Placement mentors making sense of research-based knowledge

Abstract

Placement mentors’ role increasingly implies demonstrating to student teachers how research-based knowledge in combination with experience-based knowledge may be relevant in teachers’ professional work. This is a challenge. Placement mentors are often unsure how to make sense of research-based knowledge. Frequently there is a mismatch between what they say they can do and what they actually show they are able to do. This paper explores how placement mentors’ reasoning is formed by their lack of power to define what research-based knowledge consists of. The analysis in this paper is based on an investigation of the epistemological premises that placement mentors rely on when they validate research-based knowledge. The theoretical–analytical point of departure is Michel Foucault’s conception of power-knowledge.     

Choosing Content and Methods: Focus Group Interviews with Faculty Teachers in Norwegian Pre-Service Subject Teacher Education in Design,Art, and Crafts

The study is aimed at generating knowledge on how faculty teachers reflect and justify their choice of subject content logic in teacher education, exemplified by a concurrent pre-service Subject Teacher Education in design, art, and crafts. Focus-group interviews generated data. Three topics were discussed: too many choices, different logics, and avoiding confrontation. Faculty teachers expressed various understandings of content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), linked to the teachers' intuitive and reasoned reflections and preconceptions through the anchoring effect and attribute substitution. The study contributes to the knowledge base by reframing problematic sides of education, and by expanding the understanding of CK and conditions for PCK by exploring the thread between educational psychologist Lee Shulman and psychologist Daniel Kahneman.     

A Five Country Study of Gender and Sexuality Diversity and Schooling in Southern Africa

The importance of quality education provision for all is a globally acknowledged principle for the creation of sustainable learning environments at primary and secondary levels. This article reports on a study that aimed to increase understanding of the context of how gender and sexuality diversity is responded to in schools in Southern Africa. In this regard, the researchers drew on a recent five country study focusing on what the literature says about gender and sexuality diversity and schooling in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. Drawing on a review of reports and publications by relevant ministries, policy documents, published research, relevant statistical data, as well as the grey literature from civil society organisations, the findings indicated significant barriers to access for learners who embody non-normative gender or sexualities. The policies and schooling cultures in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland foreground discourses that marginalize, silence and invisibilise gender and sexual minorities. The researchers argue that if educational institutions in the region are to include all learners, there must be real engagement with the ongoing realities of heterosexist exclusion and marginalisation. The findings pointed to the need for teacher education to step up efforts to prepare teachers in the region to comfortably and professionally engage with and teach about issues of gender and sexuality diversity in the classroom.     

Prior experience shapes metacognitive judgments at the category level: the role of testing and category difficulty

Most metacognition research has focused on aggregate judgments of overall performance or item-level judgments about performance on particular questions. However, metacognitive judgments at the category level, which have not been as extensively explored, also play a role in students’ study strategies, for example, when students determine what topics to study for an exam. We investigated whether category learning judgments (CLJs) were sensitive to differences in the difficulty of general knowledge categories. After either studying or being tested on facts from several categories (e.g., Shakespeare, Astronomy), participants estimated the likelihood that they could correctly answer new questions from those categories on a later test (i.e., they made CLJs). Results of two studies showed that CLJs were sensitive to differences in category difficulty. Further, participants gave lower or more conservative CLJs when they took an initial test as compared to studying questions from the categories. Results are discussed in terms of the value and relevance of CLJs both in educational settings and in theories of metacognition.     

The Initial Impact of the Anatomical Society Gross Anatomy Core Syllabus for Medicine in the United Kingdom: Student and Teacher Perspectives

“What do students studying medicine need to know” is an important question for curriculum planners, anatomy educators and students. The Core Regional Anatomy Syllabus (CRAS), published by the Anatomical Society in 2016, contains 156 learning outcomes (LOs) and has informed “what needs to be known.” This project explored how CRAS had impacted undergraduate anatomy and anatomists in the United Kingdom. A cross-sectional study was designed in two phases. Phase 1, involved a survey of students in clinical years (N = 164). Phase 2 included a survey of anatomist’s views (n = 50) and focus groups of anatomy educators (N = 16). The students’ perspective showed that specific regions of CRAS are deemed less relevant. These were also the body areas where students perceived their anatomical knowledge to be more deficient. Only 46% (n = 75) of students estimated that they knew over 50% (n = 78) of the LOs. Phase two revealed that all anatomists were aware of the syllabus and 48% (n = 24) had checked the CRAS against their own institutional LOs. Anatomists had shared CRAS with colleagues 64% (n = 32) and students at 34% (n = 17), respectively. Forty-six percent (n = 23) of anatomists reported having changed their teaching in some way because of CRAS. The focus groups generated four key themes: “support for CRAS,” “standardization and validation,” “professional identity,” and “limitations and leverage.” Overall CRAS has been well received and is establishing itself within the anatomical community as the new standard for anatomy teaching for medical students.     

Wie die Türken in unsere Köpfe kamen. Das Türkei-Bild in der deutschen Pädagogik zwischen 1820 und 1930

The article reconstructs the image of Turkey and the Turks that German education portrayed between 1820 and 1930. The analysis is based on educational periodicals and reference works from the historical eras of the German Confederation, the German Empire and the First World War, tracing the way old stereotypes persisted and new stereotypes arose. The study especially focuses on the opinions of German educationalists about schools in Turkey, Turkish women, Islam, the question of whether Turkey was part of Europe, and last not least on whether Ottoman educational policies were appropriate. Closely following the historical sources, the article shows how the opinions of German educationists changed according to the shift of Germany’s geopolitical interests, how their outlook went hand in hand with the views of the general press, and how they gradually came to a professional self-concept that contrasted ‘their’ educational system with what they believed was a ‘backward’ system in Turkey. At the same time they began to develop an interest in doing professional work in Turkey. The article can also be regarded as a contribution to the history of educational thinking in Germany in the course of the nineteenth century.     

Young,free and single? Theorising partner relationships during the first year of university

Recent research into young people’s private social worlds has highlighted the significance of family and friend relationships for students’ experiences of the transition to university. Drawing on data generated through a qualitative longitudinal study with 24 young women undergraduate students, this paper provides an original contribution to this growing body of literature by bringing committed partner relationships into view. The following discussion uses the notion of the ‘moral tale’ in order to reveal the ways in which singleness and commitment to a partner were experienced and articulated by young women undergraduate students at this important juncture. This paper raises important questions about how young women are able to take on ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ student identities whilst also remaining connected to important sources of love and support at this time of heightened change     

J.S. Mill’s inductive methods in artificial intelligence systems. Part I

The principles of J.S. Mill’s induction are formulated. These principles are developed and formalized for the five J.S. Mill’s inductive methods (the method of agreement, the method of difference, the joint method of agreement and difference, the method of residues, and the method of concomitant variations). The method of agreement, the method of difference, and the joint method of agreement and difference are considered in Part I. The possible strategies of plausible reasoning that realize the interaction of Mill’s induction, analogy, and abduction are formulated. These strategies are considered to be cognitive reasoning (justification is provided).     

Hypercorrection of high confidence errors in children

Three experiments investigated whether the hypercorrection effect – the finding that errors committed with high confidence are easier, rather than more difficult, to correct than are errors committed with low confidence – occurs in grade school children as it does in young adults. All three experiments showed that Grade 3–6 children hypercorrected high confidence errors and the children also claimed that they ‘knew those answers all along.’ Experiment 2 included two second-guess tasks following error commission, one in which the children attempted to choose the correct answer from six options and the other in which they tried to generate a correct second response. Neither provided evidence that children actually knew high confidence corrections all along. Experiment 3, however, showed that the children had some preferential partial knowledge insofar as they needed fewer hints to guess the correct answers to high confidence than to low confidence errors.     

Development engineers’ work and learning as shared practice

The field of workplace learning lacks empirical studies that view workplace practices as places for learning and see these practices in a critical light. Accordingly, the aim of this study is, first, to describe examples of everyday shared practice and consider what kinds of various conflicting aims and demands exist in it. Second, the purpose is to explore what and how it is possible to learn through these shared practices in the area of design and development work. The empirical material consists of ethnographic observations made in two organizations in Finland. Three thematic lines were extracted from field notes and transcribed work talk on the basis of ethnographic and adapted membership categorization analysis. They suggest that the maintenance of a good atmosphere was an important component of shared practice and learning through it. Shared practice was also found to be situated and open‐ended and it contained conflicts and contradictory aims. The findings reported here suggest that to survive, everyday work involves doing and learning, and sometimes disagreeing. Conflicts seem to strengthen a team’s ability to co‐operate and to sustain functional social relations. Attention should thus be paid to the constantly changing processes of work and to situational analyses of the different options within practice provided by the various aims of the work itself and the tasks done in accordance with those aims.