Education research and educational practice: The qualities of a close relationship

The relationship between education practice and education research has a long history. In modern times, education practice and its relation to education research has been central to debates about the nature and quality of education as an academic discipline in universities. This article reports an empirical study that investigated a new instantiation of the practice–theory debate: ‘close-to-practice’ research in education. The research sought to (a) define and further articulate the concept of close-to-practice research and (b) provide reflections on the quality of close-to-practice research. The orientation of the work reported in this article is informed by theory on traditions of knowledge in the organisation of education that have contributed to the development of education as an academic discipline. The main section of the article reports the findings of the empirical study. The research design was a rapid evidence assessment (REA), and a series of interviews with education researchers whose experiences were highly relevant to understanding of close-to-practice research issues. The conclusions of the research are reported in relation to how close-to-practice research might be defined, including in relation to quality, but also implications for education as a discipline in universities subject to nationwide assessments of quality.     

Measuring in-service teacher self-efficacy for teaching computational thinking: development and validation of the T-STEM CT

Education and Information Technologies - Despite a growing recognition that K-12 teachers should be prepared to teach students computational thinking (CT) skills across disciplines, there is a lack...     

Systematic review of young children's writing on screen: what do we know and what do we need to know

Writing is part and parcel of children's active meaning‐making on and with screens, but it has been relatively neglected in the literature focused on children's digital literacies. This study synthesises existing empirical evidence focused on young children's (aged between 2 and 8 years) writing on screen and identifies the relationships between dominant themes in published literature and contemporary theories of children's technology use. A systematic literature review that included studies from diverse disciplines yielded 21 papers. Constant comparative analysis generated five themes that indicate four key directions for future research. We call attention to researchers' theoretical framing to supplement mono‐disciplinary approaches and single levels of analysis. We suggest that future research should provide greater specification of the purpose of children's writing on screen and the different types of tools and applications supporting the activity. We also highlight the need for interdisciplinary approaches that would capture the composing stages involved in the writing process with and around screens. Finally, we point out possible age‐related differences in documenting and reporting the composing process in classrooms. Overall, limitations in the current evidence base highlight the need for research conducted from a critical perspective and focused more directly on multimodality.     

The Differential Effects of Direct Address on Parasocial Experience and Identification: Empirical Evidence for Conceptual Difference

Whereas parasocial experience is conceptualized as imagined interaction identification is defined as the merging of one’s identity with a character’s. Thus, having a character face the camera and directly address viewers should increase the sense of parasocial experience but not affect the intensity of identification. An experiment compared the levels of parasocial experience and identification among viewers of clips from the show House of Cards that included or omitted direct address tested this prediction. Results provide support for the previously theorized conceptualdistinction between parasocial experience and identification.     

Joining forces for public value creation? Exploring collaborative innovation in smart city initiatives

Creating public value is a key goal of public administrations, both in their daily business and in the growing field of smart government and smart cities, which focuses on IT-enabled innovations in the public sphere. However, many public administrations still struggle with such innovations due to complex technologies, high investments, and the numerous stakeholders involved. To address this issue, some local governments in continental Europe have turned to collaborative innovation approaches, partnering with (semi-)public utility companies in the hope that their additional innovation assets will boost innovativeness. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how exactly such collaborations should be governed to ensure that the focus remains on creating public value, as utility companies may have their own agendas. To explore this question, we conducted a comparative case study in the context of smart city initiatives with four cases in Swiss local governments. Drawing on agency and stewardship theory, we then propose a model of public-value-focused collaborative innovation, enabling us to explore various collaboration characteristics and their effects on public value creation. Our findings suggest that both agency- and stewardship-based collaborations increase innovativeness. However, while agency collaborations tend to produce smart city innovations that mainly serve the utility companies' business interests, stewardship relationships lead to innovations that are focused more on public value creation. As such, our study extends the literature on the effects of collaborative innovation on public value, and it provides practical recommendations on how such collaborative innovation should be designed.     

Soziale Unterstützung beim Berufseinstieg ins Lehramt

This study investigates the support that novice teachers receive from their mentors and peers during the teacher induction phase in Germany. It examines the relationship between the support of these two groups and the development of new teachers’ professional competencies. The sample comprises 551 novice teachers in mathematics, who were surveyed twice within one year during their induction period. Results show that both mentors and peers are perceived as providing important support, but that the two groups support different aspects of teaching competencies. Structural equation models indicate that informational and emotional support provided by mentors is associated with an increase in the teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and a decline in their emotional exhaustion, whereas the support of peers has both positive and negative effects.     

Enhancing the Development of Low-Birthweight, Premature Infants: Changes in Cognition and Behavior over the First Three Years

The Infant Health and Development Program is a randomized clinical trial to test the efficacy of educational and family support services and pediatric follow-up offered in the first 3 years of life on reducing the incidence of developmental delay in low-birthweight (LBW), preterm infants in 8 clinical sites ( N = 985). Effects of the intervention on cognitive and behavior problem scores over the 3 years are examined. Significant intervention effects were seen on cognitive scores at 24 and 36 but not 12 months of age; effect sizes were similar at both ages. These effects persist when controlling for earlier cognitive scores. At 24 and 36 months, behavior problem scores for the intervention group were significantly lower than for the follow-up group; the intervention was more efficacious for children with higher initial behavior problem scores. Results are discussed in terms of timing and targeting of services for LBW and disadvantaged children.     

Rights not restrictions for learning disabled adults: a response to Spiecker and Steutel

What follows is a response to an article by Spiecker and Steutel in which they pose the question of whether sex between people with "mental retardation" (sic) is morally permissible and in which they argue that since many such people cannot give "valid consent", the additional consent of caretakers may be required. However, we argue that the term "mental retard" is offensive and that either the UK terminology ("the learning disabled") or the internationally accepted term ("intellectually disabled") are more acceptable. Moreover, we point out that Spiecker and Steutel are mistaken. Many "learning disabled" people can and do give "valid consent". In any case, their question is itself dubious. Why should two learning disabled people who want to have sex together need anyone else's consent? In addition, we briefly address the rights of the learning disabled to the same sexual freedom as others, on the one hand, and to freedom from sexual exploitation on the other hand. Finally, we consider the implications of these issues for moral education. We suggest that carers need to develop empathy and, where necessary, advocacy skills. We point to the existence of training programmes on sexuality and protection issues.     

Authentic Tasks Online: A synergy among learner,task, and technology

Fostering synergies amongst learner, task, and technology to create innovative and immersive distance learning environments runs counter to the widespread practice of incorporating traditional classroom pedagogical strategies into Web‐based delivery of courses. The most widely accepted model of online higher education appears to be one of reductionism, whereby learning management systems facilitate the design of easily digested packets of information, usually assessed by discrete stand‐alone tests and academic assignments. This article describes a model for the development of authentic tasks that can assist in designing environments of increased, rather than reduced, complexity. It provides a robust framework for the design of online courses, based on the work of theorists and researchers in situated learning and authentic learning. It describes the characteristics of a task's design that facilitates the requirements of an entire course of study being readily satisfied by its completion, where the students make the important decisions about why, how, and in what order they investigate a problem. The article describes several learning environments that were investigated in depth in the study, and explores the synergies that exist between the learners, tasks, and technology engaged in authentic learning settings. The article leads readers to a conceptual understanding of the role of authentic tasks in supporting knowledge construction and meaningful learning, and illustrates the principles of authentic task design for online learning environments.     

Grounded practice and the design of constructivist learning environments

A variety of instructional approaches has been studied and implemented across educational and training settings. Vastly different design practices have been proposed that reflect fundamentally different philosophies, beliefs, and biases. Yet, evidence of mismatched frameworks and methods are widespread. This has become particularly problematic in advancing emerging constructivist learning environments. In this paper, we advance the concept of grounded design, a process that involves linking the practices of learning systems design with related theory and research. The purposes of this paper are to introduce the fundamentals of grounded design, to describe how underlying foundations and assumptions can be aligned with the corresponding methods, and to introduce examples of grounded constructivist learning environments.