Greek primary school children’s representations of the urban environment as seen through their drawings

In the present study, we explore aspects of Greek primary school children’s representations about the urban environment through the use of drawings and their relation to sustainability. For that purpose, 104 children, aged 9–12 (4th and 6th grades), were asked to make two drawings of their town: one as it is now and another as they would like it to be. Drawings were analysed using pre-defined categories of urban sustainability and were statistically analysed using SPSS. Results revealed a serious gap in knowledge regarding energy and aspects of local development tied to sustainability in the current and future state of the children’s towns. Although the most popular characteristics in the children’s drawings were associated with the environment, the majority of children illustrated issues related to society. Evidence indicated an age-related progression of representations related to sustainability in the urban environment, at least concerning the topics of natural environment, infrastructure and the realization of problems caused by air pollution and municipal waste generation.     

Enabling international student families: new empiricisms and posthumanist entanglements in higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper presents research on movements involved in the lives of international university students and their accompanying family members. Located in the framing of new empiricisms and new materialisms, a posthumanist approach is offered as a way to move beyond the limitations of a focus on the educational mobilities of individualised self-contained student subjects. The research this paper draws on engages a diffractive visual methodology involving interview encounters with women who each moved from Iran to Australia together with their partner and children. A materialist feminist approach enables the consideration of how a variety of entangled movements and animated affects shape the lives of international student families. The utility of this approach becomes the inspiration for thinking through the concept of ‘intra-active becoming in movement’. This brings a refreshed set of practices for designing higher education experiences for international students that resists the divisiveness of binary oppositions in Western thought.     

Old Freedoms and New Technologies: The Evolution of Community Networking

Unparalleled in human experience, the Internet, or simply the Net, is the code word for the technosocial accident that gives large numbers of people the means by which they can speak for themselves in public. This is an ironical reversal of the historical social patterning of asymmetrical, centralizing communicating technologies that have molded all of the social relations of modern society. The problematic for this distributed communication capability will be manifest in struggles around the legitimacy of self-expression, assembly, and privacy, in all of their forms. However, unlike the mass mediated discourse where, as the 'audience' object, we observed these externalized struggles by a narrow other, encounters with distributed media are palpable and subjective, and will be increasingly played out on the common terrain of local community. In initiating unconditional public access to the Net, community networks, or FreeNets, began the long process of blurring the distinction between the public and private terrain, of undoing that dichotomy that mass media technologies in this century have systematically rebuilt and fortified. Nudging along the process of democratic self-representation is the central issue for the Net, and the epochal project for community networks.     

A comparison of student feedback obtained from three methods of formative evaluation of instructional materials

The success of formative evaluation techniques to improve instructional materials is well documented. Researchers have found that materials revised on the basis of one-to-one sessions are equally effective as materials revised on the basis of small group sessions, and that both are superior to the unrevised, original versions. However, there is a paucity of research comparing the types of data obtained from these two recommended approaches to formative evaluation. This study compares the quantitative and qualitative nature of the problems identified by students in three conditions. Specifically, a one-to-one active, a small group active, and a small group passive were the conditions employed. Explanations for the observed differences are attributed to and described in terms of the instructional materials themselves and differences in the procedures or conditions employed. Finally, a number of more practical issues are raised and discussed in terms of their impact on the selection of a particular method or combination of methods for the formative evaluation of instructional materials.     

Preservice teachers’ articulated noticing through pedagogies of practice

Elementary preservice teachers at six universities engaged in a task that provided them opportunities to articulate their professional noticing within video representations, written decompositions, and animated approximations of practice. The preservice teachers’ written accounts indicated that a majority attended to students or student thinking; however, when asked to illustrate their noticing through animation, focus shifted to the classroom teacher. Findings indicate the extent to which preservice teachers articulated specific mathematics concepts within and across pedagogies of practice and highlight the critical importance for selecting and utilizing multiple types of tasks to better understand preservice teacher noticing. Implications for eliciting and supporting preservice teacher noticing are discussed.     

Personality traits in effective clinical teachers

This study looks at the teaching effectiveness of clinical instructors in a professional college of optometry from the viewpoint of students, colleagues, and the teachers themselves. It was asked whether certain measurable personal qualities could differentiate highly rated teachers from their less effective peers. It was found that teachers given high ratings on their clinical teaching effectiveness were distinguished by a constellation of measurable personality traits including self-confidence, assertiveness, personal and intellectual drive, tolerance, and a liking for personal interaction. These traits appear to be common ingredients which contribute to high quality teaching in clinical settings such as that encountered in a health profession school like optometry.     

The benefits of multi-year research experiences: differences in novice and experienced students' reported gains from undergraduate research

This mixed-methods study explores differences in novice and experienced undergraduate students' perceptions of their cognitive, personal, and professional gains from engaging in scientific research. The study was conducted in four different undergraduate research (UR) programs at two research-extensive universities; three of these programs had a focus on the biosciences. Seventy-three entry-level and experienced student researchers participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews and completed the quantitative Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA) instrument. Interviews and surveys assessed students' developmental outcomes from engaging in UR. Experienced students reported distinct personal, professional, and cognitive outcomes relative to their novice peers, including a more sophisticated understanding of the process of scientific research. Students also described the trajectories by which they developed not only the intellectual skills necessary to advance in science, but also the behaviors and temperament necessary to be a scientist. The findings suggest that students benefit from multi-year UR experiences. Implications for UR program design, advising practices, and funding structures are discussed.     

Supporting families: a nurturing teacher education strategy in Nauru

There has been little recent documentation concerning Pacific family support for family members locally involved in university study in their Pacific home country and how such responses affect both parties. Some studies dealing with family support for student family members, including Pacific families residing in the USA, have been published. A New Zealand Ministry of Education report on Pasifika students’ educational success rates raised the need for effective family support contexts. Another study researched the family support negotiation patterns of mature-age part-time students in Australia, Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea. Only one University of the South Pacific research focused on Pacific family and community expectations of family members studying and residing with their families in their Pacific home countries. This Nauru-based study describes mixed support responses from Nauruan families towards their teacher education student family members and Nauru Department of Education student engagement and well-being development strategies.     

Teachers' schemata for classroom events: The mental scaffolding of teachers' thinking during classroom instruction

Researchers have shown that experts and novices differ in their recall, representation, and analyses of problem situations. This study investigated whether such differences existed between novice and experienced high school teachers in their recall and analyses of problem events during interactive teaching. Experienced and inexperienced teachers (n = 10 in each group) completed cognitive ability tests and were interviewed after viewing three videotaped vignettes of interactive teaching. In contrast to novices, experienced teachers both recalled more classroom events and relied more on procedural knowledge and principles in analyzing classroom events. These differences may indicate that experienced teachers have better developed knowledge structures of “schemata” for classroom teaching than do novice teachers.