Teaching in a natural history museum: what can we learn from Estonian elementary school teachers?

Cultural Studies of Science Education - Natural history museums are great places for learning new concepts and enhancing social skills and motivation. However, it is often difficult for teachers to...     

The things (we think) we (ought to) do: Ideological processes and practices in teaching

Ideologies of education and of teaching are complex and layered, and they contain macro-social, institutional as well as micro-ideological levels. Building on cases from the UK and South Africa, this paper argues that notions of ‘professionalism’ among teachers display such ideological layering, and that such notions are heavily invested with interests that transcend the operational or institutional scales. In the case of the UK, we discuss the way in which a teacher described her experience of taking a degree course, exposing a rift between individual, experiential knowledge and institutional, organisational knowledge, characteristic of the large-scale transformations of the educational field in the UK. In the South African case, we show how a white teacher instructing black township children deploys images of the disciplined body that derive from the Apartheid ‘old order’. In both cases we see that views of professionalism are infused with micro-ideological, practical beliefs as well as with macro-ideological social and political views. In terms of the implications of our line of argument for teacher education we conclude that student teachers should be taught explicitly about the discourses by which teaching is constructed so that they are able to reflect more critically on their professional practice.     

Infants Perceive Three‐Dimensional Illusory Contours as Occluding Surfaces

The study assessed the contribution of stereoscopic depth cues to infants' perception of a Kanizsa rectangle as a surface that temporarily occludes a moving object. In Experiment 1, the Kanizsa figure was shifted into the foreground by enriching it with stereoscopic depth information. According to the results, perception of a three‐dimensional Kanizsa figure as an occluding surface emerges between 5 (n = 16) and 7 (n = 16) months of age. Experiment 2 demonstrated that 7‐month‐old (n = 16) infants performed similarly to the 7‐month‐olds who participated in Experiment 1 if the moving object was shifted into the background. These findings suggest that 7‐month‐old infants respond to stereoscopic depth cues and that they exploit it to perceive subjective contours as occluders.     

Quality of religious education in Croatia assessed from teachers’ perspective

The main aim of the present study was to examine the quality of religious education in Croatian primary schools when assessed from teachers’ perspective. Religious education teachers (N?=?226) rated the impact of certain factors on the existing quality of religious education in primary schools and expressed their expectations about the future status of this aspect of education. In addition, teachers rated different sources of their professional satisfaction as religious education teachers. We identified understandable latent dimensions of teachers’ opinions, expectations and satisfaction where retained dimensions are modestly interrelated. The conducted regression analyses suggest that teachers with different professional status-related personal attributes are fairly uniform in their views, expectations and satisfactions. An interesting finding of this study concerns the relationship between school-based Catholic religious education and the parish-based catechesis, where an existing relationship represents a weak source of religious education teachers’ satisfaction. This represents a valuable empirically driven insight regarding the Catholic religious education in Croatian schools with some importance to the broader context of religious education in general.     

Can giftedness be taught?

This study investigates the relationship between giftedness and strategic flexibility using cognitive training methodology. The two experiments showed that the metacognitive training influenced strategic flexibility and metacognition of students. The results further showed that it is much easier to enhance performance on closed problems than with open problems which call for creativity.