A narrative examination of early childhood teachers’ shared identities in teamwork

This study examines the two kindergarten teachers’ shared professional identities in teamwork in an effort to clarify what constitutes their shared identities and how these identities affect the teachers’ professional practices and beliefs. The relational nature of identity maintains that individuals are not the only constructors of their identity, and the literature on teacher education emphasizes the importance of identity in teacher development. The in-depth analysis of the two kindergarten teachers’ narrative interviews revealed how the educators constructed their professional identities by intertwining the features of their context, feedback, and teaching. The findings indicate that the shared professional identities of the two early childhood teachers are developed and negotiated through four shared features: commitment, feedback, educational tasks, and professional agency. Together these four shared features shape the teachers’ professional roles and pedagogical practices—either by giving support to professional growth and empowerment or by having a decreasing effect on the teachers’ professional identity and agency in early childhood contexts.     

Stepping into other people’s shoes proves to be a difficult task for high school students: assessing historical empathy through simulation exercise

In 2011, the Finnish National Board of Education assessed the learning outcomes of history with a study whose results raised doubts about the fulfilment of the goals of history education. This article seeks to expand awareness about Finnish adolescents’ understanding of historical empathy. The study assessed twenty-two 16–17-year-old high school students’ ability to understand predecessors’ actions in particular historical situations. The study also examined how well a simulation exercise works as a tool of empathy teaching and evaluation. Students participated in the simulation and afterwards the students were interviewed. They also participated in a survey that measured their attitudes before and after the exercise, and wrote an essay at the end of the course. The results of the study show that most of the high school students did not reach the goals set for history teaching. The weak performance of students is explained by the strong tradition of history teaching which has been continuing in Finnish schools despite the curriculum reform. Teaching still concentrates on passing a meta-narrative on to students who have not yet enough experience of explaining historical events from a multiperspective point of view.     

Comprehending coherent and incoherent texts: evidence from eye movement patterns and recall performance

The effect of text structure on the reading process and recall performance was examined. Adult readers’ eye movements were monitored when they read coherently and incoherently structured texts (N=19). Incoherence was brought about by changing the sentence order in the middle paragraphs of the two stimulus texts. Each subject read and learned one text in a coherent and the other in an incoherent form in two experimental sessions. Immediate free recall followed the reading. The eye movement data showed that during the first pass reading, i.e. initial reading of a sentence until the end of the sentence is reached, structurally incoherent text segments attracted the largest number of regressive fixations, and, hence, were given more visual attention than coherent text segments (indicated by the total duration of fixations). On the other hand, more rereadings, i.e. all fixations made after the first pass reading but before moving away from the given sentence, were devoted to text segments resolving the incoherence. Textual incoherence was further found to lead to inferior recall. However, no clear-cut correspondence between eye movement behavior and quantitative recall performance was found.     

Mathematics textbooks, opportunity to learn and student achievement

Opportunity to learn is considered an important contributing factor in learning outcomes. In some of the latest international comparative studies of mathematics achievement, such as SIMS and TIMSS, painstaking efforts have been made to find out what the participating students' opportunities to learn mathematics had been. However, there have been problems with relating the findings to student outcomes. This article approaches opportunity to learn in three different ways. Among these approaches, an item-based analysis of textbook contents resulted in fairly high correlations with student performance at the item level in TIMSS 1999. This implies that even a quite simple analysis of textbooks can produce valuable information when looking for explanations for student achievement in mathematics.     

Uncovering expected teaching actions in attention-demanding teaching situations

During the teaching process, a multitude of problems arise in establishing and maintaining relationships with students. The need to fully understand teaching requires more detailed and explicit knowledge regarding the ways teachers perceive and think about their classroom actions. This collective case study focuses on investigating teachers’ expectations of their teaching actions as well as the varying levels of intensity within differential teaching investments in expected teaching actions. Structured interviews were conducted with 10 primary school teachers, and the data were analysed using a primarily inductive coding scheme. The results provide a detailed exploration of two approaches, the interactional approach and the instructional approach, and their respective teaching methods. In both approaches, teachers’ investments in expected teaching actions illustrate a continuum of low and high intensities. The results may assist in gaining a better understanding of the situational demands of teaching. By being more conscious of their teaching actions, teachers can develop their pedagogical skills more deliberately.     

University Applicants’ Critical Thinking Skills: The Case of the Finnish Educational Sciences

This study investigates the quality of the critical thinking skills of applicants (n?=?77) seeking entry to the faculty of educational sciences in a Finnish university and how these skills are associated with the applicant’s age, previous higher education experience, and matriculation and entrance examination scores. The data consist of the applicants’ responses to problem-solving tasks and their matriculation and entrance examination scores. Critical thinking skills were measured with comparison and argumentation tasks. The results indicate that comparison of the texts and analysis of the arguments they contained were more difficult tasks than putting forward arguments both for and against of one’s personal standpoint. In addition, previous experience of higher education predicted participants’ comparison skills and their matriculation examination grades predicted their argumentation skills. The feasibility of using critical comparison tasks in the entrance examination tests is discussed.     

The use of eye movements in the study of multimedia learning

This commentary focuses on the use of the eye-tracking methodology to study cognitive processes during multimedia learning. First, some general remarks are made about how the method is applied to investigate visual information processing, followed by a reflection on the eye movement measures employed in the studies published in this special issue. It is argued that global eye movement measures indexing attentional and encoding processes during the entire learning period should preferably be complemented with more fine-grained analyses that are either time-locked to important events taking place in an animation or that by other means provide information about the time course of learning. As nicely documented in the present set of studies, it is also of importance to complement the eye-tracking data with offline measures indexing the end product of learning. Such a complementary approach is likely to yield important new insights into the process of multimedia learning.     

Assessing historical literacy among 12-year-old Finns

The new national core curriculum has been put into operation in Finland. Teaching and learning is intended to focus on historical literacy. In this paper, we study how it can be assessed with a pen-and-paper test, and what that reveals in regards to the mastering of historical literacy among elementary pupils. To study this, we designed a test where pupils analysed sources, answered open-ended questions, and filled out weighted multiple-choice questions. Furthermore, we implemented the test with the think-aloud method. The results from this indicate the way 12-year-olds read historical documents and formulate their own interpretations. The results demonstrate that most of the pupils succeeded in acquiring historical information from different sources, as well as understanding the interpretative nature of historical knowledge. The test also revealed that pupils can identify some intentions of the sources’ producers, as well as reasoning through their own interpretations using a single source. Some pupils, however, could not process the cognitive noise inherent to the test (i.e. conflicting sources). Some of them also considered an authoritative source to be principally more reliable than other sources. Our study sheds light on which kind of task can be used at the elementary level to assess historical literacy.     

A multifocal approach to study pedagogical ethics in school settings

This paper advocates the argument that philosophical and empirical modes of inquiry are seldom brought together to gain a better understanding of pedagogical ethics in the natural settings of school life. Here, it is hoped that this kind of combination provides interpretative lenses for the deliberation of pedagogical practices. The paper aims to shift focus to the scene where the conditions and contingencies of pedagogical ethics may be found. This means exploring day‐to‐day details of pedagogical encounters to see what they might offer in putting forth an understanding of pedagogical ethics. This paper uses three interpretations from philosophy and ethics. It focuses on the perspectives of pedagogical purposes, obligations, and situations, together with their empirical interpretations of the ethic of ideals, the ethic of rights and duties, and the ethic of character and will. It shows how abstract philosophical theories can be translated into real‐world ethics in education and how these reference points can help teachers in their practical ethical reflection.