GCSE mathematics in further education: challenging beliefs and practices

This paper describes the outcomes of a two-year study on the beliefs and practices adopted by four FE teachers in their attempt to teach one-year GCSE retake classes and the subsequent effects on students' learning. In the second year of the study, an attempt was made to perturb these practices by introducing a substantial collection of classroom discussion resources. These focused on well-known conceptual obstacles and were intended to provoke cognitive conflict and reflection. Modest, yet significant learning gains were observed with two of the classes, but not with the others. Reasons for this appear to be related to teachers' beliefs about learning.     

The high cost of speech change

The results of the statistical analyses completed in this study indicated that effective student actors were more aesthetically oriented, less economically and politically oriented, and less sociable than were ineffective student actors.     

Mixing distance and face‐to‐face higher education

There is an unreal demarcation in higher education between distance and face‐to‐face providers, argues Malcolm Tight, Director of the Centre for Research and Development in Part‐time Higher Education at Birkbeck College, University of London. Given the undoubted success of distance education, established by the Open University and others, there is now a strong case for diversifying methods of provision in higher education, in the interests of expanding opportunities for students and increasing the effectiveness of teachers.     

Discourse communities: A framework from which to consider professional development for rural teachers of science and mathematics

This paper explores aspects of professional development for teachers of science and mathematics in schools in rural Australia. The study identified a range of issues including tensions between government, school and individual professional learning priorities and their respective responsibilities; the shaping of professional development by rurality; and issues of generic versus subject-specific professional learning. The paper will focus on the needs of teachers, particularly secondary teachers, for subject-specific professional development and the capacity of different professional development approaches for satisfying these needs. The notion of discourse communities is proposed as a framework for considering this issue.