Teachers’ Lives in Context: A Framework for Understanding Barriers to High-Quality Teaching Within Resource Deprived Settings

There is a profound for more effective schools, especially within resource-poor communities in low- and middle-income countries. A wide range of literature identifies teachers as the most critical component of schools in regards to student learning. Despite this, there is a dearth of literature on how teachers' experiences influence their ability to attend school, remain in the teaching profession, and provide high quality teaching within the classroom. This study presents a theoretical framework for understanding the role of teachers' lives in context (skills, knowledge, and attitudes; poverty and health; contextual supports/barriers to teaching) in influencing teacher effectiveness. This framework builds upon Tseng and Seidman's (2007) systems framework for understanding youth social settings in order to incorporate teachers' lives into a larger model of educational effectiveness. This synthesis reveals significant gaps in our understanding of teachers' experiences and how they affect teaching. At the teacher attendance, attrition, and pedagogical quality and a key moderator of educational interventions. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.     

Marketing for the Teaching Artist

As teaching artists enter the field of arts education, they are faced with the challenge of distinguishing themselves in the job search—developing a digital presence is one great way to stand out. After conducting thorough research into their local markets, teaching artists can set long-term career goals while honing online content for a specified audience.     

Taxisin Aplysia dactylomela (Rang, 1828) to water-borne stimuli from conspecifics

Sixteen reproductively matureAplysia dactylomela were observed in a unidirectional stream under each of four conditions: sea water only, one sea hare, six sea hares, and a copulating sea hare pair. Streams containing conspecific stimulation were significantly more effective in eliciting a positive taxis towards the stimulus source. A copulating pair was not different from one or six animals in producing the approach. The sea hares showed a distinct final head orientation to six sea hares when compared with sea water only; final orientation did not differ in any other comparison.     

Evaluating the quality of peer and self evaluations as measures of student contributions to group projects

ABSTRACT

Educators in higher education commonly use peer and self evaluations to help assess student performance on group projects. Although these evaluations provide multiple benefits, many educators are wary of using them due to concerns about their quality. This study addresses three questions debated in the literature regarding the quality of these assessments. How much do students differentiate among peer contributions through their ratings? How reliable are peer ratings? How much agreement exists between peer and self ratings? Although these questions have been addressed to varying degrees in past work, their answers have been far from settled. While many studies focus on just one of the questions, this study’s data make it possible to address all three questions for the same group of students as well as examine each question by student performance level. The evaluations assessed in this study were completed by a large number of students under conditions associated with obtaining more valid and reliable ratings. Overall, the results provide support for using peer and self evaluations to help assess student contributions to group projects. Peer ratings were largely reliable as group members generally agreed on the scores given to their peers. In addition, most students differentiated among group member contributions through their ratings. Students also tended to rate themselves higher than their peers rated them. This study has implications for how peer and self evaluations can be most effectively used by educators to measure student performance in group work.     

Learning to Teach Offshore: Pre-Departure training for lecturers in transnational programs

The internationalisation of higher education in Australia over the past two decades has brought about dramatic changes in Australian universities. Growing numbers of international students have enrolled in Australian universities and the number of students studying offshore has also increased dramatically. While considerable material has been published on the ramifications of the increased numbers of onshore international students studying at Australian universities, there is relatively little published research on the specific challenges facing academics participating in offshore programs. The aim of this project was to examine the current pre-departure cross-cultural training taking place in the business faculties of three Australian universities in order to gain a better understanding of the adequacy of the support given to Australian academics teaching offshore. Twenty staff involved in offshore education were interviewed as part of this project, including academics with considerable offshore teaching experience, senior academic managers and cross-cultural trainers. While these institutions engage in little formal preparation for offshore teaching, a great deal of informal mentoring and briefing is taking place. We consider the implications of the new quality assurance framework for Australian universities, which requires that institutions be able to demonstrate the ways in which they ensure the quality of teaching and learning. Under this new system, universities are bound by the Australian Vice Chancellors' Committee's guidelines for the provision of education to international students. It appears that Australian universities will need to establish more formal mechanisms to ensure that offshore staff are adequately prepared for offshore teaching posts.     

The relationship between grit,self-control,and early grade reading: a trial measuring soft skills in rural Tanzania

Abstract

Soft skills such as grit, self-control, and self-confidence have been shown to predict outcomes in school and in life. As such, their valid and reliable measurement is of substantial interest in educational research and policy circles. However, the vast majority of this research originates in Western countries; relatively little is known regarding the measurement of soft skills in developing country contexts and whether similar types of instruments can provide evidence of these skills. This paper presents a novel means of assessing grit, self-control, and self-confidence in rural Tanzania: through the use of scenario-based self-report questionnaires. Survey instruments were administered in three regions in Tanzania to 961 Standard 2 pupils. We found that scenario-based items provided valid and, in most cases, reliable estimates of the three tested soft skills. When comparing self-reported soft skills and reading ability, we found that both grit and self-control were significant predictors of reading and mathematics performance. After controlling for sex, region, and age, grit was found to have a stronger association with reading performance than socioeconomic status.     

Supposer et postuler pour produire des connaissances scientifiques: une évidence ou une conquête théorique? Une étude des points de vue d'étudiants

Résumé De manière générale, l'évidence sensorielle et, plus particulièrement, visuelle constitue pour les étudiants le principal fondement du savoir scientifique: nul besoin de supposer pour connaître, tout est donné ou presque. Du point de vue de l'enseignement des sciences, cette croyance à saveur réaliste est particulièrement critique, notamment parce qu'elle conduit à penser que les concepts, lois et théories scientifiques procèdent d'un monde de matérialités plutôt que d'un monde de modèles et de relations. Au cours d'une recherche effectuée auprès d'un groupe-classe de 35 étudiants durant douze semaines, nous avons pu observer que, pour la majorité des étudiants, la compréhension du caractère construit et consensuel du savoir scientifique était facilitée par le développement d'une métaréflexion sur leurs propres productions de connaissance et les inévitables postulats et suppositions qui les fondent. Nous avons également pu observer qu'il découle de cette activité réflexive un modèle de science qui se distingue des modèles initialement tenus par les étudiants, par le pouvoir créateur et, surtout, le pouvoir de théoriser qu'il comporte: postuler, supposer, jauger collectivement de la plausibilité des résultats plutôt qu'en appeler à une instance occulte, voilà quelques-unes des conquêtes théoriques qu'ils ont effectuées et sur lesquelles nous allons nous attarder.

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Sensorial, and more specifically, visual evidence is generally regarded by students as the basis for scientific knowledge: no need to postulate to understand, all is almost or practically given. From a science-teaching standpoint, this rather realistic approach is critical and leads to the belief that scientific concepts, laws, and theories stem from a world of materiality rather than from a world of models and relationships. During a 12-week study a group of 35 college students, we observed that for the majority of them, the development of metareflection on how they produce knowledge, with the inevitable and inherent postulates and conjecture, facilitated their understanding of the constructed and consensual character of scientific knowledge. We also observed that this reflexive activity facilitated the development of a new approach to science that differed from those models previously used by the students in its creative potential and, more importantly, in the power of its theoretics: to postulate, suppose, and collectively estimate the plausibility of results rather than calling up occult instances. These and other theoretical achievements will be discussed in this paper.

     

Some recent Unesco publications

Notes and Reviews

Some recent Unesco publications