Professional Development at Distance as an Information‐technology Enterprise

This paper considers the issues involved in the delivery of professional development to teachers across Australia using information technology. A DEET‐funded pilot project to provide professional development in statistics education using satellite television is the basis for the discussion. Aspects of the project include the procedures followed in setting up and implementing the programme, the difficulties encountered, the evaluation of the various participants and products, the future plans arising from the project, and the possible transfer of lessons learned to other subject areas.     

Mothers and daughters: Gender-role socialization in two Newbery award books

Jane M. Agee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Language Education at The University of Georgia. She is completing dissertation research which examines preservice English teachers' perceptions of literature.     

Proportional Reasoning among 7th Grade Students with Different Curricular Experiences

Contextual problems involving rational numbers and proportional reasoning were presented to seventh grade students with different curricular experiences. There is strong evidence that students in reform curricula, who are encouraged to construct their own conceptual and procedural knowledge of proportionality through collaborative problem solving activities, perform better than students with more traditional, teacher-directed instructional experiences. Seventh grade students, especially those who study the new curricula, are capable of developing their own repertoire of sense-making tools to help them to produce creative solutions and explanations. This is demonstrated through analysis of solution strategies applied by students to a variety of rate problems.     

Teachers in Class

In this article, I argue for a closer read of the daily “class work” of teachers, as posited by Reay, 1998. In developing exploratory class portraits of four teachers who occupy distinctive social positions (two from working-class homes now teaching upper-middle-class children and two from upper-middle-class homes now teaching poor children), I explore the class constraints within which teachers work.