Sex‐role stereotyping and gifted girls’ experience and education

Recent research and literature indicate that many parents, teachers and counselors of the gifted continue to reflect attitudes and sex‐stereotypes that are detrimental to the expression of the abilities of gifted girls.     

Personality studies of gifted and/or creative females: A bibliography

Interdisciplinary social science and liberal arts courses are an ideal setting for values education for the gifted.     

Cross‐lagged associations between kindergarten teachers' causal attributions and children's task motivation and performance in reading

The present study investigated whether kindergarten teachers' causal attributions would predict children's reading‐related task motivation and performance, or whether it is rather children's motivation and performance that contribute to teachers' causal attributions. To investigate this, 69 children (five to six years old at baseline) and their teachers were examined twice during the kindergarten year. Teachers filled in a questionnaire measuring their causal attributions twice during the kindergarten year. Information about the children's reading‐related task motivation and performance was gathered at the beginning of and at the end of the kindergarten year. The results showed that the higher the task motivation and performance in reading the children showed, the more the teachers attributed their success to ability and effort, and the less they attributed it to teachers' help. Teachers' ability and effort attributions for success, in turn, predicted a high level of children's subsequent task motivation in reading. Moreover, teachers seldom attributed high‐achieving children's failure to lack of ability or effort.     

Identifying and addressing students' questions on climate change

This study uses qualitative content analysis to examine 355 open-ended questions, presented by 16–19 –year-old international students, to find out what students want to learn about climate change. The study finds that students have a high level of consideration toward scientific, societal, and ethical aspects of climate change and that students' questions are multidisciplinary and complex in nature. Most important, the findings show that students ask questions on the same themes that researchers say should be addressed in multidisciplinary climate change education. Based on the findings, this article suggests that climate change education could be developed by adopting guided inquiry.     

The assessment of learning skills in nursing student selection: A scoping review

Abstract

Higher education student selection has significant societal, institutional and individual impacts. Thousands of applicants apply only for nursing, one of the major higher education disciplines. As the nursing profession is characterised by cognitive requirements, higher education institutions assess the learning skills of nursing applicants. However, there has been no comprehensive analysis of learning skills assessment for nursing student selection. The purpose of this scoping review was to describe the assessment of learning skills in undergraduate nursing student selection. Five databases were systematically searched, and 24 studies published between 2006 and 2016 were included. Learning skills were most commonly assessed using standardised tests in the areas of language and communication, reasoning, mathematics and natural sciences. Overall scores of onsite selection methods were found to best predict future academic performance. The results indicate that higher education institutions may benefit from comprehensive assessment of learning skills in their selection processes. This assessment should focus on a wider range of cognitive aptitudes, including reasoning skills. This review focussed on nursing education, but the results may benefit other higher education disciplines due to the generic nature of learning skills and similar cognitive requirements of higher education studies. The results support the development of more comprehensive and valid methods for assessing learning skills.     

Decision-making and control: perceived autonomy of teachers in Germany and Sweden

Teacher autonomy has become an increasingly popular research topic over the past decade, reflecting wider national and global education trends. In this light, this article investigates and compares the perceptions of German and Swedish teachers concerning their professional autonomy. We analyse teachers’ perceptions using a grid, and view teacher autonomy as a multidimensional phenomenon taking place in different domains (educational, social, developmental and administrative) and at different levels (classroom, school, profession). The findings show that the teachers interviewed in Germany and Sweden value autonomy in various domains and dimensions differently, even if there also are many similarities. In instruction, that is, the educational autonomy domain, they perceive themselves to be very autonomous, in particular in relation to choices of content and method. Autonomous work in the classroom arena is also seen as the very core of the teaching profession. Overall, German teachers perceive themselves to be significantly involved in more areas of their work, and they refer much more to decisions which are to be made, whereas their Swedish colleagues are more concerned about control. Finally, we discuss the findings in relation to different nation-specific forms of extended or restricted autonomy teacher autonomy.     

Thinking beyond student resistance: a difficult assemblage in teacher education

This paper draws on feminist new materialist, poststructuralist and post-human theories to rethink discomforting moments when engaging with sensitive topics in teacher education. It is argued that the common approach to such events – as instances of student resistance or pedagogical failures – is both simplistic and problematic, and that a more holistic and in-depth approach is needed. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of assemblage and affect, our aim here is to re-theorise an instance of such an event in an attempt to make visible how place, space, objects, emotion, affect and history entangle in predictable and unpredictable ways in teacher education. The aims of the paper are to propose new ways of engaging with discomfort in teacher education and, secondly, to introduce post-human approaches in the field of teacher education, where they are underrepresented.     

Socio-emotional orientations and teacher change

In this article we consider how elementary education students’ views of mathematics changed during their mathematics methods course. We focus on four female students: two started the course with mainly positive views of mathematics and a task orientation, two with negative views of the subject and an ego-defensive orientation. The biggest change observed was that the trainees’ views of teaching and learning mathematics became more positive. Moreover, what had been an ego-defensive orientation changed towards a social-dependence orientation. The crucial facilitators of change seemed to be (1) handling of and reflection on one’s experiences of learning and teaching mathematics, (2) exploring content with concrete materials, and (3) collaboration with a partner or working as a tutor of mathematics.

Serious but fun,self-directed yet social: blogging as a form of lifelong learning

The article explores the role of digital media in supporting lifelong learning. In particular, it focuses on bloggers who write their blogs voluntarily in their own free time. The aim is to examine how lifelong learning—viewed as self-directed, nonformal learning and active participation that evolves from a desire for self-actualization—occurs in the processes of blogging. The data for this small-scale study were collected by qualitative email interviews. In all, 11 Finnish bloggers participated. The findings show that active participation, promoted and enabled by blogging, was actualized in both online and offline environments. It was embedded within six functions of their blogs that the bloggers mentioned: (1) learning and studying, (2) guidance and tutoring, (3) bringing new perspectives to public discussions, (4) applying expertise, (5) creating in one’s own space and at one’s own pace and (6) being part of a digital media culture. The findings indicate that blogging can promote nonformal, lifelong learning in many ways. Blogs and blogging constitute a learning environment that promotes active participation by making interesting, meaningful and enjoyable activities possible, and consequently the enthusiasm to actively learn and develop.