Understanding teachers’ professional learning goals from their current professional concerns

In the day-to-day workplace teachers direct their own learning, but little is known about what drives their decisions about what they would like to learn. These decisions are assumed to be influenced by teachers’ current professional concerns. Also, teachers in different professional life phases have different reasons for engaging in professional learning. In this study, we explored the professional concerns underlying teachers’ learning goals in order to understand variation in professional learning over a teacher’s career. In this qualitative study, we administered a semi-structured interview and a card sorting task to 15 secondary school teachers to elicit teachers’ learning goals and current professional concerns. By conceptually combining teachers’ learning goals with professional concerns in concern-goal pairs, we sought to understand the different reasons for teachers’ learning. These concern-goal pairs were characterized in three different types of reasons: continuous, growth and improvement, and work-management. The results showed that early career teachers have mainly growth and improvement concerns, whereas mid- and late-career teachers have both continuous and growth and improvement concerns. Work-management concerns differ for early- and late-career teachers. Results are further discussed in terms of professional life phase models and teachers’ developmental tasks throughout their career.     

HPE teachers’ negotiation of environmental health spaces: discursive positions,embodiment and materialism

A National Curriculum in Health and Physical Education (HPE) has recently been developed in Australia. This new curriculum reflects, among other educational priorities, both environmental sensitivities and a commitment to the enhancement of young people’s health and wellbeing. HPE is one of the key sites in the curriculum where a focused consideration of the relationship between the environment and health is possible. However, to date no research has considered the ways that HPE teachers might recognise and negotiate these spaces. The research described in this paper addresses this gap through an analysis of semi-structured interviews with generalist primary and specialist secondary HPE teachers, drawing on a ‘narrative ethnography’ approach derived from cultural geography. This analysis highlights the consequences of the absence of a knowledge tradition that explicitly links the fields of the environment and health in HPE. Participants who were able to conceptualise environmental health almost exclusively drew on dominant neoliberal and risk discourses. At the same time, teachers’ embodied histories and affective encounters with non-human nature helped them to rupture or challenge dominant assumptions about environmental health. We argue that corporeal knowledge developed through embodied experiences has the potential to assist teachers in formulating environmental health in ways that highlight how interactions with the environment might enhance health and wellbeing.     

Assessment of Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning with Dual-Task Methodology: Auditory Load and Modality Effects

Using cognitive load theory and cognitivetheory of multimedia learning as a framework,we conducted two within-subject experimentswith 10 participants each in order toinvestigate (1) if the audiovisual presentationof verbal and pictorial learning materialswould lead to a higher demand on phonologicalcognitive capacities than the visual-onlypresentation of the same material, and (2) ifadding seductive background music to anaudiovisual information presentation wouldincrease the phonological cognitive load. Weemployed the dual-task methodology in order toachieve a direct measurement of cognitive loadin the phonological system. In bothexperiments, the modality effect could beconfirmed in the patterns of secondary taskperformance and in the primary learning task.     

Science Teachers' Knowledge about Teaching Models and Modelling in the Context of a New Syllabus on Public Understanding of Science

As teachers' knowledge determines to a large extent how they respond to educational innovation, it is necessary for innovators to take this knowledge into account when implementing educational changes. This study aimed at identifying patterns in the content and the structure of science teachers' knowledge, at a point in time when they still had little experience in teaching a new subject, that is, Public Understanding of Science. We investigated three domains of teacher knowledge: Teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), subject-matter knowledge, and general pedagogical knowledge. A semi-structured interview and a questionnaire were used. From the analysis of the data, two types of teacher knowledge emerged. One of the types was more integrated and more extended in terms of PCK. Teachers who represented this type of knowledge had developed PCK that connected the various programme domains of the new science subject. In both types, PCK was found to be consistent with general pedagogical knowledge. In both types, however, subject-matter knowledge was similar, and not directly related to the other knowledge domains. Implications for the implementation of the new subject are discussed.     

Morning-to-afternoon increases in cortisol concentrations for infants and toddlers at child care: age differences and behavioral correlates

This study examined salivary cortisol, a stress-sensitive hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis hormone in 20 infants (12 females; M age = 10.8 months) and 35 toddlers (20 females; M age = 29.7 months) in full-day, center-based child care. Samples were taken at approximately 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. at child care and at home. At child care, 35% of infants and 71% of toddlers showed a rise in cortisol across the day; at home, 71% of infants and 64% of toddlers showed decreases. Toddlers who played more with peers exhibited lower cortisol. Controlling age, teacher-reported social fearfulness predicted higher afternoon cortisol and larger cortisol increases across the day at child care. This phenomenon may indicate context-specific activation of the HPA axis early in life.     

What Makes the Difference in Reading Achievement? Comparisons Between Finland and Shanghai

Finland and Shanghai are strong performers in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The current study explored the similarities and differences in educational effectiveness between these 2 strong performers. To this end, 14 predictors representing student background and school process characteristics were selected from the PISA 2009 database. The results show that the Finnish educational system is more efficient in transforming given inputs, specially student background characteristics, into reading achievement, while the general condition of the school climate in Shanghai, in terms of value and effect size of the predictors, contributes a large part to its comparative strength in reading achievement. Suggestions for improvement at school and system level are given.     

A Case Study of the Development of a Beginning Chemistry Teacher's Knowledge about Models and Modelling

In this paper, we present a case study of a beginning chemistry teacher who enrolled in a project aimed to contribute to the development of teachers' knowledge of models and modelling in science. The project consisted of a series of institutional meetings in combination with an action research project the teacher conducted in her own classes. By explaining how the project was conducted and mainly by focusing on the teacher's voice, her dynamic, continuous, and non-linear process of knowledge development is discussed in detail. We were able to investigate and describe this development in terms of various types of knowledge – content knowledge, curricular knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge – which were developed simultaneously. Among other results, it became clear how certain institutional activities led to specific choices in the teacher's action research project. For instance, although initially she was reluctant to conduct a modelling activity in her class, she decided to experiment with such an activity in her action research project. Subsequently, the responses of her students during the project convinced her of the value of this modelling activity and helped her to become aware of specific views of her students. Finally, it became evident that the whole experience made her very enthusiastic and stimulated her to formulate specific intentions with respect to the future, both in terms of applying certain teaching activities and in terms of collaborating with colleagues.     

The function of annotations in the comprehension of scientific texts: Cognitive load effects and the impact of verbal ability

Students participated in a study (n=98) investigating the effectiveness of three types of annotations on three learning outcome measures. The annotations were designed to support the cognitive processes in the comprehension of scientific texts, with a function to aid either the process of selecting relevant information, organizing the information in memory, or integrating information with prior knowledge. Learning outcomes were measured by assessing student recall of facts, comprehension of the text, and mental model construction. Results show that different types of annotations facilitate different learning outcomes. In addition, we found that, compared to having only one type of annotation available, multiple types of annotations resulted in a higher cognitive load that resulted in lower performance, especially in tests of higher-level processing. This effect was stronger for low-verbal-ability learners, who showed lower peformance in treatments with multiple types of annotations than high-verbal-ability learners.