Educational Psychology: What Do We Teach, What Should We Teach?

Teacher education students sometimes question the value of educational psychology courses even though educational psychology textbooks are primarily concerned with understanding and improving classroom teaching and learning. A survey of current educational psychology textbooks and instructors reveals that (a) most texts cover a wide variety of topics, (b) instructors rate most of these topics as important, (c) there are large variations in depth of coverage among texts, and (d) all texts contain numerous classroom applications. The questionable reputation of the educational psychology course may stem from its broad coverage. A dozen or more topics in one semester may decrease the probability that most students will achieve a solid grasp of any one topic, leaving students uncertain about the course's meaning and applicability. A proposed solution is to offer the introductory course as a two-semester sequence, with the second course offered as an elective.     

Selection of models in 2×2×2 contingency tables

This paper is the presentation of a simplified example of a technique, conceived by Yates and later developed by Goodman and Haberman, for the determination of appropriate log-models in the measurement of qualitative data in higher education.     

Models for Curricular Materials Development: Combining Applied Development Processes with Theory

Developing curricular materials for technical and vocational education is particularly challenging because of the comprehensive requirements for technical education and the rapidity with which technical positions are evolving. Well-educated employees are expected to have general communication, reasoning, problem-solving, and behavioral skills in addition to occupation-specific technical knowledge. Furthermore, technical and vocational education materials must meet the needs of various contexts each with its own unique array of factors which must be accommodated. To assist in the process of materials development, this paper presents a comprehensive and contextualized model as a guide for curricular developers. This model was formed through the synthesis of two theoretical and four applied models, with the outline of the applied models occurring as part of a national evaluation of the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education Program. Examples illuminating the elements of the template are provided.     

Race,Categorisation and Educational Achievement

This paper is concerned with the ways in which terms and categories are deployed in analyses and discussions of differences in educational achievement between social groups whose identity is usually specified in terms of ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’. The first part of the paper is didactic, and discusses problems with the use of ‘racial’ terms with respect to social, biological and legal discourse. The second part of the paper examines the consequences of categorisation for analyses of differences in educational achievement, with particular reference to a paper by Mackintosh & Mascie‐Taylor, on which the Swann Committee claims to have relied heavily.     

Generalizability and Validity of the Use of a Case Analysis Assessment to Make Visible the Quality of Teacher Candidates

The use of case analysis as an accountability measure for demonstrating teacher candidates abilities to meet targeted course, institutional, and state teaching standards for student motivation and classroom management was evaluated. The findings supported the generalizability of case analysis ratings made using a standards-based scoring rubric, and the ratings were shown to differentiate levels of performance in accordance with those standards. Support for the content representativeness of the performance assessment was also obtained using criteria suggested by Crocker (1997), including the realism, frequency, necessity, and importance of the targeted teaching behaviors to actual teaching practice. The findings also provided initial support for the predictive validity of the case analysis assessment for appraising candidates overall abilities to manage a public school classroom.     

Students' Perceptions of Interpersonal Aspects of the Learning Environment

This study examined variables associated with differences in students' perceptions of interpersonal teacher behavior. The perceptions of 3023 students and 74 teachers in 168 classes in seven secondary schools were used in the analyses. Investigating variance at the student, class, teacher and school levels revealed that several variables are significantly related to students' perceptions: student and teacher gender, student and teacher ethnic background, student age and grade, class size, grade level, subject taught and teacher experience. There were interaction effects between some variables, such as student ethnicity and student gender, as well as student and teacher gender. While significant, the amount of variance explained by these was low (around 10%). The outcomes generally confirmed earlier research, although some new effects were found. Perhaps the main result of the study was its verification of the complex and interactive nature of students' perceptions of the learning environment and researchers' understanding of it.     

Concurrent and predictive validity of parent reports of child language at ages 2 and 3 years

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI; Dale, 1996; Fenson et al., 1994), parent reports about language skills, are being used increasingly in studies of theoretical and public health importance. This study (N = 113) correlated scores on the CDI at ages 2 and 3 years with scores at age 3 years on tests of cognition and receptive language and measures from parent-child conversation. Associations indicated reasonable concurrent and predictive validity. The findings suggest that satisfactory vocabulary scores at age 2 are likely to predict normal language skills at age 3, although some children with limited skills at age 3 will have had satisfactory scores at age 2. Many children with poor vocabulary scores at 2 will have normal skills at 3.     

Questionnaires as interventions: can taking a survey increase teachers’ openness to student feedback surveys?

Administrators often struggle in getting teachers to trust their school’s evaluation practices – a necessity if teachers are to learn from the feedback they receive. We attempted to bolster teachers’ support for receiving evaluative feedback from a particularly controversial source: student-perception surveys. For our intervention, we took one of two approaches to asking 309 teachers how they felt about students evaluating their teaching practice. Control participants responded only to core questions regarding their attitudes towards student-perception surveys. Meanwhile, treatment participants were first asked whether teachers should evaluate administrators in performance reviews and were then asked the core items about student-perception surveys. Congruent with cognitive dissonance theory, this juxtaposition of questions bolstered treatment teachers’ support for using student surveys in teacher evaluations relative to the control group. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to increasing teacher openness to alternative evaluation approaches, and consider whether surveys show promise as a vehicle for delivering interventions.     

A Science for Citizenship Model: Assessing the Effects of Benefits,Risks, and Trust for Predicting Students’ Interest in and Understanding of Science-Related Content

This study showcases the Science for Citizenship Model (SCM) as a new instructional methodology for presenting, to secondary students, science-related technology content related to the use of science in society not taught in the science curriculum, and a new approach for assessing the intercorrelations among three independent variables (benefits, risks, and trust) to predict the dependent variable of triggered interest in learning science. Utilizing a 50-minute instructional presentation on nanotechnology for citizenship, data were collected from 301 Taiwanese high school students. Structural equation modeling (SEM) and paired-samples t-tests were used to analyze the fitness of data to SCM and the extent to which a 50-minute class presentation of nanotechnology for citizenship affected students’ awareness of benefits, risks, trust, and triggered interest in learning science. Results of SCM on pre-tests and post-tests revealed acceptable model fit to data and demonstrated that the strongest predictor of students’ triggered interest in nanotechnology was their trust in science. Paired-samples t-test results on students’ understanding of nanotechnology and their self-evaluated awareness of the benefits and risks of nanotechology, trust in scientists, and interest in learning science revealed low significant differences between pre-test and post-test. These results provide evidence that a short 50-minute presentation on an emerging science not normally addressed within traditional science curriculum had a significant yet limited impact on students’ learning of nanotechnology in the classroom. Finally, we suggest why the results of this study may be important to science education instruction and research for understanding how the integration into classroom science education of short presentations of cutting-edge science and emerging technologies in support of the science for citizenship enterprise might be accomplished through future investigations.