Accelerated School Programmes: Assessing Their Effectiveness

Accelerated School Programmes (ASPs) apply three principles designed to raise schools' effectiveness and to narrow the gap between low-achieving and high achieving students. These principles are: (1) giving the school a unifying purpose or vision; (2) allowing the school greater autonomy in its own management; (3) developing a collaborative approach to teaching, involving teachers, students, parents and the community. This article examines the effectiveness of ASPs on the basis of a study of four comprehensive schools in Israel. While the size of the sample is small, the positive results indicate that similar research on a wider scale would be valuable in shaping future educational policy.     

Sound Stuff? Naïve materialism in middle‐school students’ conceptions of sound

Few studies have dealt with students’ preconceptions of sounds. The current research employs Reiner et al. (2000 Reiner, M., Slotta, J. D., Chi, M. T. H. and Resnick, L. B. 2000. Naïve physics reasoning: A commitment to substance‐based conceptions. Cognition and Instruction, 18(1): 1–34. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) substance schema to reveal new insights about students’ difficulties in understanding this fundamental topic. It aims not only to detect whether the substance schema is present in middle school students’ thinking, but also examines how students use the schema’s properties. It asks, moreover, whether the substance schema properties are used as islands of local consistency or whether one can identify more global coherent consistencies among the properties that the students use to explain the sound phenomena. In‐depth standardized open‐ended interviews were conducted with ten middle school students. Consistent with the substance schema, sound was perceived by our participants as being pushable, frictional, containable, or transitional. However, sound was also viewed as a substance different from the ordinary with respect to its stability, corpuscular nature, additive properties, and inertial characteristics. In other words, students’ conceptions of sound do not seem to fit Reiner et al.’s schema in all respects. Our results also indicate that students’ conceptualization of sound lack internal consistency. Analyzing our results with respect to local and global coherence, we found students’ conception of sound is close to diSessa’s “loosely connected, fragmented collection of ideas.” The notion that sound is perceived only as a “sort of a material,” we believe, requires some revision of the substance schema as it applies to sound. The article closes with a discussion concerning the implications of the results for instruction.     

Understanding Children's Comprehension of Visual Displays of Complex Information

Developing students' ability to interpret the vast amount of quantitative data they encounter on a daily basis has become a major task for today's educators. However, very little attention has been given to students' strategies of analyzing multivariate data. This study investigated how students interpret and analyze multivariate data organized in tables and the nature of external visual displays that they tend to create and use for this purpose. Ten middle school students were asked to think aloud while solving five problems demanding an analysis of data organized in tables. The students were then interviewed. Results indicated that (1) students based their conclusions on only part of the data; (2) students did not use either efficient or sufficient visual representations; (3) students did not apply mathematical operations efficiently; and (4) students referred to or built a context to the problem. The results of the current research may assist educators to design efficient curricula while being aware of and taking into account (1) students' difficulties in employing previously learned mathematical devices to analyze data, (2) students' skills in choosing appropriate and efficient visual representations to present and interpret the data, and (3) strategies employed by students in analyzing multivariate data.     

Relations between EFL teachers’ formal knowledge of grammar and their in-action mental models of children's minds and learning

We studied the relations between English as a foreign language teachers’ grammar knowledge and their in-action mental models (MMs) of children's minds and learning. The grammar knowledge we examined was English wh-constructions. A total of 74 teachers completed an assessment task and were classified to have deep, intermediate or shallow knowledge. Ten teachers (five with deep and five with shallow level) were videotaped teaching wh-questions. The data were analysed qualitatively to determine the teachers’ MM, and then quantitatively to test similarities/differences in their MM's expression. The findings revealed an identical MM among all teachers that is expressed differently as a function of knowledge level.     

Whole Class Dialogic Discussion Meets Taiwan’s Physics Teachers: Attitudes and Culture

There is a distance between the power that whole class dialogic discussions (WCDD) may offer to the science class and their use in practice. Teachers’ attitudes toward WCDD are part of the problem. The aims of this study were twofold: (a) to examine Taiwanese physics teachers’ attitudes toward WCDD by considering cultural perspectives and describe how these attitudes changed as a result of a special workshop designed for this purpose, and (b) to report on how these attitudes should be taken into account in designing such workshops in the future. Nine experienced physics teachers participated in the WCDD workshop. The workshop was based on the WCDD model developed by Eshach (2010). Inductive analyses were performed on interviews with the teachers and their students, which were composed of 36 questions and developed specially for the purpose of this study, yielded the following categories: (1) In-school reasons for opposing WCDD—reasons belonging to school ways/tradition of teaching that may cause barriers to WCDD implementation; (2) External Factors—cultural reasons relating to Taiwanese views concerning education in general, which cause barriers to WCDD implementation; and (3) Cognitive aspect—refers to what teachers know about WCDD. The paper concludes with a discussion on what should be done in order to successfully bring WCDD to the Taiwanese physics class.     

Do Junior High School Students Perceive Their Learning Environment as Constructivist?

The purpose of this study is to examine the manner in which the features of a constructivist learning environment, and the mechanisms at its base, are expressed in junior high school students’ conceptions. Our research is based on an integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches, deigned to provide a wider ranging and deeper understanding. Eight hundred and forty eighth- and ninth-grade students from over 15 schools participated in the study. Of the 840 students who completed the questionnaire, the explanations of 200 well-written questionnaires were further analyzed qualitatively. The findings of the study are presented in terms of the four scales employed in the CLES, namely the autonomy scale, the prior knowledge scale, the negotiation scale, and the student-centeredness scale. The quantitative results achieved here concur with parallel studies conducted around the world. The findings indicate that a considerable portion of the students perceive their learning environment as a constructivist one and report positive attitudes toward the way they are being taught. In terms of the qualitative results, however, it appears that in some cases, the students’ explanations reveal that in fact, and contrary to the bare quantitative results, some students do not perceive their learning environment as being constructivist. This raises the question of whether the fact that students recognize the factors associated with constructivist teaching is indeed an indication that such teaching exists in practice. This finding emphasizes the importance of combining qualitative and quantitative methods for arriving at a balanced view of classroom occurrences.