Expert and preservice secondary teachers’ competencies for noticing student thinking about modelling

Educational Studies in Mathematics - This study examined how expert and novice (preservice) teachers solved mathematical modelling tasks as well as how they noticed written artifacts of student...     

Augmenting the effect of virtual labs with "teacher demonstration" and "student critique" instructional designs to scaffold the development of scientific literacy

Instructional Science - Virtual labs provide space for students to iteratively test, observe, and revise their understanding so as to improve their scientific literacy. However, one of the...     

Effects of online strategies on students’ learning performance,self-efficacy,self-regulation and critical thinking in university online courses

Educational technology research and development - Fostering students’ abilities to deal with practical problems is an important objective of professional training. To enable students to have...     

Developing and validating technological pedagogical content knowledge‐practical (TPACK‐practical) through the Delphi survey technique

Technological pedagogical content knowledge TPACK refers to the knowledge set that teachers currently use to further improve the quality of their teaching and assist their students in learning. Several TPACK models have been proposed, either for discussing TPACK's possible composition or its practical applications. Considering that teachers' practical experiences should also be critical to the development of those teachers' knowledge, this study invited a research panel (six researchers) and an expert panel (54 science‐related educators) to propose and validate the framework of TPACK‐practical. After two rounds of anonymous communications that followed Delphi survey techniques, a total of eight dimensions of TPACK‐practical and corresponding indicators were identified and rated as having high levels of importance. Among these knowledge dimensions, the knowledge of direct information and communication technology uses for enhancing teachers' professionalism and students' conceptual comprehension was rated with a high level of importance. Also, disciplinary differences were found to exist between the different groups of experts. Biology teachers showed significantly higher ratings across all knowledge dimensions, whereas physics teachers' ratings were comparatively low. Such findings suggest that the structure and content of subject matter shapes not only the way they teach with technology but also the thinking logics they build longitudinally from their learning experiences.     

An online collaborative peer-assessment approach to strengthening pre-service teachers’ digital content development competence and higher-order thinking tendency

Educational technology research and development - The competences of making good use of digital information and technology as well as making critical judgments and communicating with others have...     

Undergraduate Science Students’ Scientist–Practitioner Gap: the Role of Epistemic Curiosity and Cognitive Flexibility

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - The scientist–practitioner gap refers to the phenomenon of individuals with a scientific background exhibiting non-scientific...     

Cause and causality in daycare research: An investigation of group differences in Swedish child care

One of the most important goals of child care research has been to determine whether or not nonparental care has adverse effects on child development. Answering this question involves making causal attributions about the origins of differences between groups of children who have experienced divergent nonparental care arrangements. Some of the problems researchers face when trying to demonstrate causal relationships are illustrated in this paper using data from the Göteborg Child Care Study, a comprehensive, prospective, longitudinal study comparing the developmental trajectories of children in exclusive home care, family daycare, and center daycare. It is argued that the discovery of significant differences between groups must initiate extensive efforts to validate and interpret the findings. Focusing on the specific characteristics of prospective longitudinal studies, the article shows what measures can be taken to avoid the misinterpretation of group differences that are actually attributable to pre-selection effects or confounding variables. By rigorously identifying such confounds, researchers can accumulate support for hypothesized causal relationships, but they cannot ‘prove’ them because unknown and unmeasured confounding variables may always have important effects.     

Effects of a concept mapping-based problem-posing approach on students’ learning achievements and critical thinking tendency: An application in Classical Chinese learning contexts

In language courses, it is important to foster students’ systematic thinking and to develop their competence to express, appreciate, criticize and reflect, in particular in such courses as classical Chinese, which aim to develop students’ cultural and literature knowledge. Problem posing is a promising strategy to achieve this objective. However, without sufficient supports, students could feel frustrated since problem posing is a challenging task, in particular for young students. In this study, a fill-in concept mapping-based problem-posing approach was proposed to address this problem. A learning system was developed based on the proposed approach and a quasi-experiment was conducted on an eighth-grade classical Chinese course to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that the concept mapping-based problem-posing approach improved the students’ learning achievement, critical thinking tendency and problem-posing quality. The interview results further show that the students perceived the approach as being effective from the perspectives of “Improving article comprehension,” “Improving problem-posing performances,” and “Boosting diverse thinking.”     

Being a Mathematics Teacher Educator in China: Challenges and Strategic Responses

In this exploratory study, we developed a portrait of the challenges and strategic responses of secondary mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) in Chinese universities. The MTEs reported encountering more challenges when teaching pedagogical courses and supervising student teachers than when teaching college mathematics courses and teaching mathematical problem-solving courses. This finding reflects a key difference between the content, goals, and teaching demands of these 2 elements of mathematics teacher education programs (acting in the role of an MTE versus the role of a mathematics teacher). In this study, we also analyzed the strategies that MTEs use to deal with the challenges that arise in their work and the suggestions they have for the training of future MTEs.