Using an Attribution Support Tool to Enhance the Teacher Efficacy of Student Science Teachers

To increase the teacher efficacy of student teachers, they need positive classroom experiences: mastery experiences. These mastery experiences have to be created by the student teachers themselves. Therefore, student teachers need a tool to better understand problematic teaching experiences and help them create positive classroom experiences. Nine student biology teachers used this attribution support tool when reflecting on multiple lessons taught in classes they considered difficult. They scored their lessons and filled in a teacher efficacy questionnaire after each lesson. The results show that teacher efficacy increased and the number of failures during the lessons decreased; on average, the self-awarded marks per teacher per lesson increased, indicating an increase in mastery experiences. Therefore, the attribution tool seems to be a promising tool for student teachers to enhance their teacher efficacy and to support reflection on problematic teaching experiences.     

Too Much,Too Young? An Analysis of the Key Stage 3 National Literacy Strategy in Practice

This article was first drafted after I worked for 14 weeks last year in a school that was piloting the National Literacy Strategy at Key Stage 3. I now work in another school delivering the full published Strategy to Year 7. In this article, I explore the contradictions inherent in the Strategy in attempting to develop the English and literacy skills of Key Stage 3 pupils. Ultimately, my argument is that the educational benefits of this teaching to objectives is at odds with some of the deeper aims of the Strategy and of English teaching, and that the constant assessment involved puts too much pressure on our youngsters at an age when they should be concentrating on social development as people.     

Positive teacher–student relationships go beyond the classroom,problematic ones stay inside

The authors voice teachers' perceptions of their interpersonal experiences with students in both positive and problematic relationships. Interview data from 28 teachers were examined by coding utterances on teacher and student interactions. Results indicate that teachers defined the quality of the relationship mostly by the level of communion (friendly vs. hostile), instead of by the level of agency (in control vs. powerless). Analyses of mentioned teacher and student behavior show a friendly interactional pattern for positive relationships and a hostile pattern for problematic ones. In teachers' perceptions, positive and problematic relationships also differed in context where encounters take place and topic of talk. Contrary to interactions in problematic relationships, encounters in positive relationships were mostly situated outside the classroom context and conversations during these encounters covered a wide range of topics. Implications for teacher education programs are discussed.     

Children with epilepsy in school: Special service usage and assessment practices

Special services usage and related assessment procedures were investigated for 50 students with epilepsy. Fifty‐six percent of students with epilepsy received special education services, with mental retardation designation and self‐contained placement common, especially among individuals with epilepsy plus a coexisting neurological diagnosis. Sixteen percent of participants had an “other health impairment” designation, and several of these were deemed eligible in at least one other special education category. The majority of students who had been evaluated were administered IQ, adaptive behavior, speech/language, and sensorimotor components, whereas few were assessed for executive or memory functions. Little information about antiepileptic drugs, their effects, or the actual manifestation of students' seizures appeared in special services school documents. Additional empirical information regarding services for children with chronic health conditions, such as epilepsy, is necessary to improve school psychologists' practice. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 43: 169–181, 2006.     

Does maternal employment influence poor children’s social development?

Various initiatives over the past 40 years have aimed to strengthen children’s early learning and social development. One policy theory—manifest in recent welfare reforms—postulates that requiring single mothers to work more outside the home will advance children’s well-being. We first examine whether young children’s social development is related to maternal employment among 405 women who entered welfare-to-work programs in 1998. For girls, age 24–42 months, we found that their mother’s recent employment duration was significantly associated with a lower incidence of aggressive behavior and inattentiveness, measured by two scales from the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL 2/3). Yet these relationships with employment were weaker than more robust associations observed for proximal child-rearing practices, including the frequency of reading with the child, enforcing a regular bedtime, the propensity to spank the child, as well as levels of maternal depression. We then assess whether broader measures of the mother’s economic security help to predict these proximal determinants of development. We observed that food security and indicators of job quality consistently predicted the proximal factors. Structural equation models (SEM) provided additional evidence that these broader indicators of economic security, but not recent employment per se, operated through parenting practices and maternal depression to influence girls’ and boys’ social development. These results are consistent with recent findings from random-assignment experiments, showing that employment gains rarely affect child outcomes unless mothers’ income and broader economic security also improve.     

How to encourage a lifelong learner? The complex relation between learning strategies and assessment in a medical curriculum

Abstract

To foster lifelong learning skills, we need new didactic approaches with aligned assessment methods. Therefore, we investigated whether the outcomes of a project assignment show a different relation to learning strategies than a longitudinal knowledge-based assessment. We studied learning strategies of first year students of medicine and biomedical sciences (n?=?248) and performed hierarchical regression analyses for the learning strategies and grades of the longitudinal knowledge-based test and project assignment. Scores of students, measured with the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Likert scale 1–7), were relatively low for critical thinking (3.53), compared to rehearsal (4.40), elaboration (4.82), organisation (4.69) and metacognitive self-regulation (4.33). Knowledge based tests showed a significant relation to elaboration (p?<?0.01). For the project-based assessment, we did not find a significant relation to any learning strategy (p?=?0.074). Explained variance of the grades was low for all learning strategies (R² < 0.043). Different types of assessment did not discriminate between students with high or low scores on learning strategies associated with lifelong learning. An explanation is that the curriculum is not aligned with assessment, or students do not benefit in terms of grades. We conclude that, if assessment is to drive lifelong learning skills, this is not self-evident.