Preliminary development of a measure of sibling relational maintenance behaviors: Scale development and initial findings

Two studies were conducted to examine the use of relational maintenance behaviors in the sibling relationship. In the first study, the specific relational maintenance behaviors used by siblings were identified. A principal components factor analysis of 70 previously generated behaviors used by 363 participants revealed six factors: confirmation, humor, social support, family visits, escape, and verbal aggression. In the second study, the link between the six relational maintenance behaviors used by siblings and the relational outcomes of liking, commitment, and trust was explored. Results indicate the confirmation, humor, social support, and family visits relational maintenance behaviors are correlated positively with liking, commitment, and trust, but the verbal aggression relational maintenance behavior failed to correlate with liking, commitment, or trust.     

Learning for revival; British trade unions and workplace learning A shorter version of this article appeared in 2004, as a Research Note in Work,Employment and Society, 18(2), 413–420.

Against a background of declining union significance and falling membership, this article reviews the recent development of trade union workplace learning in Britain. It is argued that the dominant framework within which this learning is currently undertaken is one of ‘employability’. Instead of an employability framework, it is suggested that an educational framework informed by ‘democratic citizenship’ better serves the need for unions and their members to engage with changes within the workplace and within the wider societal context.     

Workplace learning: principles and practice

Students in part‐time courses were interviewed about their perceptions of good teaching and tutoring. The perceptions differed markedly between those with reproductive conceptions of learning and students holding self‐determining ones. The former preferred didactic teaching but disliked interaction, whereas the latter had almost diametrically opposite perspectives by finding student‐centred approaches consistent with their conceptions of learning. The findings have implications for the evaluation of teaching, as ratings are likely to be influenced by the predominant conceptions of learning of a class. It is common for individual instructors to be regularly evaluated by teacher evaluation questionnaires, which often have a teacher‐centred bias, and for the ratings to be used for appraisal. It is argued that this leads to conservatism as teachers fear that students with reproductive conceptions of learning will reduce their ratings if they innovate in their teaching. As the degree of bias from this ratings‐lowering phenomenon may be quite large, the findings are a caution against the common practice of using absolute rating values from both teacher evaluation questionnaires and programme‐level evaluation by instruments such as the Course Experience Questionnaire. Results need to be interpreted together with other evidence and take into account contextual factors including students' conceptions of learning.     

When ‘we wish they knew’ meets ‘I want to know’

ABSTRACT

The tension between mandated curricula and students’ interests is evident throughout the history of science education. Societal expectations for student learning often lead to standards and curricula that leave little room for students to explore their own individual interests. Occasionally, however, an event can capture the interest of so many students that teachers feel compelled to respond. The Ebola outbreak of 2014 was such an event. This article discusses findings from a study of teacher decision-making; specifically, it explores how high school science teachers in the U.S. decided whether and how they should address Ebola during the 2014–2015 school year, when the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was at its peak. Approximately 2500 teachers of science responded to an online questionnaire that addressed their Ebola-specific instruction. In comparing the decisions of those who taught about Ebola and those who did not, the study found that teachers weighed various factors, in particular student interest but also curriculum standards, time, and availability of resources for teaching about Ebola. The article concludes with implications for future urgent health-related issues.     

Student Conceptions of Ionic Bonding: Patterns of thinking across three European contexts

Previous research has reported that students commonly develop alternative conceptions in the core topic of chemical bonding. Research in England has reported that students there commonly demonstrate an alternative ‘molecular’ conceptual framework for thinking about ionic bonding: in terms of the formation of molecule-like ions pairs through electron transfer, which are internally bonded, but not bonded to other ions. The present study reports the use of translated versions of a diagnostic instrument to elicit the conceptions of bonding in NaCl (commonly used as the teaching example of an ionic compound) from two samples of students setting out on university courses in Greece and Turkey. The study reports that students in these two contexts displayed high levels of support for statements based upon the alternative conceptual framework identified in the English context. Students commonly develop similar alternative conceptions of ionic bonding in these three different educational contexts. The study also found some quite large differences in the specific response patterns across these three contexts, some of which could reflect specific features of the different curriculum contexts. The study reinforces the cross-national nature of the challenge of effectively teaching the abstract models of chemistry at the submicroscopic level. It also provides intriguing suggestions that a close study of the interactions between specific curriculum contexts and specific patterns in students' thinking offers much potential for identifying particular aspects of subject pedagogy that either support or impede the learning of accepted scientific models.     

Coordinating Procedural and Conceptual Knowledge to Make Sense of Word Equations: Understanding the complexity of a ‘simple’ completion task at the learner’s resolution

The present paper discusses the conceptual demands of an apparently straightforward task set to secondary‐level students—completing chemical word equations with a single omitted term. Chemical equations are of considerable importance in chemistry, and school students are expected to learn to be able to write and interpret them. However, it is recognised that many students find them challenging. The present paper explores students’ accounts of their attempts to identify the missing terms, to illuminate why working with chemical word equations is so challenging from the learner’s perspective. Three hundred secondary‐age students responded to a five‐item exercise based on chemicals and types of reactions commonly met at school level. For each item they were asked to identify the missing term in a word equation, and to explain their answers. This provided a database containing more than 1,000 student accounts of their rationales. Analysis of the data led to the identification of seven main classes of strategy used to answer the questions. Most approaches required the coordination of chemical knowledge at several different levels for a successful outcome; and there was much evidence both for correct answers based on flawed chemical thinking, and appropriate chemical thinking being insufficient to lead to the correct answer. It is suggested that the model reported here should be tested by more in‐depth methods, but could help chemistry teachers appreciate learners’ difficulties and offer them explicit support in selection and application of strategies when working with chemical equations.     

Teachers' work in reading literacy across the curriculum in the senior phase of learning

Teaching students to read is one of the main aims of education systems around the world. For a significant number of adolescents, however, formal schooling has failed to deliver adequate reading proficiency. This article reports on a study of teachers' responses to a reading intervention programme for adolescents implemented in a senior secondary college in Australia in 2006. It engages with the question: in what ways does the reading intervention affect senior secondary teachers' knowledge of reading literacy and their motivation to provide reading literacy support to students in content area subjects? Data were collected from 20 semi-structured interviews with 15 teachers over a six-month period. The findings suggest that, despite the success of the intervention for the students, in this particular senior school context the teachers were largely resistant to expectations that they engage with the process of teaching reading in all senior phases of learning curriculum areas.     

Conceptualizing the innovation: factors influencing doctoral candidates’ interventions in the action research dissertation

In this action research study, we describe how doctoral candidates conceptualize innovations for their dissertations and outline how we are using the results to improve the doctoral dissertation experience for our new cohort. Over the course of one academic year (2010/11) we documented our students’ process of conceptualizing their innovations as they moved from general ideas to concrete plans, which they would carry out the following year during their dissertation research. We found four major factors influencing the conceptualization of the innovation: the leader–scholar community, prior cycles of action research, interactions with stakeholders, and the student’s work context. As the next cycle in this action research study, we shared the results with our local community and are currently implementing recommended changes based on the study for the next cohort of students.