Assessing Teachers’ Science Content Knowledge: A Strategy for Assessing Depth of Understanding

One of the characteristics of effective science teachers is a deep understanding of science concepts. The ability to identify, explain and apply concepts is critical in designing, delivering and assessing instruction. Because some teachers have not completed extensive courses in some areas of science, especially in middle and elementary grades, many professional development programs attempt to strengthen teachers’ content knowledge. Assessing this content knowledge is challenging. Concept inventories are reliable and efficient, but do not reveal depth of knowledge. Interviews and observations are time-consuming. The Problem Based Learning Project for Teachers implemented a strategy that includes pre-post instruments in eight content strands that permits blind coding of responses and comparison across teachers and groups of teachers. The instruments include two types of open-ended questions that assess both general knowledge and the ability to apply Big Ideas related to specific science topics. The coding scheme is useful in revealing patterns in prior knowledge and learning, and identifying ideas that are challenging or not addressed by learning activities. The strengths and limitations of the scoring scheme are identified through comparison of the findings to case studies of four participating teachers from middle and elementary schools. The cases include examples of coded pre- and post-test responses to illustrate some of the themes seen in teacher learning. The findings raise questions for future investigation that can be conducted using analyses of the coded responses.     

Services to Distance Learners: Planning for E-Reserves and Copyright

Abstract

This paper focuses on the outreach to over 3,000 students taking classes at over 80 locations within the State of Maine, as well as students taking classes nationally via the Web through the University of Maine System Network (UNE1). The discussion will briefly note the wide range of collections and services available through the University of Maine System's digital library and the Off-Campus Library Services Office. In particular, the discussion will center on reserve services for students at remote locations, using traditional paper copies and particularly electronic reserves, and the copyright issues that surround the e-reserve service.     

How U.S. cities compete through information technology: Securing an urban advantage

Abstract

The information age is bringing about a change in the world division of labor. Many of the great trading cities that arose during the Industrial Revolution as shipping, railroad, and financial centers are now facing new challenges, challenges brought about by global telecommunications. Information technology and the changing nature of business and government offer new opportunities and threats to these and other cities as they strive to acquire or retain treasured economic activity. Telecommunications and computation capacity are among the tools cities can use as they vie with one another for this commerce.

This study describes how U. S. cities are affected by these trends and summarizes some of the key technological and policy issues involved. Several case studies are reported, which show the various strategies used by large cities such as New York and Boston, progressive Midwest cities such as Omaha, and small cities such as Heathrow, Florida. Some preliminary principles of success are adduced.     

Application of Generalizability Theory in Estimating the Reliability of a Motor Performance Test

Abstract

This paper discusses the use of generalizability theory, a flexible intraclass approach, for estimating the reliability of a motor performance task. The generalizability technique provides variance component estimates for each factor of an analysis of variance design. These variance estimates can be utilized to define a number of reliability coefficients which are dependent upon the logical or theoretical rationale for assigning variance component estimates as true score or error score variance. The second section of this paper presents a study illustrating the use of generalizability theory in estimating the reliability of a motor performance task. The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability of first-ball scores for beginning college bowlers. The facets of the generalizability study were identified as sex of the bowler, trials, and days. Three reliability coefficients, R ₁ (.93), R ₂ (.92), and R ₃ (.84), were computed by assigning the different factors to either true score or error score variance. The performance of beginning college bowlers as measured by first-ball scores is reliable. While the information might be useful for the teacher or researcher who is interested in detecting between-subject differences in coeducational bowling classes, the primary purpose of this paper was to demonstrate the use of generalizability theory to estimate reliability coefficients for a set of motor performance test scores.     

Reading Standards in Aberdeen 1962‐72

The 1962 reading survey in Aberdeen was repeated in 1972, with 99 per cent coverage of year‐groups (over 2,500) of 8‐year old and 11‐year‐old pupils: Reading comprehension tests used were NFER Sentence Reading Test AD and Test NS6. The 1972 averages on these tests were within one point of score of the 1962 averages: at age eight, the average was slightly but not significantly higher in 1972; at age 11, it was slightly and significantly lower. The children whose fathers were in semi‐skilled or unskilled jobs showed a particularly sharp decline in average performance over the ten‐year interval, whereas the standard of performance had improved or been maintained among children from professional homes.     

Homophily Among Peer Groups Members’ Perceived Self-Regulated Learning

The present study is one of the first examining whether peer group members hold similar levels of self-regulated learning. The study specifically addresses the potential homophily among group members’ regulative abilities (metacognition, environment regulation, effort regulation, peer learning, and help seeking) and whether group members’ regulative abilities predict affiliates’ academic performance. The study surveyed 9th-grade students from a Midwestern high school about their regulative abilities for mathematics. Results suggest that peer groups members’ effort regulation is similar among peer affiliates but not other regulative abilities. In addition, peer group members’ regulative abilities do not predict each others’ academic performance.     

Thirty Years in the Storm: Leadership at an African-Centered School

For most Americans, access to a quality education has always been perceived as the fundamental link to upward mobility and increased life chances within our society (Ballantine and Hammack in The sociology of education: a systematic analysis. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2011; Brown et al. 2010; Holyfield 2002). This perception of the role of education has been particularly salient for African American people. From the beginning of their experiences in America, the African American community creatively established schools for their children (Anderson in The education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988). Even during the enslavement of the majority of African people in this country, they would often risk their lives in the effort to learn to read and write (Douglass and Stepto in Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009). Subsequently this rich history, along with the continued presence of inequities and underachievement in the public schools became the undergirding impetus for the development of independent Black schools within the African American communities around the nation beginning in the early 1960’s. Through the years, many of these schools have waged a fervent battle to remain operating. In spite of difficulties with various factors such as, finances, facilities location and maintenance, as well as an unstable teaching force, the leaders who founded these institutions remain committed to the education of African American children. Currently, there is a paucity of research on the founders of these independent Black schools. The purpose of this study was to investigate the educational philosophy and strategies which guided the decision-making process of the founder of an independent Black school.     

Willystine Goodsell (1870–1962) and John Dewey (1859–1952): history,philosophy and women’s education

This article explores the work of history and philosophy in publications by Willystine Goodsell, professor of history and philosophy at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the entanglement of Goodsell’s approach to scholarship with that of her doctoral supervisor John Dewey. The article experiments with diffractive reading to examine Dewey’s and Goodsell’s approach to history, as well as Goodsell’s configuration of women’s historical and contemporary participation in education. It looks at Dewey’s comment that women’s ‘philosophising’ would not be the same ‘in viewpoint or tenor’ as that composed from the ‘different masculine experience of things’ and investigates the principles that order liberal and vocational education in Goodsell’s view of a reformed education for women. The conclusion asks whether diffractive reading is an enhanced form of intertextuality.     

Communication and aging: A study of the effects of cohort‐centrism and perceived decoding ability on communication competence and communication satisfaction

From a sample of 190 males and females (120 “young,”; 70 “old"), this study sought to determine differences in perceived levels of communication competence and communication satisfaction as a function of the main and joint effects of cohort‐centrism and perceived decoding ability. Analyses provided only weak support for the joint effects. However, older persons considered their conversational partners, whether young or old, to be more competent than did younger persons. Also, on the whole, older persons were more satisfied conversing with young persons, while younger persons were less satisfied, regardless of the age of the conversational partner. Those who perceived themselves as high decoders rated their partners as more competent than did those who perceived themselves as low decoders, and high decoders were also more satisfied with the interaction than low decoders. Cohort‐centrism was supported only in the case of low‐decoding older persons.     

Paradigm wars, dialogue or dance: is rapprochement possible and/or desirable?

In focusing on the Kincheloe and Tobin paper, ‘The Much Exaggerated Death of Positivism,’ this forum explores the hegemony of positivism in the professional practices of a group of educators whose research expertise lies in the fields of science education, mathematics education and leadership education. Responding to the first question, ‘What is your personal/professional experience of the hegemony of positivism?’, four key issues arise: is positivism part of the external world or is it within us (and thus what is our agency)?, the role of positivism as a driver of Western cultural imperialism, dualism as the chief logic of positivism, and the difficulty of responding to positivism from a pluralist perspective. The second question, ‘Is rapprochement between positivism and other paradigms possible and/or desirable without being re-colonised?’, raises a number of key issues that, although relatively new to science education, are of increasing interest to cultural studies researchers keen to embrace alternative research paradigms with which to create culturally inclusive science curricula. The discussants reveal their personal experiences of being marginalised by the hegemony of positivism and give voice to a range of opinions about how best to respond. The integral perspective of spiral dynamics is proposed as a model of paradigm evolution, our fundamental assumptions about modern progress are questioned, and the non-dualist logic of dialectics is explored as a more inclusive rationality for researchers. In the spirit of counter-hegemonic cultural studies, the discussants draw on their personal Buddhist and Hindu perspectives to open new doorways into complex ontological systems lying beyond the simplistic materialism of crypto-positivism. We are given a glimpse of powerful means of generating new insights into the emergent universe (within and without) that an evolving science endeavours to explain.