Teacher–student negotiations during context-based chemistry reform: A case study

Teachers participating in curricular reforms, especially reforms based on constructivism, are expected to bring about change in their teaching approach. This is often a difficult, complex and intensive process, and demands a radical reculturing of the classroom. This is also the case for social constructivist reforms in chemistry education, which are based on a context-based approach. Educational change is a social and interactional process, and during this change teachers will engage in negotiations with their students about the reform. These teacher–student negotiations have a profound impact on the succeeding of the reform. This study explores the teacher–student interactions during the reform that shape and alter the context-based chemistry approach. We focused on two teachers, of whom it was found in an earlier study that one of them succeeded in implementing the reform, while the other one struggled. By following them for one school year, in which in-depth qualitative data was collected through various instruments, we developed insights about the teacher–student negotiations that influenced the educational reform. Three themes emerged from the data: “agency of learning,” “vulnerability,” and “care.” The differences that were found between the teachers regarding these themes help explain why and how the reform can become a success and why the reform often fails to change classroom practice.     

Master’s thesis projects: student perceptions of supervisor feedback

A growing body of research has investigated student perceptions of written feedback in higher education coursework, but few studies have considered feedback perceptions in one-on-one and face-to-face contexts such as master’s thesis projects. In this article, student perceptions of feedback are explored in the context of the supervision of master’s thesis projects, using review studies with respect to effective feedback in coursework situations. Online questionnaires were administered to collect data from three cohorts of master’s students who were either working on their thesis or had recently finished it (N?=?1016). The results of the study indicate that students perceive the focus of feedback in terms of a focus on task and self-regulation; they perceive the goal-relatedness of feedback in terms of feed up (goal-setting) and feed back-forward (how am I going and where to next?); and elaboration of feedback is perceived in terms of positive and negative feedback. Furthermore, students that perceive the feedback to be positive, and to provide information on how they are going and what next steps to take, are the most satisfied with their supervision and perceive they are learning most from their supervisor. The findings are discussed in relation to findings in coursework settings, and are explained using goal orientation theories.     

教师知识和教学的知识基础

作者把一切与专业有关的洞察力都看做教学的知识基础,认为它们与教师的行为有着内在的联系。由此,本文提出要把教师知识或者教师的实践性知识和正式的命题知识纳入教学的知识基础当中。虽然教师知识与个人经历及情境有着紧密的联系,但教师知识的某些特征却为所有的教师或大部分教师所共同拥有。研究教师知识就是要找出这些共同特征,从而对教师知识的复杂性和特殊性做出公正的评价,但这在方法论上可能存在困难。为了说明教师知识研究的潜在益处以及局限,作者呈现了几种研究的结果。这些研究的一个主要结论是,理解教师知识不仅能够改进教师教育而且能够促进教育改革的成功。最后,作者指出未来研究的三个重要领域。     

Teacher characteristics and schoolfailure

European Journal of Psychology of Education -     

Effects of instruction and stage-fright on intelligence testing

In the present research, it was tried to unravel the influence of various types of instruction on test anxiety levels and, in turn, its influence on intelligence test performance. Three types of instruction were compared: a stressful, achievement-orientated instruction; a reassuring, task-orientated instruction; and an ambiguous instruction. Before the instruction, trait anxiety was measured with the trait version of the state-trait anxiety questionnaire and negative fear of failure with a standard questionnaire. Within each instructional condition, there were two test sessions with four intelligence tests each. Before each session, state anxiety was measured with the state version of the state-trait anxiety questionnaire and test anxiety with a standard test anxiety questionnaire. It turns out that state anxiety and test anxiety do not increase more rapidly as a function of anxiety disposition under stressful conditions compared with reassuring conditions. As in previous research, stage-fright effects were observed in the sense that repeated measures of state anxiety and test anxiety showed a decline of average anxiety levels.     

Hugo de Vries on heredity, 1889-1903. Statistics, Mendelian laws, pangenes, mutations.

The essay describes the development of Hugo de Vries's thinking on heredity from the publication of his Intracellulare Pangenesis in 1889 to the publication of Die Mutations-theorie, Volume 2, in 1903. De Vries's work in the 1890s can be characterized as an attempt to defend his theory of pangenes, especially the fundamental and controversial idea that different characters have different material hereditary carriers. Hybridization experiments served his goal. Recently discovered research notes on hybridization from 1896 suggest that, though he was unaware of Mendel's work, De Vries used the laws of dominance and recessiveness, segregation, and independent assortment to explain the 75:25 ratio in the second generation. He had discovered these laws by applying insights from probability theory to his research. In Die Mutationstheorie De Vries combined central concepts of intracellular pangenesis and his mutation theory by modifying the meanings of important terms and introducing new states of pangenes. In his attempts to describe Mendelian crossings in terms of pangenes and mutations, he became entangled in a number of contradictions. Some of his remarks suggest that he was aware that the Mendelian laws and his own theories of pangenes and mutations could not be made consistent.     

Adaptive research supervision: exploring expert thesis supervisors' practical knowledge

Several researchers have suggested the importance of being responsive to students' needs in research supervision. Adapting support strategies to students' needs in light of the goals of a task is referred to as adaptivity. In the present study, the practice of adaptivity is explored by interviewing expert thesis supervisors about diagnosing student characteristics in order to determine students' needs and concurrent adaptive support strategies. The findings suggest that next to competence, supervisors also diagnose elements of students' determination and context. With respect to support strategies, it is suggested that supervisors adapt to student needs in terms of explicating standards, quality or consequences, division of responsibilities, providing more/less critical feedback and sympathising. The complexity of the relationship between diagnosing student characteristics and adapting support strategies is illustrated and needs further study.     

Deliberate practice in teacher education

Deliberate practice is increasingly recognised as necessary for professional development. This paper sets out to explore in what ways student teachers’ learning activities in a teacher education programme can be characterised as deliberate practice. Based on an in-depth exploration of 574 learning activities, our results highlight the different ways in which activities in teacher education programmes can be designed, the different motivations students have to engage in them repetitively, and different ways in which feedback can be organised, within contextual constraints posed by all professional environments. Results also indicate that self-improvement is not the only motivation for engaging in deliberate practice for student teachers, as pupil improvement is also considered important. These results support a context-specific operationalisation of deliberate practice and provide starting points for teacher education programmes to promote deliberate practice in their curriculum.     

Social-emotional characteristics and special educational needs

The aim of the research described in this article was the development of an instrument to measure social emotional characteristics and special educational and pedagogical needs of students in the last grade of primary education. Questionnaires were developed for teachers as well as for students. Exploratory factor analyses showed that the factors underlying the structure of the teacher questionnaire corresponded for the larger part with the negative poles of four factors of the Big Five, i.e., conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and emotional stability. A stepwise regression analysis was conducted to examine which factors contribute to the prediction of type of secondary education. Intelligence was the most important predictor; lack of conscientiousness accounted for another nine percent of the variance in level of secondary education.