The elusiveness of teacher quality: A comparative analysis of teacher certification and student achievement in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries

In national education systems worldwide, teacher quality has become synonymous with education reform efforts, but a more elusive goal is empirically measuring teacher quality. One proposed measure of teacher quality, teacher licensing, also known as certification, is an increasingly ubiquitous component of national education systems and pre-service teacher education around the world. Rapidly developing national education systems, like those in the Arabian Gulf states, are actively seeking to measure teacher quality through teacher certification and to estimate teacher quality using scores on student achievement tests. This study synthesizes research literature and contextual data as a foundation for using hierarchical linear models to estimate the impact of teacher certification on student achievement in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Despite the emphasis on improving teacher quality by establishing teacher certification requirements in GCC national education systems, the researchers found neither a direct nor a consistent association between teacher certification and student achievement in the GCC.     

A model of properties of compliance‐gaining strategies

This paper intends to induce a set of properties that unify and distinguish compliancegaining strategies and to determine whether coders can reliably classify messages on the basis of the proposed properties. The first goal was accomplished by deriving codified strategies from open‐ended responses of subjects to persuasive situations. Properties that reflected differences in the strategies were induced. The second goal had three coders content‐analyze the original responses in terms of the derived properties. Measures of unitizing and coder reliability and content validity were assessed. In addition, information concerning representational validity was presented. The approach taken in this paper provides us with an assessment of the state of affairs found in a compliance‐gaining strategy.     

Examining the relationship between emotion variability,self-regulated learning,and task performance in an intelligent tutoring system

Educational technology research and development - Prior research has focused extensively on how emotion tendencies (e.g., duration, frequency, intensity, and valence) affect students’...     

A Useful Example when Teaching Hypothesis Testing

This article describes an example which is useful when teaching hypothesis testing in order to highlight the interrelationships that exist among the level of significance, the sample size and the statistical power of a test. The example also allows students to see how what they learn in the classroom directly affects the content of some of the commercials that they watch on television.     

A manualised approach to anger management in a group therapy context: striving towards accessibility,affordability and inclusivity within mainstream schools

Queensland has recently seen the first conviction under the new one-punch law. In this instance a then 19-year-old male punched and fatally injured a 54–year-old man. This article details a six session manualised group therapy approach that was applied within a mainstream school in an effort to support adolescents who had been identified as having regular and heightened episodes of inappropriately expressed anger. The cohort of students attending this school is characterised by a diversity of cultures, families of low socio-economic means and a significant proportion of students verified as having special needs. As such, the introduction of a new therapeutic program was designed to accommodate the needs of a range of students whilst necessarily remaining alert to matters of financial viability. This manualised approach seeks to provide: a common vocabulary for application by teachers/parents/students alike; rehearsed problem solving skills; and an identifiable method to continuing the exploration of cognitions, physical/emotional responses, behavioural choices and associated values. This article will articulate the content specific to the manual such that practitioners may consider application within their own practice. Results of the impact of this manual will be described with reference to two different cohorts – each containing six male students. Group one were scored according to both the PROMIS Emotional Distress – Calibrated Anger Measure Paediatric and Personal Anger Assessment, whereas group two were scored according to the Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents.     

The Impact of a Web-Based Research Simulation in Bioinformatics on Students’ Understanding of Genetics

Providing learners with opportunities to engage in activities similar to those carried out by scientists was addressed in a web-based research simulation in genetics developed for high school biology students. The research simulation enables learners to apply their genetics knowledge while giving them an opportunity to participate in an authentic genetics study using bioinformatics tools. The main purpose of the study outlined here is to examine how learning using this research simulation influences students’ understanding of genetics, and how students’ approaches to learning using the simulation influence their learning outcomes. Using both quantitative and qualitative procedures, we were able to show that while learning using the simulation students expanded their understanding of the relationships between molecular mechanisms and phenotype, and refined their understanding of certain genetic concepts. Two types of learners, research-oriented and task-oriented, were identified on the basis of the differences in the ways they seized opportunities to recognize the research practices, which in turn influenced their learning outcomes. The research-oriented learners expanded their genetics knowledge more than the task-oriented learners. The learning approach taken by the research-oriented learners enabled them to recognize the epistemology that underlies authentic genetic research, while the task-oriented learners referred to the research simulation as a set of simple procedural tasks. Thus, task-oriented learners should be encouraged by their teachers to cope with the scientists’ steps, while learning genetics through the simulation in a class setting.     

Association tests and outdoor ecology education

This paper deals with the analysis of written associative responses in the context of a week-long outdoor ecology education at a National Park (treatment). Firstly, 12–13 year old pupils were instructed to respond freely to two selected key words (“Environment” and “Conservation”) by listing all words that they associate with them. All observed associations were categorized into a preselected cluster of 8 (or 9) domains. Secondly, the same procedure was applied in a followup survey: For both key words, participation in the education programme influenced frequencies as well as the choice profiles themselves indicating an increase in positive emotional and conservational associations. Advantages and limitations of the method are discussed.