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.     

The fading of a teaching profession? reforms of early childhood teacher education in Sweden

In Sweden, working with young children in institutions outside the home dates back to the late nineteenth century when public child care provision developed in a context of industrialization, urbanization and democratization. Out of the charitable work of unmarried women in these early institutions, pre‐schools and teacher education programmes developed. Over the years, pre‐school teacher education has undergone major changes, the most recent reform being the move into a system within which the previous eight distinctive teacher education programmes, pre‐school teacher education being one of them, have been replaced by one integrated teaching degree. This article addresses some major features of the development of pre‐school teacher education and concludes with a discussion of the most recent reform and its consequences for the early childhood teaching profession.     

Childhood roots of adulthood hostility: family factors as predictors of cognitive and affective hostility

Childhood predictors of adulthood hostility was examined in a population-based sample of 1,004 children and their parents. Parents' Type A behavior, their life satisfaction, family's socioeconomic level, and maternal reports of children's Type A behavior were obtained for 6-, 9-, and 12-year-old participants. Hostility was self-evaluated by these participants 15 years later. Results revealed that childhood environment in terms of parental Type A behavior and life dissatisfaction as well as children's own Type A behavior predicted their adulthood hostility. The findings identified childhood environments that either promoted or protected against hostility. Results underline the need to consider the conjoint effects of various factors because the same characteristics play different roles in different contexts.     

Associations of student temperament and educational competence with academic achievement: The role of teacher age and teacher and student gender

We examined associations of teacher-perceived student temperament and educational competence with school achievement, and how these associations were modified by students’ gender and teachers’ gender and age. Participants were 1063 Finnish ninth-graders (534 boys) and their 29 Mother Language teachers (all female) and 43 Mathematics teachers (17 male) from a population-based sample. All temperament and educational competence traits were associated with both grades, but more clearly with Mathematics. Boys received systematically lower Mother Language grades but higher Mathematics grades than girls. Teacher gender had no effect on school grades, while teacher age had an effect only on Mother Language.     

Just us,just discussing: imagined homogeneities in the Gender Studies classroom

This article explores practices of othering through formations of normative sameness in discussion-based seminar classrooms. It takes literary scholar Stanley Fish's question, ‘Is there a text in this class, or is it just us?’, back into the classroom to explore the formation of a ‘just us,’ an imagined homogeneous interpretive community which, I argue, has discriminatory effects by normalising some voices and practices. It draws on feminist and anti-oppressive theory to discuss ways to pedagogically trouble the enactment of homogeneous interpretive communities in the Gender Studies classroom. As the Gender Studies teacher, I devised pedagogical practices based on the allocation of specific roles as a way to work towards an anti-discriminatory classroom by de-mystifying academic practice and framing seminar practice as a social genre. The article critically reflects on students' subsequent reluctance to take on roles and their preference for free-flowing discussions, doing what comes naturally, a ‘doing' of academia which, I suggest, is linked to social privilege.     

The interplay between teachers’ approaches to teaching,students’ approaches to learning and learning outcomes: a qualitative multi-case study

The interaction between approaches to teaching and students’ learning has been the focus of research for more than 20 years. Previous studies concerning approaches to teaching in higher education have identified two broad categories: content- and learning-focused approaches. Some studies indicate that teachers do not always adopt a consonant teaching- or learning-focused approach, but might employ elements of both, which results in a dissonant approach. Research on how dissonant approaches to teaching and students’ quality of learning are related is scant. This study explored relationships between how teachers’ approaches to teaching and undergraduate students’ self-reported approaches to learning and learning outcomes. The data for this study consisted of 33 semi-structured interviews with students from three courses. Interviews were analysed with qualitative content analysis. The results demonstrated that, when the teacher used a consonant learning-focused approach to teaching, students’ learning outcomes and approaches to learning were of a slightly higher quality than when the teacher employed a dissonant approach to teaching. However, a dissonant approach to teaching did not always result in a lower quality of approaches to learning and learning outcomes.