Teaching the language of mathematics at three levels of an English-medium primary school

This study, situated in a multilingual, English-medium educational context, draws on theory from mathematics and language education to capture teachers’ perspectives on the place of language in their mathematics pedagogy. The benchmark study explored this topic through surveying and interviewing teachers. Additionally, it sought to relate teachers’ views to their practice by focusing on observing three teachers’ mathematics lessons at primary one, three, and five. Findings are that mathematics teachers placed importance on teaching language, being specifically concerned with language as input and comprehension. They taught vocabulary and reading skills in supportive ways explicitly yet differently at the three grade levels. Particularly at the lower levels, teachers contextualised language in the concrete examples employed for mathematics teaching. At all three levels, prominence was given to teaching pupils how to read word problems as well as how to solve them. However, at primary three, a tension was observed between the two aims of teaching mathematical vocabulary and teaching the reading skills for word problems. This paper illustrates the tension and discusses its possible causes.     

YouTube: Educational Potentials and Pitfalls

No abstract available for this article.     

Using psychological constructs from the MUSIC Model of Motivation to predict students’ science identification and career goals: results from the U.S. and Iceland

ABSTRACT

We investigated students’ perceptions related to psychological constructs in their science classes and the influence of these perceptions on their science identification and science career goals. Participants included 575 middle school students from two countries (334 students in the U.S. and 241 students in Iceland). Students completed a self-report questionnaire that included items from several measures. We conducted correlational analyses, confirmatory factor analyses, and structural equation modelling to test our hypotheses. Students’ class perceptions (i.e. empowerment, usefulness, success, interest, and caring) were significantly correlated with their science identification, which was correlated positively with their science career goals. Combining students’ science class perceptions, science identification, and career goals into one model, we documented that the U.S. and Icelandic samples fit the data reasonably well. However, not all of the hypothesised paths were statistically significant. For example, only students’ perceptions of usefulness (for the U.S. and Icelandic students) and success (for the U.S. students only) significantly predicted students’ career goals in the full model. Theoretically, our findings are consistent with results from samples of university engineering students, yet different in some ways. Our results provide evidence for the theoretical relationships between students’ perceptions of science classes and their career goals.     

History in the National Curriculum: a lesson in curriculum devolution

This article will focus on an event in the educational history of Wales in the 1980s which still impacts both on school practice and on thinking about concepts of Welsh identity. That event was the creation of the History Committee for Wales which was charged with devising a history curriculum for Welsh schools in the wake of the 1988 Education Act. The story will be told largely by using evidence gleaned in elite interviews with the ministers, senior inspectors and civil servants most closely associated with the decision to support or accept the creation of this committee.

The significance of the decision will be assessed by charting the progress of curriculum devolution in Wales from the beginnings of state education and the implications of this for ideas of Welshness. This background will be briefly sketched, as will the background to the 1988 Education Act on a wider canvas. General reaction to that act in the Welsh Office will be discussed before the detailed implications for the subject of history will be explored in detail.

It will then be argued that wider discussions as to how schools should approach and reflect the history and culture of nations not only shed important light on devolutionary processes which were gathering pace at the time but also reflect the nature of Welshness as perceived by senior figures in the world of education policy-making.     

A probabilistic model of information retrieval: development and comparative experiments: Part 2

The paper combines a comprehensive account of the probabilistic model of retrieval with new systematic experiments on TREC Programme material. It presents the model from its foundations through its logical development to cover more aspects of retrieval data and a wider range of system functions. Each step in the argument is matched by comparative retrieval tests, to provide a single coherent account of a major line of research. The experiments demonstrate, for a large test collection, that the probabilistic model is effective and robust, and that it responds appropriately, with major improvements in performance, to key features of retrieval situations.Part 1 covers the foundations and the model development for document collection and relevance data, along with the test apparatus. Part 2 covers the further development and elaboration of the model, with extensive testing, and briefly considers other environment conditions and tasks, model training, concluding with comparisons with other approaches and an overall assessment.Data and results tables for both parts are given in Part 1. Key results are summarised in Part 2.     

Exploring Sign Use in Two Settings

Nicola Grove, speech/language therapist, and Sine McDougall, psychologist, from the Division of Psychiatry of Disability, Department of Mental Health Sciences, St. George's Hospital Medical School, London, explore use of Makaton signs in teacher-directed and free play settings by children with severe learning difficulties.