Existential career guidance for groups of young refugees and migrants: a Danish initiative

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - For many young migrants and refugees, adapting to a new life in Denmark is a challenging process. They often find themselves...     

How epistemic reflexivity enables teacher educators’ teaching for diversity: Exploring a pedagogical framework for critical thinking

Recent research points to the importance of teacher educators teaching for diversity in initial teacher education programmes. Teaching for diversity is an approach to teacher education in which an understanding of specialist literature and a focus on critical thinking supports a social justice agenda as opposed to merely using different tips and tricks to prepare future teachers for teaching diverse learners in the classroom. In this study, we explored how Australian and New Zealand teacher educators negotiated a social justice agenda in teacher education programmes, using a new transdisciplinary framework of epistemic reflexivity. The Epistemic Reflexivity for Teacher Education (ER-TED) framework draws on epistemic cognition (Clark Chinn’s Aims, Ideals, Reliable epistemic processes – AIR – framework) and Margaret Archer’s reflexivity to explore knowledge claims in teacher educators’ pedagogical decision-making. The findings identified how teacher educators in our study discerned and deliberated with respect to epistemic aims for justification, which involve transformative critical thinking and critical thinking for self. They reported good knowledge (ideals) as being scholarly in nature, and reliable epistemic processes based on higher-order thinking (analysis and evaluating competing ideas) or engaging with multiple perspectives. The teacher educators in our study are clear examples of how strong overall evaluative epistemic stances enable teaching for social justice. We argue that the ER-TED framework can help us as a profession to address teaching for diversity in teacher education programmes based on the belief that the pursuit of social justice requires an evaluativist epistemic stance.     

Stimulus blocking during compound discrimination training with pentobarbital and visual stimuli

Learning & Behavior - To investigate blocking by drug-induced stimuli and visual stimuli, three groups of rats were trained to escape shock in a T-maze by choosing the left or right arm. During...     

Adolescent Weak Decoders Writing in a Shallow Orthography: Process and Product

It has been hypothesized that students with dyslexia struggle with writing because of a word-level focus that reduces attention to higher level textual features (structure, theme development). This may result from difficulties with spelling and/or difficulties with reading. Twenty-six Norwegian upper secondary students (M = 16.9 years) with weak decoding skills and 26 age-matched controls composed expository texts by keyboard under two conditions: normally and with letters masked to prevent them reading what they were writing. Weak decoders made more spelling errors and produced poorer quality text. Their inter-key-press latencies were substantially longer preword, at word end, and within word. These findings provide some support for the word-level focus hypothesis, although we found that weak decoders were slightly less likely to engage in word-level editing. Preventing reading did not affect differences between weak decoders and controls, indicating that their reduced fluency was associated with production rather than reading difficulties.     

Assessing System Thinking Through Different Concept-Mapping Practices

System thinking is usually investigated by using questionnaires, video analysis, or interviews. Recently, concept-mapping (CM) was suggested as an adequate instrument for analysing students' system thinking. However, there are different ways with which to use this method. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine whether particular features of CM practices affect the valid assessment of students' system thinking. The particular features analysed were the medium (computer versus paper–pencil) and the directedness (highly directed versus nondirected) of CM practices. These features were evaluated with respect to their influence on (a) students' performance in CM and (b) the validity of different CM practices for system thinking. One hundred fifty-four German fourth graders (mean age: 9.95 years) and 93 eighth graders (mean age: 14.07 years) participated in the study following an experimental pre-test–post-test design. Three variations of CM practices were applied: (a) highly directed computer mapping, (b) highly directed paper–pencil mapping, and (c) nondirected paper–pencil mapping. In addition to the CM task, a paper–pencil questionnaire was employed to investigate the validity of the CM practices. Results showed that the computer positively influenced student performance in CM when compared with paper–pencil. By contrast, there was no difference between highly directed and nondirected mapping. Whereas the medium rarely influenced the validity of CM for system thinking, high directedness showed a positive influence. Considering the limitations and benefits of particular CM practices, we suggest highly directed and computer-based CM as an appropriate assessment tool—in particular, with regard to large-scale assessments of system thinking.     

Civic learning: moving from the apolitical to the socially just

This study examines the knowledge and skills that characterize civic learning for young people. Building on a literature review, it reports an exploratory case study with students and teachers in four secondary schools in the Ottawa, Canada region. The perspectives of researchers co‐operating with educators and students against a backdrop of provincial government curricula and secondary literature on youth citizenship engagement provide an enriched understanding of the state and potential of civic learning. It concludes that current civic learning is primarily characterized by procedural knowledge and compliant codes of behaviour that do not envelope students in collective action for systemic understandings of political issues. This study argues for renewed efforts to put social justice at the heart of student learning. To present a convincing civic educational programme, schools should prepare students to analyse power relationships, investigate the ambiguities of political issues, and embrace opportunities for social change.     

The Impact of High versus Low Linguistic Levels in Swedish Beginning Readers' Oral Reading of Running Texts

The impact of high (e.g. syntax and semantics) and low (graphemes) linguistic levels in 50 Swedish beginners' oral reading of running texts is explored, by means of a qualitative analysis of reading errors collected in a longitudinal study. The hypothesis, based on previous quantitative results from the same data, was that the graphemic and/or lexical levels could explain some of the reading errors, but that, for example, syntactic complexity or unexpected contexts could explain others. Unfamiliar words and words with complex graphemic structures did result in many reading errors, but a relatively large number of errors seem to be caused by, for example, syntactical or contextual constraints. In the longitudinal perspective, the readers tended to advance through various phases regarding their utilisation of higher linguistic levels, revealing a possible transition from a concentration mainly on the graphemic level via a dependency on and finally a sensitivity to context.