Parents’ Expectations About Participating in Antenatal Parenthood Education Classes

Our objective was to assess parents’ expectations about participating in antenatal parenthood education classes and to determine whether their expectations might be related to gender, age, and educational level. Data from 1,117 women and 1,019 partners residing in three cities in Sweden were collected with a questionnaire in a cross-sectional study. Participants believed that antenatal education classes would help them to feel more secure as parents and to be better oriented toward childbirth. Men had more positive expectations about the childbirth than the women. The participants mostly wanted help in preparing for parenthood and in learning infant care skills, followed by help in preparing for childbirth. The participants’ expectations were affected by gender, age, and educational level. The expectant parents appeared to want more focus on preparation for parenthood than on childbirth.     

Validating and Optimizing the Effects of Model Progression in Simulation-Based Inquiry Learning

Model progression denotes the organization of the inquiry learning process in successive phases of increasing complexity. This study investigated the effectiveness of model progression in general, and explored the added value of either broadening or narrowing students?? possibilities to change model progression phases. Results showed that high-school students in the ??standard?? model progression condition (n?=?19), who could enter subsequent phases at will, outperformed students from a control condition (n?=?30) without model progression. The unrestricted condition (n?=?22) had the additional option of returning to previous phases, whereas the restricted condition (n?=?20) disallowed such downward progressions as well as upward progressions in case insufficient knowledge was acquired. Both variants were found to be more effective in terms of performance than the ??standard?? form of model progression. However, as performance in all three model progression conditions was still rather weak, additional support is needed for students to reach full understanding of the learning content.     

Engaging students in higher education through mobile learning: lessons learnt in a Chinese entrepreneurship course

This evaluative?Cexploratory case study reports pedagogical experiences with using mobiles phones, wikis, and other mobile learning approaches such as podcasts and walking tours as educational tools in the context of an undergraduate course on Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks taught at a university in Singapore. Conceptualized as mobile learning, the paper argues that information and communication technologies (ICT) devices used by Gen Y students as part of their everyday life such as hand phones in combination with social media platforms such as course wikis and other proven pedagogical methods such as mini lectures, field visits, and walking tours can greatly enrich learners?? experience and produce valuable learning outcomes on the basis of blended learning provided their usage is easy and effectively integrated into the respective instructional strategy.     

Emotional identification with teacher identities in student teachers’ narrative interaction

The paper suggests that narrative interaction in student teacher peer groups is an important context for emotional identification with culturally available teacher identities. It addresses issues pointed out as problematic in research on teacher identity formation: focus on the individual and the underestimation of context. A positioning analysis of narrative interaction in a conversation between two student teachers depicts the ways in which they express and negotiate feelings related to out loud reading. The results show that this approach can be a complement to the extensive body of knowledge on the place of emotions in teacher identity formation as it shows how emotions are negotiated among student teachers in a way that challenges the predominant focus on individual students’ expressions of emotions.     

To Choose or Not to Choose Science: Constructions of desirable identities among young people considering a STEM higher education programme

In the literature, there is a general concern that a less number of students choose to study science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM). This paper presents results from a Danish longitudinal study which examines students’ choice of whether or not to continue studying STEM after upper-secondary school. In particular, this study focuses on students who held an STEM subject as one of their favourite subjects at secondary educational level, but who chose not to study STEM at the tertiary level. This paper explores how students’ perceptions of STEM relate to their identity work. The data used, primarily consist of interviews with 38 students at the end of upper-secondary school. The analysis explores the students’ expectations of what higher education STEM might be like. These expectations are contrasted with the first-year experiences of 18 of the 38 students who eventually entered a higher education STEM programme. The results show that the students who did not choose STEM, perceived STEM as stable, rigid and fixed, and, hence, too narrow a platform for developing and constructing desirable identities. The experiences of those students who actually entered a STEM programme turned out to be similar to these expectations. However, many choosers would also prefer their studies as less rigid and fixed. If the institutions could adjust to the form and content of the courses, it might both meet the interests of choosers and non-choosers and thereby both increase recruitment and retention at STEM higher education programmes.     

Tutor-student interaction in undergraduate chemistry: a case of learning to make relevant distinctions of molecular structures for determining oxidation states of atoms

ABSTRACT

In this study, we explore the issues and challenges involved in supporting students’ learning to discern relevant and critical aspects of determining oxidation states of atoms in complex molecules. We present a detailed case of an interaction between three students and a tutor during a problem-solving class, using the analytical tool of practical epistemology analysis (PEA). The results show that the ability to make relevant distinctions between the different parts of a molecule for solving the problem, even with the guidance of the tutor, seemed to be challenging for students. These shifts were connected to both purposes that were specific for solving the problem at hand, and additional purposes for general learning of the subject matter, in this case how to assign oxidation states in molecules. The students sometimes could not follow the additional purposes introduced by the tutor, which made the related distinctions more confusing. Our results indicate that in order to provide adequate support and guidance for students the tutor needs to consider how to sequence, move between, and productively connect the different purposes introduced in a tutor-student interaction. One way of doing that is by first pursuing the purposes for solving the problem and then successively introduce additional, more general purposes for developing students’ learning of the subject matter studied. Further recommendations drawn from this study are discussed as well.     

Agreed discoveries: students’ negotiations in a virtual laboratory experiment

This paper presents an analysis of the scientific reasoning of a dyad of secondary school students about the phenomenon of dissolution of gases in water as they work on this in a simulated laboratory experiment. A web-based virtual laboratory was developed to provide learners with the opportunity to examine the influence of physical factors on gas solubility in water. An evaluation process involving 180 students revealed that the concepts connected to the dissolution of gas in water caused problems for the students even after having experimented with the virtual laboratory. To investigate the nature of learners’ reasoning about the visualised events, 13 video-recorded groups of learners were analysed. This study follows the reasoning of one group that displayed a possibly productive way of solving the problem. The results address the students’ general difficulty of discovering something that they are conceptually unprepared for within the virtual laboratory. The analysis shows how the students eventually found a way out of their dilemma by making an analogy with other dissolving processes. In effect, the analysis elucidates some of the analytical work that had to be done by the participants when collaboratively negotiating a shared meaning of a scientific concept in concord with a given task and set of instructional materials. Implications for design might be to provide the learning material with explicit hints that enable students to connect to specific phenomena related to the one investigated concept. The findings show the usefulness of video analytic research, informed by CA and ethnomethodology. This analytical framework can support design processes and provide useful information, which might identify hurdles to learning a scientific concept by simulated events and pathways to overcome these hurdles.     

Context Effects on Children's Use of Language

The sweeping changes in Swedish society in the 1990s, with extensive decentralisation, privatisation and cutbacks in the public sector, implied quite new conditions for the realisation of the aim of pre-school and school as a meeting place for children from different backgrounds. This article discusses some of these changes and their implications, through a study of parent's choice of pre-school care facility in the city of Uppsala. The main data source is a survey study among 1584 mothers of children born in 1995. The results show that parents' use of the right to choose pre-school facility is economically, socially and culturally segregated; the patterns of choice are construed in relation to residential areas but are not a simple effect of housing segregation. The choice of pre-school facility in Uppsala is thus a practice that creates specific conditions--socially and culturally homogenous private pre-school facilities--that make it virtually impossible for them to achieve the goal of being meeting places.     

Swedish Doctoral Students' Experiences on their Journey towards a PhD: Obstacles and opportunities inside and outside the academic building

The overall aim of this article was to provide a picture of how doctoral students experience their working conditions on their journey towards a PhD. It is based mainly on an extensive pilot study and comprised both a qualitative and a quantitative section. The questionnaire was distributed to 278 students of both sexes at Umea § University in Sweden and the interview study comprises six female students. Interest in working at the university after receiving a PhD was about as great for women as it was for men, although, significantly fewer women continued. Different aspects of insecurity (financial insecurity, insecurity concerning one's own capacity, and insecurity concerning unwritten rules), difficulty in combining an academic career and a family, as well as negative experiences, were some of the obstacles mentioned. The opportunities described included intellectual development and a good chance for in-depth study in a special field. Several of the students also felt that their work involved something of importance. Many mentioned freedom, but often as a kind of Janus face (two-faced) freedom. They emphasised the advantages of freedom in doing research, but maintained at the same time that this freedom also meant that there was no clear dividing line between work and leisure time, and the women in particular felt under stress.     

Are Attitudes Only of Theoretical Interest?

The concept attitude is often used in general mass media debate as a causal, explaining factor. In contrast, the concept has hardly ever appeared in the headlines of Swedish scientific reports in pedagogics during the last few years. A possible explanation may be the pessimistic opinion about the usefulness of attitude research expressed by researchers in adult education. Studies lending support to this defeatism are critically examined from a methodological point of view without finding support for the general conclusion that the attitude concept is of low interest, as an explanatory and a predicting construct.