Teachers engaging in action research: challenging some assumptions

A number of recent professional development projects in Australia have expected teachers to engage in action research as a process for professional learning and educational reform. This study investigated the experiences of ten teachers from one school who spent a year undertaking action research projects as part of the Innovative Links Project. The author was a participant observer in the study in her role as the school's ‘academic associate’ for the project. In this article, the project's expectations of the teachers are examined to reveal the extent to which they were based on realistic assumptions about the conditions within which the teachers worked as they tried to achieve them.     

Question Posing, Inquiry, and Modeling Skills of Chemistry Students in the Case-Based Computerized Laboratory Environment

A new learning unit in chemistry, Case-based Computerized Laboratories (CCL) and Computerized Molecular Modeling (CMM) was developed at the Technion. The CCL and CMM curriculum integrates computerized desktop experiments and molecular modeling with an emphasis on scientific inquiry and case studies. Our research aimed at investigating the effect of the CCL and CMM learning environment on students’ higher-order thinking skills of question posing, inquiry, and modeling. The experimental group included 614 honors 12th grade chemistry students from high schools in Israel who studied according to this learning unit. The comparison group consisted of 155 12th grade chemistry honors students who studied other chemistry programs. Pre- and post-tests questionnaires were used to assess students’ higher-order thinking skills. Students’ responses were analyzed using content analysis rubrics and their statistical analysis. Our findings indicated that the scores of the experimental group students improved significantly in question posing, inquiry and modeling skills from the pre-test to the post-test. The net gain scores of the experimental group students were significantly higher than those of their comparison peers in all three examined skills. In modeling skills, experimental group students significantly improved their achievements in making the transfer from 3D models to structural formulae, but only about half of them were able to transfer from formulae to 3D models. By presenting a case-based chemistry assessment tool and content analysis of students’ responses in this paper, we enable teachers and educators to analyze their students’ higher-order thinking skills both qualitatively and quantitatively.     

Exemplifying a Continuum of Collaborative Engagement: Raising Literacy Achievement of At-Risk Students in New Zealand

This article reports different ways researchers work with stakeholders in national projects targeted at raising achievement of students. Specifically, New Zealand has a persistent high performance–low equity profile in international tests, with indigenous Māori students and immigrants from the Pacific Islands most at risk of underachievement and of leaving school without qualifications. Policy has aimed to address this issue largely through provision of high-quality professional development to enhance effectiveness of practice. The notion of a continuum of collaboration is proposed; examples are presented that are positioned at different points in terms of the ideal of coconstructed, evidence-based judgments and decisions. The examples represent models or ways of working and the analysis captures both the varied nature of the interface that researchers have with policy makers, ministry officials, deliverers of professional development, and schools, and the affordances and tensions that accompany each model. Student achievement outcomes are identified.     

Factors associated with concussion-symptom knowledge and attitudes toward concussion care seeking in a national survey of parents of middle-school children in the US

Background:Developing appropriate concussion prevention and management paradigms in middle school(MS)settings requires understanding parents’general levels of concussion-related knowledge and attitudes.This study examined factors associated with concussion-symptom knowledge and care-seeking attitudes among parents of MS children(aged 10-15 years).Methods:A panel of 1224 randomly selected U.S.residents,aged ≥18 years and identifying as parents of MS children,completed an online questionnaire capturing parental and child characteristics.The parents’concussion-symptom knowledge was measured using 25 questions,with possible answers being“yes”,“maybe”,and“no”.Correct answers earned 2 points,“maybe”answers earned 1 point,and incorrect answers earned 0 point(range:0-50;higher scores=better knowledge).Concussion care-seeking attitudes were also collected using five 7-point scale items(range:5-35;higher scores=more positive attitudes).Multivariable ordinal logistic regression models identified predictors of higher scores.Models met proportional odds assumptions.Adjusted odds ratios(aORs)with 95%confidence intervals(95%CIs)(excluding 1.00)were deemed statistically significant.Results:Median scores were 39(interquartile range:32-44)for symptom knowledge and 32(interquartile range:28-35)for care-seeking attitude.In multivariable models,odds of better symptom knowledge were higher in women vs.men(aOR=2.28;95%CI:1.71-3.05),white/non-Hispanics vs.other racial or ethnic groups(aOR=1.88;95%CI:1.42-2.49),higher parental age(10-year-increase aOR=1.47;95%CI:1.26-1.71),and greater competitiveness(10%-scale-increase aOR=1.24;95%CI:1.13-1.36).Odds of more positive care-seeking attitudes were higher in white/non-Hispanics vs.other racial or ethnic groups(aOR=1.45;95%CI:1.06-1.99)and in older parental age(10-year-increase aOR=1.24;95%CI:1.05-1.47).Conclusion:Characteristics of middle school children’s parents(e.g.,sex,race or ethnicity,age)are associated with their concussion-symptom knowledge and care-seeking attitudes.Parents’variations in concussion knowledge and attitudes warrant tailored concussion education and prevention.     

An Australian Proposal for Doing Critical Literacy Assessment: The Case of Writing

In this article we present current thinking and practices in Queens land, Australia, about how to do critical literacy assessment in the English classroom. In taking this focus, we propose and discuss a framework that brings together interest in text analysis and social practices. Then, we apply the framework showing how it can be used to generate writing tasks and assessment criteria that are consistent with critical pedagogy. Finally, the challenges of moving to a socially critical, discourse‐oriented approach to assessment are considered.     

General physiology,experimental psychology,and evolutionism. Unicellular organisms as objects of psychophysiological research, 1877-1918

This essay aims to shed new light on the relations between physiology and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on the use of unicellular organisms as research objects during that period. Within the frameworks of evolutionism and monism advocated by Ernst Haeckel, protozoa were perceived as objects situated at the borders between organism and cell and individual and society. Scholars such as Max Verworn, Alfred Binet, and Herbert Spencer Jennings were provoked by these organisms to undertake experimental investigations situated between general physiology and psychology that differed from the physiological psychology advocated by Wilhelm Wundt. Some of these investigations sought to locate psychological properties in the molecular structure of protoplasm; others stressed the existence of organic and psychological individuality in protozoa. In the following decades, leading philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Henri Bergson, as well as psychological researchers like Sigmund Freud, integrated the results of these investigations into their reflections on such problems as the nature of the will, the structure of the ego, and the holistic nature of the reactions of organisms to their environment.