Transition to school practices: comparisons from Iceland and Australia

This paper is the result of collaboration among early childhood education researchers from different cultures on opposite sides of the globe. The project sought to identify what practitioners in both preschool and primary school settings in Iceland and Australia regarded as successful transition to school practices. Independently developed surveys of these practitioners, both based on earlier work in the USA, gathered data on what the practitioners identified as ‘good ideas’ in transition practices. There were similarities across the countries: popular practices included children visiting primary schools prior to the start of the school year and informational meetings for parents. There were also differences: Icelandic primary school teachers were, for instance, more likely than Australian teachers to write to their prospective students before they started school.     

Content Familiarity: Differential Impact of Effective Teaching on Student Achievement Outcomes

Improving the quality of higher education for all students requires researchers to focus on factors that potentially influence learning. Of particular interest are student entry characteristics and effective teaching behaviors. Accordingly, structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships between student differences, prior experience with the subject material, past performances, teaching behaviors, and perceived learning and achievement. A theoretical model containing 8 variables was formulated and tested on students who were either experienced or inexperienced with the course material. The data were gathered at a large midwestern university fitting the Carnegie classification as a research institution. Overall, student achievement is affected by test anxiety and high school GPA. Prior experience with the course content revealed that content-unfamiliar students' perception of learning is more positively influenced by instructor organization than by instructor expressiveness, whereas for content-familiar students, expressiveness is much more influential than organization. Additionally, content-unfamiliar students are more sensitive to both teaching behaviors than content-familiar students. These findings have important implications for administrators, instructors, and researchers.     

Understanding educational transfer: theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks

Educational transfer is an important and growing body of literature in the field of comparative education. Work from the last decade has focused on the stages of the borrowing cycle, and the context, causes and rationales for education borrowing. This recent work has contributed to earlier research on the role of multilateral organizations in education development and transfer. Rather than reviewing in comprehensive detail the substance, agents or mechanisms of educational transfer, this paper provides an overview of the field’s main theoretical lenses and conceptual frameworks, focusing on the stages, processes and forms of educational transfer. Throughout the paper we link related literature from disciplines other than education to account for education policy changes. The paper concludes with a discussion of future lines of research on educational transfer.

Naturalizing negativity: how journalism textbooks justify crime,conflict, and “bad” news

This critical analysis of U.S. journalism textbooks from 1894 to 2016 shows how texts across decades have (re)constructed a discourse of damage through news values emphasizing and rationalizing conflict and bad news. Findings are reported in the context of literature suggesting that negative news values foster a distorted sense of social relations, increase fear, and depress civic participation. Literature also indicates that non-journalists often view news through less conflict-oriented, and more value-laden, frames, suggesting that journalistic values are not natural or inevitable but subject to change. The discourse in journalism textbooks can be a key site for understanding and influencing journalism culture. Constructive alternatives to the dominant discourse are suggested.     

Reopening Inquiry into Cognitive Processes in Writing-To-Learn

Writing produces generally positive, but inconsistent, effects on learning. The reasons for this inconsistency are unknown. This review examines four hypotheses about writing-to-learn: Writers spontaneously generate knowledge at the point of utterance (Britton, 1980/1982); writers externalize ideas in text, then reread them to generate new inferences (Young and Sullivan, 1984); writers use genre structures to organize relationships among elements of text, and thereby among elements of knowledge (Newell, 1984); and writers set rhetorical goals, then solve content problems to achieve these goals (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987; Flower and Hayes, 1980a). These four hypotheses invoke different aspects of writing, and so are mutually compatible. The genre hypothesis has been supported by empirical research; the other three hypotheses have been tentatively supported by research concerning writing-to-learn, or indirectly supported by other research concerning learning or writing. Further investigation is needed concerning: The empirical validity of the four hypotheses, and interactions among the processes that they identify; the declarative and procedural knowledge that underpins writing-to-learn; and the educational effectiveness of applying cognitive strategy instruction to learning through writing.     

The Effects of Rhetorical and Content Subgoals on Writing and Learning

Argument writing is challenging for elementary students. Previous experimental research has focused on scaffolding rhetorical goals, leaving content goals relatively unexplored. In a randomized experiment, 73 students in grades 5, 6, and 7 wrote persuasive texts about difficult-to-classify vertebrates. Each student received one of three sets of writing prompts: a persuasive goal only (control); a persuasive goal + rhetorical-subgoal prompts; or a persuasive goal + content-subgoal prompts. Rhetorical subgoals increased text quality, variety of rhetorical moves, number of complex propositions, and classification knowledge. Content subgoals increased the number of simple propositions in text. A path analysis indicated that content-subgoal prompts and rhetorical-subgoal prompts elicited different paths to writing and learning.     

Performance of students in grades six,nine, and twelve on five logical,spatial and formal tasks

Performance on five logical, spatial and formal tasks was used to make inferences about the reasoning structures of the subjects. The tasks used were: seriation matrix, tilt of a cone, location of a point in two and three dimensions, flexible rods and projection of shadows. Three research questions were asked: first, what is the general level of performance; second, are there grade level differences; and third, are there gender differences in task performance. The subjects were 101 middle and high school students chosen at random from the school population. Each task was given in an individual interview. Findings include grade level differences in performance and gender differences in performance on one of the tasks. Implications for classroom teachers were proposed.     

Using collaboration to foster academic integrity

Abstract

For students new to higher education, the task of developing their academic writing skills, and particularly the principles and practices of source-referencing, can be daunting. Although institutions and teachers can and do provide positive guidance on this score, all too often students veer into inadvertent plagiarism through lack of confidence and confusion. This case study identifies opportunities through collaborative work to help students approach referencing with greater clarity and confidence. A project with first-year Arts students engaged in collaborative writing encouraged them to attend to their recording and writing-up of source references using individual ‘reading and referencing’ logs and then passing on completed references to their group’s designated bibliographer. Checks on later, solo, assignments by these students indicated that they were less likely to stray into inadvertent plagiarism, whilst feedback from the students themselves pointed towards improved confidence in their academic writing skills and development of study habits conducive to effective self-monitoring.     

Teachers’ learning experiences in relation to their ownership,sense-making and agency

The aim of this study was to gain understanding of how teachers familiarise themselves with a new pedagogy during their everyday practice, in this case the implementation of the coaching role in vocational education. For this purpose, 11 teachers reported their learning experiences in a digital log. An identity perspective was used as a lens to reflect and interpret these learning experiences. More specifically, it was looked at the extent to which teachers expressed ownership in their learning experiences with this new pedagogy, the ways they made sense of their learning experiences, and the extent to which they expressed agency in their learning experiences. On the basis of their initial positioning in terms of their ownership, sense-making and agency, these teachers were divided into an engaged and a reserved group. Differences were found in the learning experiences both between and within these groups. The digital logs of the engaged teachers showed more ownership than those of the reserved group and their sense-making was more active and explicit. Agency was present in the digital logs of both groups. Within the two groups, differences were found, particularly between teachers in the reserved group.