Pathways to resilience: how drawings reveal pre-service teachers’ core narratives underpinning their future teacher-selves

For this study of teacher-identity, which is part of a larger research project on teacher resilience, preservice teachers were invited to draw “the kind of teacher you hope to become”. In this, our study recognises drawing as a semiotic system of meaning-making and communication. The drawings were examined in terms of the “stories” they told. Using an emergent design approach to the data, drawings were synthesised into categories that were distilled into theme clusters. A hermeneutic reading revealed the core identity narrative underpinning each teacher-identity story. This story was told in sociocultural terms, or constructed around functioning at work or couched in terms of personal validation and achievement. These core identity narratives signal what “matters” to preservice teachers’ sense of their teacher-selves. Since there is an observed correlation between teacher-identity and resilience, knowing what matters is a helpful basis for building resilience.     

Racial hierarchy and masculine space: Participatory in/equity in computational physics classrooms

ABSTRACT

Background and Context

Computing is being integrated into a range of STEM disciplines. Still, computing remains inaccessible to many minoritized groups, especially girls and certain people of color. In this mixed methods study, we investigated racial and gendered patterns of equity and inequity in high school physics classrooms incorporating computational modeling, with an emphasis on group work.     

Strategic technology planning in higher education

Higher education institutions struggle with planning for future needs, growth, and, sometimes, contraction. As student populations expand and as faculty members adopt new technologies, universities struggle to support these needs. To the casual observer, it may seem that the technology planning process is haphazard. This article details a process that organizations can use to develop a strategic plan to satisfy near‐ and long‐term technology needs. A case study of how this process was used to develop a technology roadmap at San Diego State University will be discussed.     

Student plagiarism in higher education in Vietnam: an empirical study

This paper assesses and compares the prevalence of plagiarism across different student and assignment characteristics at a university in Vietnam, using the similarity index reported by the text-matching software Turnitin as a proxy measure of plagiarism on a sample of 681 student papers. The findings present a level of match higher than reported in earlier studies at universities outside of Vietnam, with an average similarity index of 29.06%. Controlling for the gender and major of the students, the extent of plagiarism is implied to be negatively correlated with the students’ academic performances and with the likelihood of being caught, and positively correlated with the length of the assignments. Thus, this study, relying on actual text-matching data rather than self-reported surveys, provides the first empirical test of two theoretical plagiarism models proposed in the literature. The explanatory factors confirmed by this study illustrate the potential benefits of the use of software tools to detect plagiarism and can help refine academic integrity policy formulations for universities.     

Interrelations between self‐efficacy and learning approaches: a developmental approach

Two major theoretical frameworks in educational psychology, namely student approaches to learning (SAL) and self‐efficacy have been used extensively to explain and predict students’ learning and academic achievement. There is a substantial body of research studies, for example, that documents the positive interrelations between individuals’ self‐efficacy beliefs and their approaches to learning. In particular, evidence ascertained from structural equation analyses suggests both a positive sense of academic self‐efficacy and deep learning approach combined to influence students’ academic achievement. More recently, albeit limited, research has focused on the study of developmental changes of these two constructs over time. As a contribution to this approach, we used latent growth curve modelling (LGM) to explore the initial states and trajectories of self‐efficacy and the two major learning approaches – surface and deep – over a two‐year period. Furthermore, we regressed both gender and academic experience as possible external correlates that could account for the change in the two theoretical frameworks. Two hundred and fifty‐two (116 females, 136 males) university students were administered Likert‐scale inventories on three occasions. SPSS AMOS showed a few major findings – notably, for example, the negative impact of academic experience on the change in self‐efficacy and the positive impact of academic experience on the initial states of self‐efficacy and surface learning approach.     

The influence of framing on transfer: initial evidence from a tutoring experiment

This paper investigates the idea that the framing of learning and transfer contexts can influence students’ propensity to transfer what they have learned. We predicted that transfer would be promoted by framing contexts in an expansive manner in which students are positioned as having the opportunity to contribute to larger conversations that extend across time, places, people, and topics. A one-on-one tutoring experiment was conducted to test this hypothesis by manipulating framing as either expansive or its opposite (bounded) within a complex instructional learning ecology. We investigated the degree to which high school biology students transferred knowledge from a learning session about the cardiovascular system to a transfer-of-learning session about the respiratory system depending on framing condition. Consistent with the framing hypothesis, students in the expansive condition were generally more likely to transfer facts, a conceptual principle, and a learning strategy from one system to another.     

Students＇ Difficulties With Multiple Representations in Introductory Mechanics

Research in physics education indicates that the use of multiple representations in teaching and learning helps students become better problem-solvers. We report on a study to investigate students＇ difficulties in solving mechanics problems presented in multiple representations. We conducted teaching/learning interviews with 20 students in a first-semester calculus-based physics course which covered introductory classical mechanics. Each student was interviewed four times during the semester, each time after they had completed an exam in the course. During these interviews, students were asked to solve a problem they had seen in the exam, followed by problems that differed in the type of representation from the exam problems. Students were provided verbal hints to solve the new problems. We discuss the common difficulties students encountered when attempting to solve problems in different representations and some common themes in students＇ performance.     

iPads in higher education—Hype and hope

This paper systematically reviews current research on using iPads in the higher education sector. Since the release of iPads by Apple in 2010, this new technology has been quickly adopted everywhere, especially by the younger generation and professionals. We were motivated to find out how iPads have been adopted for use in the higher education sector. We searched for and collected all the peer‐reviewed publications in conference proceedings and scholarly journals in EBSCOhost, Scopus, Informit A+ Education, ProQuest Academic Research Library and Google Scholar, and conducted a content analysis of the full‐text papers collected. The results show that the reported studies are at an early exploratory stage from both the student and staff perspectives. From the student perspective, the iPad was found to enhance the learning experience but not necessarily lead to better learning outcomes. From the staff perspective, the iPad was found to offer benefits associated with electronic information dissemination, academic administration and professional development support. A finding common to both perspectives is that while the iPad has the potential to offer benefits to the academics and students who were found to be eager adopters of this technology, it is not clear how best to align and integrate it within the academic programmes and workflows, and how best to manage it as a resource within a university's organisational setting.     

A cross-cultural study of possible iatrogenic effects of gifted education programs: tenth graders’ perceptions of academically high performing classmates

Previous empirical studies have yielded inconclusive results about peer perceptions of academically high performing students. The purpose of this study was to investigate students’ perceptions of the intellectual ability, positive social qualities, and popularity of a hypothetical new high performing classmate. Participants were 1060 Vietnamese, South Korean, British, Australian, Peruvian, and Spanish boys and girls in 10th grade. The results revealed that the perceptions of academically high performing classmates differed by country group. Positive perceptions of intellectual ability and social qualities were commonly found in all countries except the two Asian countries (Vietnam and South Korea), where the students reported more neutral views of high performers. In conclusion, it is argued that there is no evidence for possible iatrogenic effects of gifted education programs aiming at high achievements     

Agreement on Childhood Disability between Parents and Teachers in Vietnam

The purpose of the present study was to examine agreement on childhood disability among the teachers and parents of children with cognitive delays in Vietnam. The participants were 57 teachers in kindergarten programmes (for children 2 to 6 years of age), and 106 mothers and 93 fathers of the children attending these kindergarten programmes. The data were collected using the ABILITIES Index and a demographic information form. The results indicated that teachers rated the children’s level of functioning more severely, especially in the areas of intellectual disabilities and behaviour problems, than mothers and fathers. Logistic regression that examined the factors that predicted the agreement and disagreement among parents and teachers revealed that teachers and parents were more likely to agree when the child’s disability was genetically related or physical. Screening, diagnosis and treatment issues can become more challenging for children with intellectual disabilities who do not have such physical and genetic conditions, especially when the agreement between parents and professionals on the conditions of the children is low.