Professional development for teachers: a world of change

As the industrialised world shifted to an interdependent and global society, formal schooling was quickly recognised as a major factor in achieving a knowledge society of lifelong learners capable of transforming and revitalising organisations. Teachers were encouraged to engage in learning together to improve teaching and, by extension, improve learning for the children in their care. This article identifies three emerging trends intended to broaden teachers' learning and enhance their practices through continuous professional development: glocalisation, mentoring, and re‐thinking teacher evaluation. The body of the article indicates how these three trends are unfolding in Australia, England, Latvia, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Taiwan, and the USA.

However, teachers cannot bring about necessary changes without organisational and systemic change; namely, collaboration with governmental agencies and other institutions. The authors suggest that transforming schooling in the twenty‐first century depends on education policies being supported by expanded teacher participation in education policy‐making, more coherent governmental policies across agencies, and collaborative, differentiated models for career‐long continuing professional development.     

Exploring criteria for successful query expansion in the genomic domain

Query Expansion is commonly used in Information Retrieval to overcome vocabulary mismatch issues, such as synonymy between the original query terms and a relevant document. In general, query expansion experiments exhibit mixed results. Overall TREC Genomics Track results are also mixed; however, results from the top performing systems provide strong evidence supporting the need for expansion. In this paper, we examine the conditions necessary for optimal query expansion performance with respect to two system design issues: IR framework and knowledge source used for expansion. We present a query expansion framework that improves Okapi baseline passage MAP performance by 185%. Using this framework, we compare and contrast the effectiveness of a variety of biomedical knowledge sources used by TREC 2006 Genomics Track participants for expansion. Based on the outcome of these experiments, we discuss the success factors required for effective query expansion with respect to various sources of term expansion, such as corpus-based cooccurrence statistics, pseudo-relevance feedback methods, and domain-specific and domain-independent ontologies and databases. Our results show that choice of document ranking algorithm is the most important factor affecting retrieval performance on this dataset. In addition, when an appropriate ranking algorithm is used, we find that query expansion with domain-specific knowledge sources provides an equally substantive gain in performance over a baseline system.

The influence of parents on undergraduate and graduate students’ entering the STEM disciplines and STEM careers

This research examines the influence of parents on students’ studying the STEM disciplines and entering STEM careers. Cases of two graduate students (one female, one male) and one undergraduate student (male) are featured. The first two students in the convenience sample are biology and physics majors in a STEM teacher education programme; the third is enrolled in computer science. The narrative inquiry research method is used to elucidate the students’ academic trajectories. Incidents of circumstantial and planned parent curriculum making surfaced when the data was serially interpreted. Other themes included: (1) relationships between (student) learners and (teacher) parents, (2) invitations to inquiry, (3) modes of inquiry, (4) the improbability of certainty, and (5) changed narratives?=?changed lives. While policy briefs provide sweeping statements about parents’ positive effects on their children, narrative inquiries such as this one illuminate parents’ inquiry moves within home environments. These actions became retrospectively revealed in their adult children’s lived narratives. Nurtured by their mothers and/or fathers, students enter STEM disciplines and STEM-related careers through multiple pathways in addition to the anticipated pipeline.     

In pursuit of the practice of radical equality: Rancière inspired pedagogical inquiries in elementary school science education

This article outlines a study of praxis. Inspired by my reading of Jacques Rancière’s (The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation, trans. K. Ross, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991) influential text, The Ignorant School Master, I explore the practical applications of his work for teaching and outline a pedagogical response that sought to effect educational change through a philosophically driven teacher inquiry.