European Survey of Master's and Doctoral Dissertions in Science Education

Editorial comment and summaries

English

Drs Kjöllerström and Lybeck present here a brief report of their European survey of master's and doctoral dissertations in science education, undertaken subsequently to a workshop on Research in Science Education in Europe held at Malente, FR Germany in 1976. The full report of their survey has recently been published by the Institute for Science Education (IPN), Kiel, FR Germany.

The article published here reports on the distribution, size and organization of science education research groups, their areas of research interest and higher degree programmes. It also surveys the main areas of science education research at master's and doctoral level undertaken during the period 1971‐1976, and the employment taken up by master's and doctoral students upon completion of their studies.     

“The system shows us how bad it feels”: special educational needs assessment in North Rhine-Westphalia,Germany

ABSTRACT

In the context of the North Rhine-Westphalian school reform towards an inclusive education system, this article problematises the practice of categorisation. Our research aims to investigate the assessment of special educational needs (SEN) and thereby enrich the discussion of the relation between inclusion and diagnostics. For this study, we interviewed 14 SEN investigators and five decision-makers. We discuss the results on the basis of a qualitative content analysis and against the background of Fleck’s concept of thought styles. We mainly found inertia in special education traditions, expressed in the use of intelligence tests, the dominance of SEN teachers in the assessment process and the lack of participation of parents and pupils. We conclude that it is necessary to reform the SEN assessment rules. At the same time, we see major challenges in transforming existing thought styles into a more flexible and decategorising approach.     

Mathematics teacher quality: its distribution and relationship with student achievement in Turkey

A main purpose of the present study was to investigate the distribution of qualified mathematics teachers in relation to students’ socioeconomic status (SES), as measured by parental education, among Turkish middle schools. Further, relationships between mathematics teacher quality indicators and students’ mathematics achievement were explored. Data from the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study were used. Relationships between mathematics teacher quality and students’ mathematics achievement were investigated using hierarchical linear modeling. The current study identified SES-related inequities in access to qualified mathematics teachers in Turkey. Low-SES students were more likely to be taught by mathematics teachers who had less than 3 years of experience or who did not hold a degree in mathematics or mathematics education. On the other hand, years of experience and a degree in mathematics or mathematics education were found to be substantially related to Turkish eighth-grade students’ mathematics achievement. Low-SES students’ mathematics teachers were also more likely to report a lack of confidence in their preparation to teach various mathematics contents.     

Extending the language modeling framework for sentence retrieval to include local context

Employing effective methods of sentence retrieval is essential for many tasks in Information Retrieval, such as summarization, novelty detection and question answering. The best performing sentence retrieval techniques attempt to perform matching directly between the sentences and the query. However, in this paper, we posit that the local context of a sentence can provide crucial additional evidence to further improve sentence retrieval. Using a Language Modeling Framework, we propose a novel reformulation of the sentence retrieval problem that extends previous approaches so that the local context is seamlessly incorporated within the retrieval models. In a series of comprehensive experiments, we show that localized smoothing and the prior importance of a sentence can improve retrieval effectiveness. The proposed models significantly and substantially outperform the state of the art and other competitive sentence retrieval baselines on recall-oriented measures, while remaining competitive on precision-oriented measures. This research demonstrates that local context plays an important role in estimating the relevance of a sentence, and that existing sentence retrieval language models can be extended to utilize this evidence effectively.     

Teachers' perceptions regarding school principals' coaching skills

The purpose of this study was to find out teachers' perceptions about school principals' coaching skills. The study was carried out within qualitative research methods. The study group included 76 teachers in Elazig and 73 teachers in Kahramanmara? provinces of Turkey. All the data were processed using Nvivo 9 software. The results indicate that teachers' perceptions about their principals' coaching skills do not differ according to the age, marital status, sex and education status variables. The teachers think that their principals are successful at some coaching skills such as being experienced and knowledgeable, being an effective listener and setting achievable targets. Principals fail to show empathy, communicate effectively, praise, give feedback, motivate and have effective inquiry coaching skills. According to teachers' opinions, being a role model, showing empathy, praising, effectively communicating and motivating are important coaching skills that they would show if they were to sit in the principal chair.     

Swedish teachers’ ethical reflections on a study visit to Central America

In this article we argue that culturally variable values and morals have a key role in educational initiatives that address a global dimension. The article suggests that looking at values and morals in relation to a teaching practice is a way of adding knowledge to this field. Our study inquires into how an intercultural experience can evoke ethical reflections on environmental and sustainability issues. The article is based on a qualitative empirical study of teachers’ experiences of a teacher development programme, where we analyse the variety of ethical reflections that emerge during a study visit to a Central American country. We build on a pragmatic analytical approach that takes John Dewey’s ethical thoughts on moral situations as a point of departure and deals with teachers’ ethical reflections in a way that takes the contextual and situated nature of morals into account.