Gaining a Better Understanding of Self: A Self-Study in Cultural Competence in Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

This articles describes a year-long self-study in cultural competence. Armed with the understanding that “teachers first need to know their own cultures,” a small group of faculty researchers engaged in systematic self-study to better understand their own cultural competence in an effort to enhance teacher candidates’ cultural competencies. The overarching goals of the study were: for faculty researchers to better understand their own cultural competence and for faculty researchers to better understand their ability to create safe spaces in which teacher candidates could develop deeper understandings of their cultural competencies. Hence the faculty researchers worked collaboratively for the broader purposes of re-imaging classrooms as communities that foster new and more equitable opportunities for teaching and learning.     

Semantic Innovation: Arithmetical and Algebraic Metaphors Within Narratives of Learning

This paper examines a theoretical perspective on the ways in which children progress in learning mathematics. It suggests that there is a difficulty in associating teaching discourses with the mathematics they locate. This can result in an incommensurability between alternative perspectives being offered. The paper resists attempts to privilege any particular account but rather demands an analysis of these discourses and their presuppositions. In developing these themes the paper invokes Ricoeur's analysis of time and narrative as an analytical approach to treating notions such as transition, development and progression in mathematical learning. His notion of semantic innovation is introduced. This embraces both the introduction of a new metaphor into a sentence or the creation of a new narrative which reorganises events into a new plot. The notion is utilised in arguing that the shift in the student's mathematical development from arithmetic to first order linear equations with unknowns reconfigures the contextual parameters governing the understanding of these mathematical forms. It is also utilised in showing how alternative approaches to accounting for such transitions suit different and perhaps conflicting outcomes. For example, demonstrating awareness of generality or performing well in a diagnostic test featuring the solution of linear equations.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Teachers' conceptions of assessment: implications for policy and professional development

Teachers' conceptions of assessment can be understood in terms of their agreement or disagreement with four purposes to which assessment may be put, specifically, (a) improvement of teaching and learning, (b) school accountability, (c) student accountability, or (d) treating assessment as irrelevant. A 50‐item Teachers' Conceptions of Assessment (COA‐III) questionnaire was completed by New Zealand primary school teachers and managers (n=525). The COA‐III, based on the four main purpose‐defined conceptions of assessment, was analysed with structural equation modelling and showed a close fit of the data to a hierarchical, multi‐dimensional model (χ²=3217.68; df=1162; RMSEA=.058; TLI=.967). On average, participants agreed with the improvement conceptions and the school accountability conception, while rejecting the view that assessment was irrelevant. However, respondents disagreed that assessment was for student accountability. Improvement, school, and student accountability conceptions were positively correlated. The irrelevance conception was inversely related to the improvement conception and not related to the system accountability conception. Surprisingly, no statistically significant differences were found in mean scale scores for each conception regardless of teacher (age, gender, role, assessment training, or assessment practices) or school (size, location, or socio‐economic status) variables. Implications for the use of the COA‐III for policy implementation and teacher professional development are discussed.     

Increasing Access to Higher Education Among Low-Income Students: The Washington State Achievers Program

The purpose of this study was to assess how a comprehensive precollege intervention and developmental program among low-income high school students contributed to college enrollment outcomes measured in 2006. Our focus was on the Fifth Cohort of the Washington State Achievers (WSA) Program, which provides financial, academic, and college preparation support to 500 high school students who come from the lowest 35% of Washington state income levels. One important feature of the WSA Program is that it provided funding for complete high school curriculum reform among 16 Washington high schools that have a high prevalence of low-income students. The data set contained three groups of students from these 16 high schools: Funded Achievers who were part of the WSA Program and received funding for college; Nonfunded Achievers who were part of the WSA Program and but did not receive funding for college; and Nonrecipients who were neither part of the WSA Program nor received funding for college. Results from generalized multinomial logistic models found two trends (a) early and continuous financial support for college along with being active in the WSA Program nearly guarantees enrollment in college and increases enrollment in 4-year and highly selective colleges; and (b) even in the absence of financial support for college there are still quantifiable and positive effects on college-going for just participating in the WSA Program and receiving its abundant nonfinancial resources and support. These results persist even with strong controls for selection, background, academic, financial, aspiration, and school-level variables.     

Student and faculty perceptions of teaching effectiveness

Omnibus measures of teaching effectiveness can be viewed as weighted combinations of more narrowly defined traits describing the teaching process. Our study was designed to determine whether students and faculty weight such traits differently in forming their respective perceptions of effective teaching.Students and faculty within the School of Business and Economics at CSUN were surveyed regarding their assessment of ideal teaching effectiveness in courses where the predominant mode of presentation is lecture. Ten traits depicting various aspects of teaching were selected and each respondent was asked to distribute 100 points across the 10 according to their view of each trait's relative importance in determining effectiveness. The results indicate that there are, indeed, significant differences in student and faculty assessments.Regression analysis of individual trait weighting on demographic variables such as age, sex, field of specialization, etc., produced generally low, insignificant coefficients of determination for both students and faculty. This observed invariance of the respective perceptions of each group across differing combinations of demographic characteristics provides evidence that students and faculty adopt fundamentally different criteria in evaluating teaching effectiveness.     

Social Class Differences in Taxonomic Skills: a matter of preference or habit,rather than competence 1

The taxonomic sorting responses of 56 lower‐class and 56 middle‐class children from two age groups (mean ages for these being 8 years 4 months and 12 years 3 months) were assessed under two instructional conditions. One condition involved ‘explicit’ cues to sort the task items taxonomically and the other condition involved only an ‘implicit’ requirement to do so. The social class groups sorted equally well under the ‘explicit’ instructions, but under the ‘implicit’ conditions, the performance of the younger lower‐class children was significantly poorer than that of the younger middle‐class children. The results are considered in terms of a discrepancy between performance (habit or preference) and competence in taxonomic tasks for younger lower‐class children.

     

Personality traits’ effects on self-efficacy and outcome expectations for high school major choice

The current study focuses on the contribution of the Big Five personality traits to the development of self-efficacy and outcome expectations regarding selection of a high school major among 368 Israeli adolescents (M _age = 16.07, SD = 0.41). Structural equation analyses showed that higher levels of conscientiousness and extraversion and lower neuroticism contributed to higher self-efficacy. In contrast, higher levels of conscientiousness and neuroticism and lower extraversion contributed to higher outcome expectations. These findings expand our understanding regarding personality characteristics serving as antecedents of self-efficacy and outcome expectations and sets important implications for career interventions with adolescents.     

Tongan secondary students’ conceptions of schooling in New Zealand relative to their academic achievement

This study examines the relationship between Tongan students’ attitudes and beliefs towards their school experiences and their academic achievement on the high-stakes National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) assessments in English and mathematics. Data were obtained from using previously published self-reported inventories on a sample of Tongan senior students in New Zealand secondary schools. Confirmatory factor analysis of students’ conceptions found good fit measurement models for each domain (teaching, learning, and assessment). Structural equation modelling was used to identify the effect of the various beliefs upon students’ total score in each subject and upon internal and externally assessed performance. It was noted that different beliefs became statistically significant predictors of performance, depending on the subject and type of assessment. Nonetheless, all three constructs played some role in at least one subject. A small-to-moderate proportion of variance in NCEA performance could be attributed to student beliefs, suggesting that efforts to help students adopt adaptive beliefs will have beneficial consequences for those students.     

Education and employment status: a test of the strong screening hypothesis in Italy

We apply the comparative techniques originated by Wolpin, K.I. (1977, Education and screening, American Economic Review, 67, 949–958) and Psacharopoulos (1979, On the weak versus the strong version of the screening hypothesis, Economics Letters, 4, 181–185) to discriminate between the ‘weak' and ‘strong' screening hypotheses. Controlling for sample selection, we find evidence for weak but not strong screening in the Italian labour market. [JEL J3, J24, J41]