Shedding the content: semantics of teaching burdened by didactic formalisms

The paper argues that what is left behind in the current era of accountability is the educational content. The authors present shedding the content as the great challenge of teaching and learning in today’s schools. They turn to the tradition of Bildung and outline the theoretical background for the content-focused approach to (research on) teaching and learning. Their approach is based on analyses of authentic (real-life) teaching and learning situations. The paper highlights how didactic case studies can be used to generalize the findings across individual cases. Within the multiple case studies, 44 didactic case studies were reanalysed to identify didactic formalisms, i.e. problems in the semantic and logical structure of educational content, which corrupt the quality of instruction. Two specific types of didactic formalism are described in detail; stolen cognition and concealed cognition. Stolen cognition prevents cognitive activation of students when the teacher over-reduces the space allowed for the students’ cognitive work with the content, concealed cognition are instances of purposeless cognitive activation of students due to their being disconnected from the content.     

Recommendations for effective university study based on students’ point of view

This research examined what university students recommend for effective university study and whether their recommendations differ by gender, faculty or study programme degree. The research was based on 985 questionnaires. The following words were most commonly used in advice for freshmen: Go, Lectures, Learn, Continuously, Be, Prepare, Information, Have, Do, Materials. The fundamental advice seems to be: to go to lectures, to have needed materials and information and to learn and prepare continuously. Some stated recommendations react to the development of information and communication technologies and the massive usage of the Internet (such as obtaining a laptop and a cell phone or setting up a Facebook profile). Quite a lot of advice was connected with health, such as to sleep enough, to eat regularly, to not smoke, to relax and to restrict alcohol consumption. The recommendations gained in this survey were categorised by thematic similarities to characteristics, knowledge, skills, behaviour and background. The findings highlight the fact that given recommendations for effective study differ by the respondent’s gender and faculty. Women concentrated more on recommendations on how to behave and men mentioned more often what personality characteristics are important for effective university study. Students of the Faculty of Multimedia Communications highlighted the necessity of creativity and practical experience more often than others.     

The Influence of Interactive Learning Materials on Solving Tasks That Require Different Types of Mathematical Reasoning

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - The purpose of this study is to analyse the effects of the Interactive Learning Materials Triangle (iLMT) on the learning and knowledge...     

Academic self-efficacy and learning strategies as mediators of the relation between personality and elementary school students’ achievement

European Journal of Psychology of Education - In this study, we examined the mediating role of academic self-efficacy and motivational learning strategies in the relationship between personality...     

Good and evil at school: Bullying and moral evaluation in early adolescence

We investigated how adolescents (sixth-graders, N = 357) morally evaluated hypothetical bullying and defending protagonists and whether these evaluations related to behavior in bullying as nominated by peers. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) resulted in four factors for the evaluation of the hypothetical bullies: Evil soul, Contempt, Cowardice, and Deviance, and five factors for the evaluation of the hypothetical defender: General admiration, Courage, Cool, Empathic care, and Fair justice. Corresponding scales were constructed. The findings showed that bullying positively correlated with evaluating the hypothetical bullies using Cowardice while victimization positively correlated with evaluating the hypothetical defender in terms of General admiration, Empathic care, and Fair justice. MANOVA for each of the two sets of the evaluative scales indicated that behavioral status (bully, victim, defender, or uninvolved) had a significant effect on the moral evaluation of hypothetical bullies, and no significant effect on the moral evaluation of the hypothetical defender.     

That’s Not For Our Kids: The strange death of philosophy and ethics in a low socioeconomic secondary school

Abstract

This article reflects on the successes and failures of a new Philosophy and Ethics course in a low socioeconomic context in Perth, Western Australia, with the eventual demise of the subject in the school at the end of 2010. We frame this reflection within Deleuzian notions of geophilosophy to advocate for a Philosophy and Ethics that is informed by nomadic thought, as this offers a critical freedom for students to transform themselves and their society and suggests practical ways both of overcoming the prejudices which led to its demise and of student reluctance to engage in open discussion in class. We consider the demise of the course a ‘missed opportunity’ because it had so much potential to be transformative of student subjectivities in schools.     

The methodological illumination of a blind spot: information and communication technology and international research team dynamics in a higher education research program

This self-ethnography complements the other articles in this special issue by spotlighting a set of key challenges facing international research teams. The study is focused on the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT)-based collaboration and research team dynamics. Our diverse team, drawn from researchers in five countries and three projects, argues that an ironic casualty of the powerful, global phenomena we study, is a lack of insight into what happens to generic research team dynamics, when groups are ‘stretched’ in terms of geographical distance, generations, cultural beliefs, values and norms, as well as disciplinary/specialist traditions. Good intentions are not sufficient to cope with these challenges. This is because of the emerging complexity inherent in many types of international, interdisciplinary fields of study and the complexity of the career trajectories needed to make these studies a reality. Our study underlines that there are no beliefs, values, norms and practices linked to research team dynamics, that hold across the current territory, generations, disciplines, cultures, organizations and individuals leading and conducting comparative studies—and even less reflection on the implications of this fact. Compounding this lack of awareness is a less-than-perfect understanding of the way in which ICT-based collaboration bears on research team dynamics. We assert that a holistic, critical, long-term approach to emerging insights into the global division of academic labor, serves our field better than folk psychology or the methodological parochialism that sustains convention at the expense of creativity. Careful consideration of emergent processes, relationships and linkages that explain how short-term cooperation—within projects—begins to make sense—over careers—illuminates key focal points, which, in turn qualitatively illuminates the way forward concerning conceptualization and problematization of our practice; and novel methodological routes available for those interested in attaining better outcomes, over the long term.     

Whose feedback? A multilevel analysis of student completion of end-of-term teaching evaluations

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is now common practice across higher education, with the results used for both course improvement and quality assurance purposes. While much research has examined the validity of SETs for measuring teaching quality, few studies have investigated the factors that influence student participation in the SET process. This study aimed to address this deficit through the analysis of an SET respondent pool at a large Canadian research-intensive university. The findings were largely consistent with available research (showing influence of student gender, age, specialisation area and final grade on SET completion). However, the study also identified additional influential course-specific factors such as term of study, course year level and course type as statistically significant. Collectively, such findings point to substantively significant patterns of bias in the characteristics of the respondent pool. Further research is needed to specify and quantify the impact (if any) on SET scores. We conclude, however, by recommending that such bias does not invalidate SET implementation, but instead should be embraced and reported within standard institutional practice, allowing better understanding of feedback received, and driving future efforts at recruiting student respondents.     

Metacognitive strategies and reading comprehension in elementary-school students

The aim of this study was to explore comprehension monitoring and perceived use of reading strategies as factors of reading comprehension. Participants were elementary school students from the fifth to the eighth grade. Error correction and text sensitivity tasks from the Metacomprehension test (Pazzaglia, De Beni, &; Cristante, 1994). and the cloze-task were used as measures of comprehension monitoring during reading. A Strategic reading questionnaire (Koli?-Vehovec &; Baj?anski, 2001b) was applied as a measure of perceived use of strategies during reading. Girls had better results than boys on text comprehension, all measures of comprehension monitoring, as well as on the Strategic reading questionnaire. Significant developmental improvements in comprehension monitoring occurred after the fifth grade and between the sixth and the eighth grade. A similar change was evident in reading comprehension. All measures of comprehension monitoring were significantly related to text comprehension in all age groups. However, perceived use of reading strategies was significantly related to reading comprehension only in eighth-grade students.