Building professionalism and employability skills: embedding employer engagement within first-year computing modules

This paper outlines a means of improving the employability skills of first-year university students through a closely integrated model of employer engagement within computer science modules. The outlined approach illustrates how employability skills, including communication, teamwork and time management skills, can be contextualised in a manner that directly relates to student learning but can still be linked forward into employment. The paper tests the premise that developing employability skills early within the curriculum will result in improved student engagement and learning within later modules. The paper concludes that embedding employer participation within first-year models can help relate a distant notion of employability into something of more immediate relevance in terms of how students can best approach learning. Further, by enhancing employability skills early within the curriculum, it becomes possible to improve academic attainment within later modules.     

Empathy-based stories capturing the voice of female secondary school students in Tanzania

Tanzania, like many other African countries, has experienced a rapid expansion of its secondary education sector. This has resulted in large numbers of secondary school graduates struggling to build a future through continuing education or finding employment. ¹ 1. During the past decade, secondary education enrolment in Tanzania has increased rapidly, net enrolment in secondary education in 2009 being 31.3% (URT 2009 United Republic of Tanzania (URT). 2009. Basic education statistics in Tanzania. National data. Dar es Salaam: The Ministry of Education and Vocational Training. http://216.15.191.173/statistics.html.  [Google Scholar]). Still, transition rates from primary to secondary education are among the lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although almost equal in lower years of primary education, the proportion and performance of girls decrease while moving to the upper secondary education. For a recent review on gender and education in Tanzania, see Okkolin, Lehtomäki, and Bhalalusesa (2010 Okkolin, M.-A., Lehtomäki, E. and Bhalalusesa, E. 2010. Successes and challenges in the education sector development in Tanzania: Focus on gender and inclusive education. Gender and Education, 22(1): 63–71. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Students are faced with the difficult task of assessing their opportunities in the face of various challenges and making plans to build a better life. The presented research uses empathy-based stories to identify which elements were considered to be important by students in determining their success in education. The analysis of narrative data represents a shared cultural meaning on the social and cultural support available to students. The findings suggest that using empathy-based stories as a methodological tool can provide valuable insights for culture-sensitive and intercultural research through its ability to widen the context of discovery.     

Regulation of emotions in socially challenging learning situations: an instrument to measure the adaptive and social nature of the regulation process

Self-regulated learning (SRL) research has conventionally relied on measures, which treat SRL as an aptitude. To study self-regulation and motivation in learning contexts as an ongoing adaptive process, situation-specific methods are needed in addition to static measures. This article presents an ‘Adaptive Instrument for Regulation of Emotions’ aimed at accessing students’ experiences of individual and socially shared regulation of emotions in a socially challenging learning situation. The instrument, grounded in self-regulated and socially regulated learning theory, comprises four interrelated components: the socio-emotional challenges experienced in a collaborative learning situation; individual and group-level attempts to regulate the immediate emotions evoked by the challenges; the personal goals; and goal attainment pursued in that situation. The theoretical foundation of the instrument and its components are outlined and some reliability issues illustrated. The limitations but also educational potential of the instrument to understand regulation of emotions in socially challenging learning situations are discussed.     

A second chance for higher education: Academic preparatory programs in Israel

The Israeli academic preparatory programs (APPs) challenge the sorting regime of regular education by offering a genuine second chance for higher education to youngsters who have failed to acquire the necessary prerequisites via the mainstream. The study analyzes the success of the APPs to produce changes in their students in light of the failure of a different second-chance framework, the community college, to do so. The analysis of a sample of APP graduates indicates that background characteristics and high school history, powerful sources of differentiation upon admittance to the APPs, lose their discriminating power after graduation. All graduates join any postsecondary educational framework, regardless of their initial disadvantages. The success of the APPs in eliminating initial gaps among the students is assigned mainly to their nonconformity to the selection criteria of regular education. The purpose of this research was to assess whether second-chance educational programs that challenge the sorting criteria of the mainstream succeed in enhancing social equality in education. Outcomes of the challenging second-chance academic preparatory programs in Israel are analyzed in light of the reported failure of community colleges to moderate inequalities in higher education.     

Caregivers' beliefs about library visits: A theory-based study of formative research

Currently, no research has systematically investigated the beliefs underpinning caregivers' intentions to visit public libraries with their young children. Drawing from the theory of planned behaviour, this study adopted a three-phase program of formative research to examine the decision making processes of parents and carers with young children living in a low socio-economic area. Phase 1 identified seven behavioural, five normative, and ten control beliefs as modal salient beliefs held by parents and carers. Phase 2 identified a variety of key behavioural, normative, and control beliefs as significant predictors of intention to visit the library with their young child. Phase 3 elicited the reasons underpinning these key beliefs guiding parents' and carers' intentions, identifying 34 reasons that could be used in messages to promote library visits. The results provide useful information that intervention designers, councils, and library services can use to encourage library use among parents and carers with young children.     

Support for School-to-school Networks: How Networking Teachers Perceive Support Activities of a Local Coordinating Agency

External support by a local coordinating agency facilitates the work of school-to-school networks. This study provides an innovative theoretical framework to analyse how support provided by local education offices for school-to-school networks is perceived by the participating teachers. Based on a quantitative survey and qualitative interview data from a networking project in eight German districts, we argue that in order to enable networks to work independently on innovative reforms, local coordinating agencies should focus on autonomy support, such as training on network management, and on support aimed at establishing significance, i.e. through vision and goal setting.     

Professional primary school teacher identity development: a pursuit in line with an unexpressed image

The results presented in this article are taken from a case study of novice primary school mathematics teachers’ professional identity development from the perspective of the teachers themselves. The empirical material was collected through self-recordings, observations and interviews. The results show how the professional identity development of these novice teachers becomes a pursuit in line with their image of a primary school teacher. To develop a sense of themselves as primary school teachers they need to establish their own criteria - individual (including graduation and personal knowledge) and social (the ability to work in one school, have colleagues and have a class of their own for which they do the planning and teaching). These criteria are shown to be both a precondition for and a part of professional identity development. The novice teachers’ image of what it means to be a primary school teacher directs their actions and becomes the goal of their professional identity development. Because of its high impact, student and novice teachers’ image of primary school teachers ought to be made visible in both teacher education and teacher induction.     

Monitoring makes a difference: quality and temporal variation in teacher education students’ collaborative learning

The aim of this process-oriented video-observation study is to explore how groups that perform differently differ in terms of the number, quality, and temporal variation of their content-level (knowledge co-construction) and meta-level (monitoring) activities. Five groups of teacher education students (n = 22) were observed throughout a 3-month course. Video recordings (33 hours) of face-to-face group interaction (n = 12,931 speech turns) and pre- and post-tests of students’ knowledge were collected. The results show that the well-performing group was more engaged in high-level knowledge co-construction and monitoring activities. The well-performing group was also capable of maintaining a higher level throughout the tasks, whereas the lower performing groups’ knowledge co-construction and monitoring activities was reduced during the course.