaware effect motivated several further studies. As it stands, low-performing students are assumed to provide inaccurate and overconfident performance judgments. However, as research with second-order judgments (SOJs) indicates, they apparently have some metacognitive awareness of this. The current study with 266 undergraduate students aimed to provide in-depth insights into both the reasons for (in)accurate performance judgments and the appropriateness of SOJs. We implemented a general linear mixed model (GLMM) approach to study item-specific performance judgments in the domain of mathematics at the person and item level. The analyses replicated the well-known effects. However, the GLMM analyses revealed that low-performing students’ lower confidence apparently did not indicate subjective awareness, given that these students made inappropriate SOJs (lower confidence in accurate than in inaccurate judgments). In addition, students’ self-generated explanations for their judgements indicated that low-performing students have difficulties recognizing that they possess topic knowledge to solve an item, whereas high-performing students struggle with admitting that they do not know the answer to a question. In sum, our results indicate that students at all performance levels have some metacognitive weaknesses, which, however, occur subject to different judgment accuracy.     

Embodying skilful performance: Co-constituting body and world in biotechnology

This article offers a philosophical-empirical account of embodied skilful performance in the practice of plant biotechnology. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and others, we elaborate how skilful performance emerges from and through reciprocal relations encompassing the body-in-the-world and the world-in-the-body. The contribution of this article lies in offering an account of skilful performance that is attentive to a perceiving, motile, feeling body entwined with world. In genetically modifying plants, scientists direct their senses of touch and vision to manipulating plant materials and matter, ‘reading’ subtle changes in tissue cultures, plantlets and so on. In rhythmic movements, they extend their bodies through skilful use of complex equipment, while calling on ‘intuition’ to guide their work. Skilful performance, then, relies on our lived body that is not merely a physical object among other objects, nor a passive instrument for the mind, but dynamic and inescapably entwined with people and things in a world in flux. Bringing to the fore how perceiving, motile, feeling bodies are implicated in skilful performance has significant implications for education and workplace training.     

Marketisation of adult education: principals as business leaders,standardised teachers and responsibilised students

The marketisation of education is a global phenomenon and has attracted increased interest during the last three decades, not least in terms of research on school choice and its consequences. However, while much research has been conducted on the marketisation of schooling, less attention has been directed at adult education. In this paper, focus is directed at institutional logics and institutional responses to the process of marketisation of adult education. More specifically, we focus on how a procurement system, implemented in order to create competition and to increase quality in adult education, influences how students construe themselves, as well as the way principals and teachers work. Our results indicate that teachers emerge as the main source of resistance towards an institutional logic emerging in the wake of marketisation, while principals and students to a large extent conform to the emerging institutional demands.     

The Norwegian perspective on issues of quality in day care

Since 1953, Norwegian national standards regulate ratios of children to staff, training requirements, group sizes, leadership and subsidies. Both national and local subsidies support the management and quality level of day care centers. In Norway a current viewpoint on quality in day care is to stimulate innovation in day care activities by rewarding local initiative and creativity. Outdoor activities and giving the children freedom to learn are highly valued. Preschool teacher education, which is three years at college, shares a common frame of a governmental curricular guideline as well as a nationwide curriculum for day care. A responsive and warm interaction between staff, children and parents is a definite moral value of the preschool teacher profession. Current issues of quality are related to the shortage of highly qualified directors and leaders in public day care as well as the expansion of private centers with questionable quality. Quality control of day care centers is now discussed as a necessary surveillance system of the quality of contexts and interactions in children’s daily life.     

Seating order as a symbolic arrangement

The study set out to explore the bases on which the school assesses pupils’ educability and which show up as pupil categorizations manifested in seating order. The research was carried out with ethnographic methods and focused on the classroom situations of one first-grade class during one autumn term. The points of interest were those changes and episodes in which the seating order organized the action. Four stages was the spontaneous order created by the pupils themselves on their first day of school; the seating order of the other three stages was set up by the teacher on the basis of mixing boys and girls, of reading skills, of settledness, of capability for pair-work, and of “interpersonal chemistry”. It was found that the teacher made an active use of seating order as a pedagogical instrument. The pupils seemed to adopt the classification criteria and used them in their talk, but the application of these criteria, especially gender and interpersonal relations, was a constant source of dispute between the pupils and the teacher. It was concluded that seating order manifests, implements, and conveys to the pupils important symbolic elements of the representation of educability endorsed by the school.