From Traditional to Non-Traditional: An Adaptive Procedure for Assessing the Instruction Librarian

Assessment of teaching is an important part of growing as an instruction librarian. The article presents how instruction librarians can apply the small group analysis technique to improve their teaching skills. The benefit of using the small group analysis is its flexibility; it can be customized to meet the needs of the librarian and feedback from students can be collected and used to make changes. Through a case study, the authors demonstrate how the continuous use of this teaching assessment can improve the teaching skills of the librarian and lead to curriculum changes as well.     

Reconceptualizing the School Administrator's Role: Socialization at Mid‐Career

School reform strategies involving restructuring require that administrators redefine their roles. Most of the research in this area has emphasized new rather than veteran administrators. However, if these reform strategies are to be implemented, school administrators at mid‐career stages will need to change their conceptions of the role.

This article identifies and examines literature concerning the major issues of socialization to a role conception, including definitions, sources, and socialization mechanisms for changing conceptions of the role. The article also presents a research agenda based on this theoretical examination that delineates research questions, relevant variables, and possible findings regarding changing role conceptions. The research agenda focuses on two major strategies of educational reform: shared decision making and schools of choice.     

Interactive group activity: a socially mediated tool for opening an interpretive space in classroom research

An ongoing challenge in classroom research is to understand children’s perspectives on their learning. While learning is highly individual, it is also significantly social and this raises methodological challenges. An Interactive Group Activity (IGA) is one of several data collection strategies used during the action research phase of the Connecting Curriculum, Connecting Learning project (2010–2011) focusing on arts-based curriculum integration. This article concentrates on the IGA tool as a means of uncovering children’s meaning making following an extended period of learning. Of particular note is the use of an arts pedagogical device to introduce the IGA to children, a device that frames the purpose of the task. In effect, the IGA acts as a group assessment device underlining the socially mediated nature of children’s learning. This article describes how the IGA tool evolved, gives its form and structure, argues for its affordances and suggests possibilities for its wider use.     

Learning‐to‐learn and learning‐to‐teach: the impact of disciplinary subject study on student‐teachers’ professional identity

A coherent view of student‐teachers’ preparation and the learning experiences to which they are exposed are key to sustaining the relevance of university‐based teacher‐education programmes. Arguably, such coherence is lacking and the research base to an understanding of the student‐teacher experience is still a relatively limited one. This paper takes the view that student‐teachers’ epistemological growth is a key component of their professional development, their sense of identity as intending teachers, and their successful entry into a teaching career. In adopting a phenomenographic approach it explores a chain of evidence which demonstrates that immersion in the processes of learning and knowing, within a specific disciplinary context, had a significant impact on students’ emerging professional identities and on their values as teachers which extends beyond the subject matter itself. Arguably, the findings of this case‐study hold important implications for a teacher‐education programme and for effective pedagogic practice.     

Coefficient Alpha,Test Reliability,and Heterogeneity of Score Distributions

From concepts which refer only to observed scores and which allow the parameters of score distribution over repeated measurements on a given person to differ from person to person, necessary and sufficient conditions under which coefficient alpha equals test reliability are derived. The result clarifies the relation this quantity to the Kuder-Richardson formula 20, to the KR 21, to the Spearman-Brown formula, and to Lord item sampling model.     

Pressures,rewards and teacher retention: a comparative study of primary teaching in England and Finland

The article presents some findings from the York‐Jyväskylä Teacher Professionalism project. The project was a follow‐up study to earlier case‐study research in six schools in Finland and six schools in England on the impact of educational reforms on teachers' work. Data were collected by re‐interviewing a sample of teachers from the original schools six years later. The views of English and Finnish teachers concerning the ways in which changes in practice, pay and working conditions affected their perception of teaching as a profession are contrasted. The crucial factors discouraging teachers from remaining in teaching were work intensification, low pay, deteriorating pupil behaviour and a decline in public respect. Positive influences on teacher retention were commitment to children, professional freedom and supportive colleagues. Suggestions are offered as to how policy makers should act to preserve the commitment of primary teachers and to promote their retention.     

Pervasive and Non‐pervasive Conduct Problems in a Clinic Sample Aged 4–8 years: Child,family and day‐care/school factors

Differences between pervasive (home and day‐care/school) versus non‐pervasive (home only) conduct problems were examined in regard to various child, parent/family, and day‐care/school characteristics in an outpatient clinic sample of 120 children aged 4–8 years. All children scored above the 90th percentile on the Eyberg Child Behavior Inventory for home problems and met the criteria for a possible or a confirmed diagnosis of oppositional defiant behaviours. The proportion of children with pervasive conduct problems was high, 83%. Teachers in day care and school reported children in the pervasive group to have significantly more attention and internalizing problems as well as lower social competence scores than those in the non‐pervasive group. Children in the pervasive group also showed consistently more problems in their relationships both with teachers and peers than those in the non‐pervasive group. The implications for assessment and treatment of children with conduct problems in these age‐groups are discussed.     

A cross-cultural comparison of numeracy skills using a written and an interactive arithmetic test

This study applied two arithmetic tests, one written and one one computer-based interactive, to samples of primary school children from two populations, one suburban non-Aboriginal and one rural Aboriginal. The results from the written test were significantly (p?&;lt;?0.001) better for the non-Aboriginal children than for the Aboriginal children. This was not the case with the results from the computer-based interactive test. The study used Rasch-based methodology to reduce the results from the two tests to a common scale, to ascertain whether the Aboriginal children performed better (in relation to the non-Aboriginal children) in the computer-based than in the written test. The study found that this was the case, and concluded that the results from the computer-based test exhibited less cultural bias against the Aboriginal children than the written test.     

Being a ‘professional’ primary school teacher at the beginning of the 21st century: a comparative analysis of primary teacher professionalism in New Zealand and England

This article analyses findings from two studies conducted collaboratively across two educational settings, New Zealand and England, in 2001–2002. These studies examined the impact of national educational policy reforms on the nature of primary teachers’ work and sense of their own professionalism and compared these impacts across the two countries. Adopting a policy ethnography approach, using in‐depth interview data from samples of teachers in each country, it is argued that there have been discursive shifts in the meaning of the three key terms, autonomy, altruism and knowledge, embodied in the classical professionalism triangle. These shifts reflect policy‐makers’ moves from a ‘professional‐contextualist’ conception of teacher professionalism towards the ‘technocratic‐reductionist’ conception that accompanies neo‐liberal educational reforms in many countries. Teachers in both countries experienced increasing constraints on their autonomy as they became far more subject to ‘extrinsic’ accountability demands. Whether these demands were perceived as enhancing or diminishing teacher professionalism depended on the manner in which they were filtered through the profession’s defining quality, namely teachers’ altruistic concerns for the welfare of the children in their care.