Stimulating Prewriting Skills with the Help of Pictorial Images

Increasingly, children who start school have already acquired basic reading and writing skills provided by their parents or preschool teachers. However, even if we choose to accept the fact that by teaching preschool children how to read and write parents wish to help them integrate successfully into the school environment and methods of work, we still need to emphasize that certain activities are not in balance with the needs, abilities, and potentials of a preschool child. At the same time some other possibilities are not being used enough (e.g., visual art). The present research introduces this aspect and presents training prewriting skills based on visual art activities given that visual art represents one of the primary media that every child spontaneously uses in his or her preschool years.     

Negative school factors and their influence on math and science achievement in TIMSS 2003

The aim of the present study was to conduct an analysis of TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) 2003 database and to determine how negative school factors, such as aggression, are associated to the mathematical and science achievement of students. The analyses were conducted separately for national and international data. National analyses for Slovenia show significant associations between math and science achievement and the experience of aggressive behaviour. Students who experienced aggressive behaviour scored lower in math and science, both in the fourth and in the eighth grade. The results of the regression analysis show that negative factors, such as aggressive behaviour, are good predictors of educational achievement in Slovenia. International analyses for the selected countries (high‐ and low‐achieving countries from the whole TIMSS population) confirm that this type of finding is culturally impartial as well as valid for the level of achievement both in math and in science.     

Roles,practices and contexts for acting as agents of social justice – student teachers’ perspectives

ABSTRACT

Student teachers are oftentimes encouraged to apply theoretical principles of social justice to their professional practice. However, this can be problematic when theoretical knowledge is contested or if it is inconsistent with the practices in their future workplaces. Studies in this area often examine student teachers’ beliefs and understanding of their roles without taking account of how concrete working contexts shape what they see as possible in their practice. This study explored how students in two teacher education programmes based at the University of Edinburgh perceived their roles, practices and contexts for acting as agents of social justice. Mixed methods were used for data generation and triangulation including a questionnaire survey (n = 299) and scenario-based interviews (n = 9) to explore how students think about social justice issues in context. Student teachers generally saw agency for social justice as part of their role. Their understanding of the ways of addressing context-embedded issues of social justice focused on classroom practices while they raised concerns about how their practice depends on others in the system. We discuss the implications of these findings for teacher education.     

Prospective primary teachers’ shift in locus of control and pedagogy focus

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education - This paper presents the findings of an empirical research project, designed with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology. Our goal was...     

‘Beyond 2015’, within the modern/colonial global imaginary? Global development and higher education

Efforts to emphasize higher education’s role in development have grown in recent years, but important questions remain about the motivations and effects of these initiatives. In this paper, we employ the concept of a ‘modern/colonial global imaginary’ to consider the impact of the enduring power relations and uneven politics of knowledge in the relationship between higher education and development. Specifically, we consider the Association of Commonwealth Universities’ (ACU) ‘Beyond 2015’ campaign, which was launched in anticipation of the new UN Sustainable Development Goals. We argue that despite the ACU’s intention to provide ‘a platform for diverse voices, particularly from the global South’, the campaign was structured in a way that discouraged dissenting perspectives. More broadly, we consider available possibilities and limitations for challenging mainstream development agendas.     

Empowering learners with personalised learning approaches? Agency,equity and transparency in the context of learning analytics

Abstract

The emergence of personalised data technologies such as learning analytics is framed as a solution to manage the needs of higher education student populations that are growing ever more diverse and larger in size. However, the current approach to learning analytics presents tensions between increasing student agency in making learning-related decisions and ‘datafying’ students in the process of collecting, analysing and interpreting data. This article presents a study that explores staff and student experience of agency, equity and transparency in existing data practices and expectations towards learning analytics in a UK university. The results show a number of intertwined factors that have contributed to the tensions between enhancing a learner’s control of their studies and, at the same time, diminishing their autonomy as an active agent in the process of learning analytics. This article argues that learner empowerment should not be automatically assumed to have taken place as part of the adoption of learning analytics. Instead, the interwoven power relationships in a complex educational system and the interactions between humans and machines need to be taken into consideration when presenting learning analytics as an equitable process to enhance student agency and educational equity.