Comparison of anxiety levels of students in introductory earth science and geology courses

Students in geology and earth science courses were not anxious about taking these courses as measured by the State-Triat Anxiety Inventory. Students in each course were split into two grade groups. It was shown that students whose grades were in the higher group had low anxiety, which continued to be reduced during the course. Students in the lower grade group had high anxiety, which increased during the course. There was no difference between anxiety scores of males and females. In general, students who planned to elect additional courses had lower state anxiety and higher grades than students who did not plan to elect additional courses in geology and earth science.     

Creating home–school partnerships: examining urban and suburban teachers’ practices,challenges, and educational needs

This study examines suburban and urban teachers’ family involvement practices, challenges they face in involving families, and their educational needs. A questionnaire was administered to 89 teachers. Data were coded using a constant comparative analysis. Codes were analyzed to determine the number of teachers whose responses fell into each category and by comparing suburban and urban teachers’ responses. Results of this study suggest that although urban and suburban teachers share some similarities in terms of their practices, challenges, and needs, a number of differences were evident. Overall, suburban teachers’ responses were more detailed and included specific strategies. We also found that urban teachers’ interests in further education did not necessarily align with the areas in which they reported challenges.     

A comparative study of dialogue and response journals

This study compared the use of dialogue and response journal formats in a graduate class for literacy educators. Data came from student journals, interviews, and questionnaires. The findings indicated that students comparably completed each type of entry and believed the two formats served similar functions, for example, exploring selected topics and/or connecting them with a classroom environment, improving their writing, reading critically, and influencing classroom practice. However, students preferred the dialogue format. They felt the feedback promoted collegial consultation, improved task engagement, and affirmed their feelings and ideas.     

The freshman course: A curricular schema

Research on college students indicates that (a) attrition is greatest during and at the end of the freshman year and (b) retention is associated with the degree to which a student is integrated socially and academically. Recently, freshman courses have been introduced to increase the integration of students into college environments. The core components are informal contact with peers and faculty or staff, a small group setting, and cognitive and affective learning. A classification system for freshman courses formulated from dominant themes that emerged from a review of current practices of 20 colleges and universities is reported. Characteristic features and analogous programs of the interdisciplinary, developmental and utilitarian approaches are presented.     

A case example of one state's efforts to measure and address the critical shortage of school psychologists

Despite persistent calls for school psychologists to provide comprehensive and integrated services, school psychologists may have difficulty providing these services because of critical shortages in the profession. This practical action research study involved surveying district supervisors of school psychologists and training program directors in the state to identify the current and projected shortages in Florida. This multimethod, multi‐informant case example also focused on facilitators of and barriers to addressing the critical shortage. How the data have been used to inform recruitment, retention, and advocacy efforts to identify school psychology as a critical shortage legislatively are provided as well as recommendations for future research.     

How pre-service teachers internalize the link between research literacy and pedagogy

Enabling pre-service teachers to develop a critical view of their practice and to acquire the higher order inquiry skills necessary for pedagogic research has been and continues to be a challenge. The present study presents a unique intervention in the training of pre-service teachers in research literacy (RL) skills using a Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach. The intervention is implemented in two different Learning Communities (LC), one online and the other blended. Both immediate and long-term effects of PBL are investigated as are the effects of social and direct scaffolding within the LCs. The study focuses on transmitting the following RL skills: identifying and defining a problem, formulating a research question, and designing a research method. The findings indicate an immediate effect upon all RL skills in both LCs. The long-term effect appears only in the online LC and only for two RL skills: identifying and defining problems. Additionally, there is greater use of social scaffolding in formulating and designing a research study in the online LC than in the blended learning community. Those findings are then interpreted in terms of retention capacity and scaffolding in blended and online LCs.     

Differential response to structure of advance organizers in science instruction

In an experiment designed to investigate individual differences in learning from written materials preceded by advance organizers, 89 fourth-grade subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in which programmed material on insects was preceded by one of three introductory passages containing: (1) higher level generalizations and specific examples; (2) higher level generalizations without examples; or (3) a control passage. Membership in treatment groups was determined by random assignment. Criterion performances were immediate and delayed posttest performance and errors during instruction. Analysis of variance results of treatment effects showed that the three treatments were about equally effective in terms of promoting retention and program errors. Simple regression analysis of Aptitude × Treatment interactions disclosed that Otis-Lennon IQ scores interacted significantly with instructional treatments for program errors showing a negative relationship between IQ scores and the degree of structure provided by the advance organizers.     

Voting rights,anti-intersectionality,and citizenship as containment

ABSTRACT

This piece argues that dominant histories of U.S. suffrage have misremembered the history of voting rights legislation as one of steady social progress and multicultural inclusion. By contrast, I consider landmark legislation affecting voting rights such as the 19th Amendment and the Dawes and Magnuson Acts as strategies of containment that that expand but also continue to police the racialized gender norms of U.S. citizenship. These legal reforms, while providing potential channels for redistributions of power and resources, also perpetuate anti-intersectional (Brandzel) vocabularies that impose single-axis frameworks (Crenshaw) onto understandings of citizenship and civic inclusion. While acknowledging the partial and contingent gains made by suffrage movements, I offer a counternarrative of U.S. voting rights as means of managing and maintaining colonial dominance. I argue that the settler-colonial nation state continues to restrict the decision-making capacities of those marginalized by race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and/or disability through a vast network of administrative practices that must be analyzed in concert with voting rights.     

Teacher design teams as a strategy for professional development: the role of the facilitator

ABSTRACT

The goal of the current study was to explore the role and importance of the facilitator in teacher design teams. The study took place in the context of a pre-service teacher education institution in Belgium, where teacher design teams were set up to facilitate the professional development of teacher educators. The findings from focus-group discussions with team members and semi-structured interviews with facilitators confirm that the perceived importance of a facilitator depends on several factors, such as team characteristics and the design phase. Moreover, we found that a facilitator can fulfil three roles in a dynamic way: (a) providing logistic support, (b) scaffolding the design process, and (c) monitoring the design process. The discussion centres on how these results can be used to support facilitators for successful Teacher Design Teams.