Performance Management in the French System of Secondary-Teacher training

The present study focuses on performance analysis and performance management in teacher training in France. After a brief summary of the French system of secondary-teacher training, determinants affecting performance are analyzed. The analysis shows that three determinants – the number of external competitors, the size of a department and the number of posts to be filled by recruitment examinations – are crucial to the performance of a training department. The analysis reveals, however, that although a department’s performance may be related to its size, efficiency and inefficiency limits have to be taken into account in growth strategies.     

Striving to Be King of Mobile Mountains: Communication and Organizing Through Digital Fitness Technology

This study considers fitness-tracking applications as settings for communicative performances. Qualitative interviews and observations with 41 users of a cycling-focused fitness application revealed communicative themes of qualifying, social sharing, and withholding. Users also assessed other members through social-group comparing and upward comparing. This study develops theory by revealing how individuals use the technology to communicate about their physical acts, and how the context of use facilitates organizing processes. We argue that use of this fitness application extends our understanding of how communication can constitute a community of practice (CoP; Brown & Duguid, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Primarily, the hybrid online/offline nature of Strava complicates the traditional understanding of communication and CoPs.     

Framing processes in public commentary on US federal tobacco control regulation

Governmental health policy officials increasingly seek to promote public participation in expert and technical decisions regarding health regulation. The issues of what r?le the public plays in regulatory processes, and how health policy officials orient to public opinion, matter especially in the US context, where public commentary is a requisite component of federal rule-making. This paper examines written commentary as one specific, institutionalized form of public participation. To understand the relationship between scientific evidence and public commentary in public health regulation, we examine a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation, proposed in 1995, to restrict the promotion and sale of tobacco products to minors. We use recent work on collective action frames to analyse how the FDA framed the proposed regulation as a rational, science-based policy; the discursive practices employed in the public commentary either to embrace or to contest the FDA's framing; and how the agency presented the final version of its rule as responsive to that public commentary. Our content analyses reveal a significant disparity between the FDA's emphasis on scientific evidence and the commentators' emphases on political and ideological frames, which we analyse in terms of counter-framing. An orientation to the dynamics of framing and counter-framing contributes to an understanding of the relationship between scientific evidence and public commentary in the formulation of controversial health policy regulations.     

Emergence,flexibility, and stabilization of language in a physics classroom

Learning physics is a complex phenomenon. In this article, we use concepts from the theory of nonlinear systems to study the development of language in classroom science in an experimental unit on chaos theory in a German 10th‐grade physics classroom. In ongoing activity, the explanations students developed for phenomena emerged through interactive stabilization and material constraints on the interpretive flexibility of material (artifacts) and discursive representations (talk). Interpretive flexibility both enables novel understandings and differences between private and common public use of these representations. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 869–897, 2003     

Knowledge acquisition from text: Introduction

European Journal of Psychology of Education -     

Rethinking the Role of Information Technology-Based Research Tools in Students’ Development of Scientific Literacy

Given the central place IT-based research tools take in scientific research, the marginal role such tools currently play in science curricula is dissatisfying from the perspective of making students scientifically literate. To appropriately frame the role of IT-based research tools in science curricula, we propose a framework that is developed to understand the use of tools in human activity, namely cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Accordingly, IT-based research tools constitute central moments of scientific research activity and neither can be seen apart from its objectives, nor can it be considered apart from the cultural-historical determined forms of activity (praxis) in which human subjects participate. Based on empirical data involving students participating in research activity, we point out how an appropriate account of IT-based research tools involves subjects’ use of tools with respect to the objectives of research activity and the contribution to the praxis of research. We propose to reconceptualize the role of IT-based research tools as contributing to scientific literacy if students apply these tools with respect to the objectives of the research activity and contribute to praxis of research by evaluating and modifying the application of these tools. We conclude this paper by sketching the educational implications of this reconceptualized role of IT-based research tools.