STYLES OF THINKING IN THE SCHOOL

Educators know that variables beyond abilities affect students’ performance in school and their interactions with their teachers. Thinking styles are such a variable. Thinking styles are preferred ways of thinking. They are not abilities but rather preferred ways of expressing these abilities. Both students and teachers vary in thinking styles, and in systematic ways. For example, teachers tend to match the stylistic pattern of the school, and students to match the stylistic pattern of their teachers. Teachers tend to overestimate the extent to which their students match their own styles, and also evaluate more favorably students whose styles match their own. Thus, teachers are more likely to identify as “gifted” not only high ability students, but those who match them stylistically.

     

Raising the Achievement of All Students: Teaching for Successful Intelligence

This article describes how we can teach students more effectively by teaching for successful intelligence. Teaching for successful intelligence involves instructing and assessing analytically, creatively, and practically, as well as for memory. Such teaching helps students recognize and capitalize on strengths, and at the same time recognize and correct or compensate for weaknesses. The article describes how to teach for successful intelligence and presents empirical evidence that teaching for successful intelligence really works in the classroom in raising student achievement.     

Interviewing youthful suspects in alleged sex crimes: a descriptive analysis

OBJECTIVE: To introduce and evaluate a structured interview protocol designed for investigative interviews of youthful alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse. METHOD: Seventy-two alleged perpetrators ranging from 9 to 14 years of age (M = 12 years) were interviewed by 1 of 13 experienced youth investigators, employed by the Israeli Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, about incidents that had been reported by alleged victims. All interviews were conducted as part of the investigators' regular work and followed the structured interview guide appended to this article. RESULTS: Interviewers questioned older and younger children similarly, but addressed fewer invitations, directive questions, and option-posing prompts to suspects who denied the allegations than to those who partially or fully admitted them. The total number of details provided by the suspects did not vary depending on their age or whether or not they fully or partially admitted the allegations. In both cases, more information was elicited using invitations rather than suggestive or option-posing prompts. CONCLUSION: Contrary to expectations, suspects who at least partially admitted their involvement provided considerable amounts of information and were very responsive to free recall prompts, although interviewers used more risky (potentially error-inducing) prompts when interviewing suspects rather than alleged victims.     

Educational psychology has fallen,but it can get up

Educational psychology has fallen, but it can get up. It has fallen because of its uncertainty, as a field, as to its own core. I argue that the core of the field ought to be in the multifaceted analysis of the teaching—learning process. A useful construct for analyzing this process is that of expertise—what is it that makes for an expert teacher and an expert learner? Expertise is a prototype, and so in order to understand expertise, we need to understand the prototypes we have formed for expert teachers and students. I discuss the prototype of the expert teacher in terms of knowledge, efficiency, and insight; and the prototype of the expert student in terms of the kinds of abilities that are currently valued in schools and that we might further value. This discussion therefore points out that prototypes are not fixed: We can decide what we value, and thereby, what constitutes expertise in a given domain.     

Effectiveness of game development-based learning for acquiring programming skills in lower secondary education in Croatia

Education and Information Technologies - A European initiative CODING4GIRLS (C4G) promotes the acquisition of programming skills through a game development process with the aim of preparing young...     

Family background, entry selectivity and opportunities to learn: What matters in primary teacher education? An international comparison of fifteen countries

First findings of IEA’s “Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M)” had revealed differences in the demographic background, opportunities to learn (OTL), and outcomes of teacher education between student teachers from different countries. Two hypotheses are examined: OTL and teacher background are significant predictors of mathematics content knowledge (MCK) and mathematics pedagogical content knowledge (MPCK) as outcomes. OTL effects are partly mediated by differential student teacher intake. Data from multi-level models support our hypotheses with respect to gender, high-school achievement, motivation, OTL in mathematics and the mediating effect of student teacher intake. Background affects only MCK but not MPCK.     

Measuring Teaching Effectiveness: Correspondence Between Students’ Evaluations of Teaching and Different Measures of Student Learning

Relating students?? evaluations of teaching (SETs) to student learning as an approach to validate SETs has produced inconsistent results. The present study tested the hypothesis that the strength of association of SETs and student learning varies with the criteria used to indicate student learning. A multisection validity approach was employed to investigate the association of SETs and two different criteria of student learning, a multiple-choice test and a practical examination. Participants were N?=?883 medical students, enrolled in k?=?32 sections of the same course. As expected, results showed a strong positive association between SETs and the practical examination but no significant correlation between SETs and multiple-choice test scores. Furthermore, students?? subjective perception of learning significantly correlated with the practical examination score whereas no relation was found for subjective learning and the multiple choice test. It is discussed whether these results might be due to different measures of student learning varying in the degree to which they reflect teaching effectiveness.     

Kompetenzmodellierung: Struktur,Konzepte und Forschungszugänge des DFG-Schwerpunktprogramms

The assessment and modeling of competencies plays a key role in optimizing educational processes and improving educational systems. The DFG priority program “Competence Models for Assessing Individual Learning Outcomes and Evaluating Educational Processes” which was founded in 2007, aims at promoting and coordinating the scientific efforts in this field across disciplines. The present article describes the structure, concepts and research approaches and sketches the current state of research of the priority program.     

Assessment of gifted students for identification purposes: New techniques for a new millennium

The augmented theory of successful intelligence [Sternberg, R. J. (2003b). Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized. New York: Cambridge University Press] postulates that intelligence comprises creative skills in generating novel ideas; analytical skills in discerning whether they are good ideas; practical skills in implementing the ideas and persuading others of their worth; and wisdom-based skills in employing one's creative, analytical, and practical skills for a common good. The article summarizes three projects designed to identify gifts. In the Rainbow Project, my colleagues and I found that it was possible substantially to increase prediction of first-year university academic performance and simultaneously reduce ethnic-group differences on the predictive test, relative to a standardized test used for admissions in the United States. In the Kaleidoscope Project, my colleagues and I found that students admitted for expanded skills performed as well as did other students, without the ethnic-group differences typically obtained in such measures. In the Aurora Project, Elena Grigorenko, Mei Tan, and their colleagues are seeking to identify giftedness in students at the upper elementary grades. All three projects show that it is possible to apply the augmented theory of successful intelligence in ways that enhance gifted identification.