Integrating Student Assessment Practices: the significance of collaborative partnerships for curriculum and professional development in a university department

The purposes and practices of student assessment in all sectors of education are contested. So when the members of a university department decide to collaborate in order to integrate their assessment requirements, what they enter into is a program of personal and collective review that begins to unmask the moral and political dynamics of curriculum and professional development. This article describes such a collaborative project, its processes and its products, as well as the dynamics of collective review as they relate to facilitation, organisational change, and comfortable versus critical collaboration.     

The influence of children's prior knowledge and previous experience on their spatial orientation skills in an urban environment

This study investigates the capacity of children to develop map-based skills in spatial orientation in an urban environment unknown to them. In this quantitative study, a total of 328 pupils of grades 3–5 had to achieve specific skills with regard to map-based skills in spatial orientation (such as turning-off skills, transformation from map to place, finding one's direction, navigation). These skills were tested by means of a map of Münster (Westphalia, Germany). This paper focuses on factors of potential influence, such as prior knowledge in the field of map reading as well as family- and school-related previous experience.     

Untapped Potential: A Study of Academic Online Legal Research Guides

This article explores the current state of online legal research guides. It surveys guides from 197 ABA-accredited law school libraries and (1) identifies four major types of guides and (2) calculates the total number of academic-law-library-produced online legal research guides. The article also takes a closer look at the content and format of online legal research guides, with immigration-focused guides as an illustration. After analyzing the survey results, the article suggests some best practices for format regardless of the guide type. Ideally, an awareness of the breadth and depth of existing online legal research guides will result in less duplication of efforts among law librarians and more current, accurate, and functional online legal research guides.     

Introverts,Extroverts, and Achievement in a Distance Learning Environment

Although difficulties that characterize distance learning (DL) clearly have differential effects on different learners, links between barrier research and individual differences remain relatively unexplored. This study examined the relationship between cognitive style, based on Jung's (1971) theory, and achievement levels among 77 university students in a videoconference-based learning environment. Clarifying this relationship enables educators to identify in advance students who may require additional instructional support in a DL context. Understanding student-related variables that affect learning also enables faculty to adapt instructions to meet the diverse needs of different students instead of adopting a “one-size-fits-all” approach to designing DL environments.     

Developing a Professional Identity as an Elementary Teacher of Nature of Science: A self-study of becoming an elementary teacher

This study explores the development of professional identity as a teacher of nature of science (NOS). Our research question was ‘How can a teacher develop a professional identity as an elementary teacher of NOS?' Through a researcher log, videotaped lessons, and collection of student work, we were able to track efforts in teaching NOS as part of regular classroom practice. A team of four researchers interpreted the data through the Beijaard et al. professional identity framework and found that it was not as simple and straightforward to teach NOS as we predicted. Development of professional identity as a teacher of NOS was influenced by contextual factors such as students, administration, and time, as well as personal struggles that were fraught with emotion. Development took place through an interpretation and reinterpretation of self through external factors and others' perceptions, as well as the influence of sub-identities.     

What Preservice Teachers and Knowledgeable Others Professionally Notice During Lesson Study

The purpose of this study was to understand what preservice teachers and knowledgeable others professionally notice as they engaged in repeated cycles of a modified version of lesson study, as a component of a field experience in a teacher education program. The study also centered on comparing the professional noticing practices of preservice teachers with other lesson study participants, including classroom teachers and university facilitators. Data analyzed included videos of weekly lesson study analysis meetings for seven weeks for each of four teams. Each team included six preservice teachers, a classroom teacher, and a university facilitator. Findings indicate that preservice teachers primarily noticed elements about the classroom environment and teacher pedagogy, but included instances of noticing centered on students' mathematical thinking. In contrast, classroom teachers and university facilitators, as knowledgeable others, typically noticed general events and were less focused on students' mathematical thinking. Analysis of noticing trends over the seven weeks indicated that noticing levels remained steady initially, dropped in the fourth and fifth week, and resumed original status in the final weeks. Results that the preservice teachers' noticing comments were at higher levels than the knowledgeable others are contrary to other research studies and indicate that incorporating lesson study with appropriate scaffolds into a field experience for preservice teachers may be a viable option for encouraging noticing of students' mathematical thinking.     

Leadership decision making and the use of data

Intelligence gathering, or data collection, is a preliminary and critical stage of decision making. Two key approaches to intelligence gathering are “discovery” and “idea imposition.” The discovery approach allows us to learn about possibilities by gathering intelligence in order to identify and weigh options. The idea imposition approach limits intelligence gathering and focuses resources on promoting a solution. The purpose of this study is to explore the intelligence‐gathering stage of organizational leaders during decision making from both of these perspectives and to begin to identify themes as they relate to the data considered, types of decisions and outcomes sought, and level of confidence in decision‐making success.     

Stichwort: Mehrsprachigkeit

The article provides an introduction to the state of the art in research on migration induced multilingualism. At first, recent research on the dynamics of migration is taken up, showing that practices and types of migration have changed dramatically in the past two decades. These changes lead to linguistic textures in societies that go beyond all forms of complexity ever experienced before. The theoretical concept of super-diversity tries to capture the new types of complexity. It is presented in the first chapter of this article. Actual super-diversity in migration areas is confronted with traditional self-concepts of homogeneity and monolingualism as the regular case in societies, in chapter two. A historical analysis in chapter three illustrates the development of the linguistic self-image of classical, i.e. European nation states. This concept of linguistic normality—a monolingual habitus—sets the frame not only for actual language practice and language policies in many nation states world-wide, but has also influenced important parts of scientific research and discourse on multilingualism. Chapters four and five deal with the state of knowledge concerning language development in multilingual contexts, and present the controversy about bilingual education. In the final chapter, perspectives for future research on multilingualism and education are presented that take linguistic super-diversity into account.