Moral relations in encounters with nature

The overall aim of this article is to develop in-depth knowledge about the connection between outdoor experiences and moral attitudes towards nature. The study focuses on processes in which moral relations are at stake in encounters between students and nature. The purpose is to identify such events, describe their specific circumstances and clarify how moral relations are established in these events. The empirical material consists of video-recordings of activities in three different outdoor education practices. In order to identify and categorise moral situations, an analytical tool called the ethical tendency is used. This tool is based on Wittgenstein’s language game method. The findings show that in the investigated outdoor education practices, moral relations towards nature are established in several different ways. The article concludes with four educational implications: responsibility when dealing with moral reactions; bringing ethical questions to the fore; different educational conditions create different encounters with nature; and the consequences of different language games.     

“It’s Funny that We Don’t See the Similarities when that’s what We’re Aiming for”—Visualizing and Challenging Teachers’ Stereotypes of Gender and Science

This study illuminates teachers’ conceptions of gender and science and possibilities to challenge these conceptions. Since 2005, a group of teachers (K-6) in Sweden have met approximately once a month in two-hour seminars to discuss and develop their instruction in science and technology based on a gender perspective. The present data consist mainly of audio-recordings of the teacher seminars and video-recordings of science activities with students. Analysis of the empirical data has been carried out in several stages and was inspired by thematic analysis, the theoretical framework of which is based on Hirdman’s and Beauvoir’s theories of gender. The results show that the teachers’ ideas about gender/equity and science exist on several levels, within which various conceptions are represented. On the one hand, “reasoning around similarity”, where teachers consider that both girls and boys should have the same prerequisites for working with science. In contrast, stereotypical conceptions of girls and boys occur when the teachers evaluate their activities with students, and condescending attitudes toward girls are also observed. The girls’ ways of working with science are not as highly valued as the boys’, and this outlook on children can ultimately have consequences for girls’ attitudes towards the subject. When teachers are allowed to read their own statements about the girls, they get “a glimpse of themselves”, and their condescending ideas about girls are made visible. In this way, the teachers can begin their active work towards change, which may lead to new outlooks on and attitudes towards students.     

Psychometric analysis of a measure of socio-emotional development in adolescents

This is a psychometric analysis of an instrument to assess the socio-emotional development of school students, How I Feel (HIF), developed as a situational judgment test, with scoring based on expert judgments. The HIF test was administered in grades 4–9, 1999–2005. Internal consistency, retest reliability, and year-to-year stability were satisfactory, and the HIF instrument appears sensitive to intervention effects. Sex differences and associations with substance use and other instruments support construct validity. A significant negative trend was found across grades, attenuated in a group receiving socio-emotional training. The HIF test has limited discriminatory power among individuals with high socio-emotional maturity.     

Deliberative Teaching: Effects on Students’ Democratic Virtues

Since the early-2000s, deliberative democratic theory has influenced the debate on teaching. Proponents of deliberation in education have argued that deliberative communication as a teaching model enhances both subject knowledge and democratic virtues among students. However, empirical support for this assumption is weak. The aim of this article is to empirically test the assumptions made by the proponents of deliberative teaching. This study uses a field experimental research design. The study was carried out in a civics course in Swedish upper-secondary schools in both vocational programs and programs preparing students for ensuing studies. To some extent, the results support the hypothesis derived from deliberative theory. Deliberative teaching seems to enhance democratic virtues among students in vocational programs.     

Study Success

The meaning of study success is crucial when investigating the validity of the admission system to higher education. A common measure of study success is grades. However, grades might be a measure of different kinds of success in different education programmes due to disciplinary differences. This article presents the results of a study carried out in the Departments of Business Administration and Social Welfare at a Swedish university. University teachers were interviewed about their views on study success in their freshmen and senior students of today and in the future. The results indicate that the teachers in the Department of Business Administration tend to choose cognitive criteria whereas the teachers in the Department of Social Welfare tend to choose non-cognitive criteria and criteria classified as both cognitive and non-cognitive, when asked about their present students. Regarding the success of future students, the tendency is similar but the differences between the two groups of teachers are smaller.     

Conditions for Boundary Crossing: Social Practices of Newly Qualified Swedish Teachers

The purpose of this study is to gain knowledge about conditions for boundary crossing between academic and vocational practices and to identify dimensions of social practice within workplaces. The data consist of 28 questionnaires and 14 in‐depth interviews with newly qualified secondary school teachers in their first year of teaching. We use the lens of sociocultural theory to analyse qualitatively what we can learn from newcomers' talk about their experiences and whether theories provided during their teacher education helped them to meet challenges in their new workplaces. Theoretically, notions of participation in social practices in terms of social space are in focus. In the findings, such space is identified as social adjustment, social distance, social inclusion and social expansion. Drawing on these concepts, we suggest that professional development depends strongly on the way new teachers' boundary crossing is supported by collaboration and to what extent they belong to professional dialogues in settings with inclusive and expansive relationships.     

Consultants’ Learning within Academia: Five devices for the design of university-based learning opportunities for management consultants

This paper explores the ways in which it is possible for universities to design learning opportunities for management consultants. Drawing on a successful practice in The Netherlands and using the literature on learning, development of competencies and career theory, it investigates selected aspects of this particular “market”, comparing the conventions governing the practice of consultants with those of academic practice. Its subsequent argument for the successful design of learning opportunities for professional consultants is organised around a discussion of five learning “devices”: (1) a self-reflective design practice; (2) a design process operating along three dimensions - the acquisition of knowledge and/or techniques, development of professional competencies, and personal and professional transitions; (3) treating knowledge as a process rather than a product; (4) building on learning experiences in work and on anticipated performances; and (5) a prohibition of “ego” in consultants' learning. The paper concludes with some reflections on the use of these devices elsewhere.     

Biology Curricula at Universities in the European Community

In literature, several processes have been suggested to describe conceptual changes being undertaken. However, a few parts of studies analyse in great detail which students' learning processes are involved in physics classes during teaching, and how they are used. Following a socio-constructivist approach using tools coming from discourse analysis, we suggest studying three processes of students' learning: (1) establishing links between ideas, (2) increasing the domain of applicability of ideas, or (3) decreasing the domain of applicability of ideas. Our database consists of video data and written worksheets of two students at the upper-secondary school level (Grade 10 [15-year-old students]) during a one-month teaching sequence about gas. Based on semiotic resources contained in oral and written language, we reconstruct in great detail all the ideas about gas expressed by both students during the entire teaching sequence. Our analysis deals with (1) how learning processes are identified based on the ideas expressed by students, and (2) how the three learning processes are used by the two students during teaching. Our results show that during the teaching sequence: (1) the emergence of the networks of three ideas is supported by networks of two ideas expressed previously by students; (2) both students express more networks of two ideas than networks of three ideas; (3) the process ‘increasing the domain of applicability’ of an idea or a network of ideas is very often involved; and (4) the process ‘decreasing the domain of applicability’ of an idea or network of ideas is rarely used by them.     

Concept Formation in Biology: The Concept ‘Growth’

Summaries

English

A concept is understood here as a logic core, which is surrounded by an associative framework, to which also the name of the concept belongs. The logic core is a pattern of properties of a class of things, which is invariant to individual objects of the class as well as to the observer. The pattern is determined by logic relations, which are constituents of the epistemic structure of the learner.

In this article an analysis of the situation concerning the concept ‘growth’ is carried out. The logic core of the concept is theoretically investigated by means of systems theory and is empirically tested by means of free definitions. The associative framework, however, is determined by means of free association tests.

It is shown that in the course of school education a marked shift takes place in the logic core as well as in the associative framework from a ‘growth in terms of geometric dimension’ towards a ‘growth in terms of particle numbers’.     

Data-driven approaches to education governance and their implications

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability -