Connecting the curriculum through the national mathematics and science standards

Summary It is always important to remember that science and mathematics are forever tied together by context and application. Science is the application of mathematical theory and understanding, and mathematics is the language and primary tool of science. As teachers and teacher educators, we should help our students see the connection between content and concept, rather than their separation.Through the use of the Connections Matrix described in this article, the standards can be addressed in the classroom and connections established across the curriculum as an individual or with a partner. The process can be established as a regular part of the planning process and help guide educators to implement effective activities which embed the standards and connections within the curriculum, rather than as an add-on or supplemental program. In short, this is the right way to accomplish the goals of connecting the curriculum and implementing the national mathematics and science standards.     

Teaching Across the Grades: Dispositions of Ideally Competent Teachers

ABSTRACT

The study of dispositions for effective teaching has become a key topic in education. Diverse characteristics, skills, and behaviors have been proposed as centrally important. Nevertheless, little work has been done on evaluating these disparate claims, or whether importance varies across primary and secondary teaching contexts. We address these issues by using a new instrument that incorporated a wide range and a large number of individual dispositions with an established methodology (the Q-sort; Block, 2008) that allows dispositions to be meaningfully ranked by importance and then compared across grade level. A diverse group of experienced teachers were consistent in their rankings, and their judgments showed both similarities and differences across grade level. We discuss theoretical and practical implications.     

Family Ecologies of Ethnic Minority Children

This article discusses a proposed interconnectedness between the ecologies of ethnic minority families, adaptive strategies, socialization goals, and child behavioral outcomes. The ethnic minority groups included are African American, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian Pacific Americans, and Hispanics. Demographic information on population size, geographic area of concentration, and preferred identity terms is provided. It is argued that adaptive strategies, including extendedness of families and role flexibility, biculturalism, and ancestral worldview, emerge from the ecological challenges of ethnic stratification status. These adaptive strategies foster the child-rearing goals of positive orientation to the ethnic group and socialization for interdependence, which in turn enhance the developmental outcomes of cognitive flexibility and sensitivity to discontinuities among ethnic minority children.     

Teachers,tasks, and tensions: lessons from a research–practice partnership

How teachers make sense of new academic standards significantly shapes the implementation of those standards. Professional development organized around the analysis of mathematical tasks has potential to prepare teachers for standards implementation by helping them develop common understandings of standards and how to help students meet ambitious new learning goals. In practice, however, designers and participants bring different goals to the professional development context, which becomes evident when teachers engage in task analysis. In this article, we use the design tensions framework (Tatar in Human Comput Interact 22(4):413–451, 2007. doi: 10.1080/07370020701638814) to analyze these tensions within a research–practice partnership comprised of five university researchers, three district curriculum leaders from a large urban school district, 12 high school Algebra 1 teachers from nine schools in the district, and a small team of Web engineers. Primary data for the study consist of participant observation and field notes of meetings in which project stakeholders negotiated the design of the professional development, as well as interview and survey data. An analysis based on the design tensions framework helped our partnership surface, both in the moment and retrospectively, the need for designers of professional development focused on standards implementation to be adaptive and willing to evolve activities to satisfy multiple stakeholders’ goals for participation.     

Characterizing mentoring capital in a residency program through mentor’s voices

The purpose of our study was to examine mentors’ conceptualizations of mentoring residents (preservice teachers) in a teacher residency program. Understanding the nuances of mentoring in a year-long placement in a mentor’s classroom may further illuminate mentoring in this context. In this qualitative, longitudinal study, we used constant comparative analysis to allow the data to drive recurring patterns and ideas linked to real-life situations and values coding to examine mentors’ conceptualizations of mentoring in a residency program. Residents enrolled in the federally-funded Teaching Residency Program for Critical Shortage Areas program were placed in a high-need urban secondary school for a year-long clinical experience to work alongside mentors, who had a non-evaluative role. By examining mentors’ conceptualizations of mentoring in this particular context, our data reveal aspects of their agency that reflected three main themes: (a) professional altruism, (b) extant knowledge, and (c) resident as stimulus. Our findings add to the research on mentoring by illuminating the voices of mentors to describe how they conceptualized mentoring and to further examine their motivations for mentoring, contributions to the mentee, and professional gains.     

Relationships between social support,job autonomy,job satisfaction,and burnout among care workers in long-term care facilities in Hawaii

This study examined the effects of social support, job autonomy, and job satisfaction on burnout among long-term care workers in Hawaii, USA. Data were collected from 170 care workers working at long-term care facilities in Hawaii. The study variables included demographic data, burnout, social support, job autonomy, and job satisfaction. The study findings support the association between social support, job autonomy, job satisfaction, and burnout among care workers at long-term care facilities. Social support, job autonomy, and job satisfaction were negatively and significantly associated with the level of burnout of care workers in Hawaii. Furthermore, the findings suggest the need to develop policy and practice considerations for reducing burnout risks among care workers in order to improve quality of care.     

Coke or Pepsi?

A binomial experiment dealing with a volunteer's ability to distinguish Coca-Cola from Pepsi-Cola is used to introduce the concepts of hypothesis testing and Type I and Type II errors.     

Cultural and School-Grade Differences in Korean and White American Children's Narrative Skills

A great deal of ethnographic research describes different communicative styles in Asian and Western countries. Asian cultures emphasise the listener's role in assuring successful communication, whereas Western cultures place the responsibility primarily on the speaker. This pattern suggests that Asian children may develop higher-level receptive skills and Western children may develop higher-level expressive skills. However, the language of children in formal education may develop in certain ways regardless of cultural influences. The present study quantifies the cultural and school-grade differences in language abilities reflected in middle-class Korean and white American children's story-telling and story-listening activities. Thirty-two Korean first- and fourth-grade children and their American counterparts were individually asked to perform two tasks: one producing a story from a series of pictures, and one involving listening to and then retelling a story. The individual interview was transcribed in their native languages and analysed in terms of ambiguity of reference, the number of causal connectors, the amount of information, and the number of central and peripheral idea units that were included in the story retelling. The data provided some empirical evidence for the effects of culture and school education in children's language acquisition.