Teachers’ motivations for master’s degree programs in education in Israeli teacher training institutions and the implications for government policy-making concerning those programs

ABSTRACT

The study aimed to identify teachers’ motivations to study Master of Education (M.Ed.) programs offered by teachers’ training colleges. M.Ed. degree programs have become available in Israel since 2004, with a rapid increase since then in the number of colleges offering various programs and a consequent increase in the number of graduates. M.Ed. degrees follow one of two teaching approaches: (1) top-down/transmission of knowledge (2) bottom-up transformative studies to support teachers’ professional autonomy. The first approach complies with the policy of the Council for Higher Education (CHE). The other is promoted by the Israeli Ministry of Education as an integral part of teachers’ professional development. The study’s methodology included examining data from multiple sources: documentation concerning the academic programs, government policy statements, and surveys administered to teachers who had graduated successfully from M.Ed. programs over the past decade and are now working in the field. We found that after the first decade of M.Ed. courses in Israel, significantly more programs incline towards the bottom-up/transformative approach, aiming to promote individual, personal and professional development instead of adopting the transmission approach. Teachers prefer M.Ed. programs at universities that include research. Yet their motivation to study is primarily intrinsic motivation, whether they aspire to study at universities or at teachers’ training colleges. Results are pertinent for government planning of teachers’ professional development. Further study into the needs of teachers is required to endorse these conclusions.     

Facilitating integrated agricultural technology development through participatory research

Purpose: In this paper, we discuss the role of participatory research in integrated agricultural technology development using the example of a solar fruit drying project in Mozambique.

Design/methodology/approach: We engage in seven participatory exercises with groups of farmers from two farmers’ associations in Inharrime district in Mozambique to identify their needs for solar fruit drying that are crucial for solar dryer technology design. We focus in the analysis on three of these exercises including a daily schedule exercise, SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analysis and technology requirement exercise.

Findings: Participatory research takes a dual function for integrated agricultural technology development. First, it can help to identify the technology needs of farmers and second it can enable the exchange and creation of different sets of knowledge for agricultural technology development between multiple stakeholders.

Practical implications: Participatory research provides a tool for joint knowledge exchange and creation, which allows the identified technology requirements to be translated into practical technology design.

Theoretical implications: This paper extends the concept of integrated research to integrated agricultural technology development and shows how participatory research is a tool that enables transdisciplinarity, which presents the most desired form of integrated research.

Originality: This research is highly relevant for researchers working in an interdisciplinary environment with agricultural technology development in cross-cultural contexts. From a meta-level perspective, it provides insights for joint and integrated technology development.     

The Future of Universities∗

The world is going through a major transitional crisis that is touching all facets of human existence including all human institutions. The roots of this crisis, so far as higher education is concerned, go back to the events of 1968, a year that also saw the birth of the Club of Rome, an organization that has made sustainable human development its goal. The university, although it must change to meet new circumstances, remains the institution that can contribute most, from a global perspective, to preserving and developing the quality of life, within the limits of sustainable human development, and of conserving and furthering the material and spiritual future of humanity.

     

Scoring mode and age-related effects on youth soccer teams’ defensive performance during small-sided games

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to examine the scoring mode (line goal, double goal or central goal) and age-related effects on the defensive performance of youth soccer players during 4v4 small-sided games (SSGs). Altogether, 16 male players from 2 age groups (U13, n = 8, mean age: 12.61 ± 0.65 years; U15, n = 8, 14.86 ± 0.47 years) were selected as participants. In six independent sessions, participants performed the three SSGs each during 10-min periods. Teams’ defensive performance was analysed at every instant ball possession was regained through the variables: ball-recovery type, ball-recovery sector, configuration of play and defence state. Multinomial logistic regression analysis used in this study revealed the following significant main effects of scoring mode and age: (1) line goal (vs. central goal) increased the odds of regaining possession through tackle and in the defensive midfield sector, and decreased the odds of successful interceptions; (2) double goal (vs. central goal) decreased the odds of regaining possession through turnover won and with elongated playing shapes; (3) the probability of regaining possession through interception significantly decreased with age. Moreover, as youth players move forward in age groups, teams tend to structurally evolve from elongated playing shapes to flattened shapes and, at a behavioural level, from defending in depth to more risky flattened configurations. Overall, by manipulating the scoring mode in SSGs, coaches can promote functional and coadaptive behaviours between teams not only in terms of configurations of play, but also on the pitch locations that teams explore to regain possession.     

A review of altmetrics as an emerging discipline for research evaluation

This article analyses the scientific production of publications on altmetrics as an emergent discipline for research evaluation. The research objective was to identify the investigative tendencies that characterize the subject. The analysis studied documents indexed by Web of Science and Scopus databases. About 253 documents were retrieved, showing a growth in articles 2005–2015. We discovered that the most productive authors, journals, institutions, and countries were from Europe and North America. The collaboration networks between authors and institutions reveal a homogenous community formed by the most prolific contributors. The most explored subjects deal with (1) social media and networking, (2) internet, (3) scholarly and scientific communication and publication, (4) open access and public libraries, (5) citation analysis, (6) impact factor measurements, (7) metric disciplines, (8) information analysis, retrieval, and processing, (9) search engines and data bases, and (10) evaluative bibliometrics. We discovered a nucleus of contributors who have attempted to solidify the knowledge area, with emerging principles of high theoretical consistency.     

Stories of impact: the role of narrative in understanding the value and impact of digital collections

Cultural heritage institutions leverage digitization to fulfill their mission to preserve, represent, and provide access to collections under their care. Despite their common interest in documenting the progress of digitization and online access, the library, archives, and museums (LAM) sector lacks a conceptual framework for assessing and demonstrating the impact of digitized ethnographic collections. Reporting the findings of a yearlong interdisciplinary study, this article underscores the importance of storytelling in articulating the value and impact of digitized ethnographic collections held in cultural heritage institutions. We begin with an overview of the literature on the assessment and describe the methods we employed in our study. Next, we identify and discuss the different ways that stories and storytelling are strategically mobilized in conversations about the impact of digitization. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for cultural heritage practice and collection development.     

A Participatory Social A/r/tography: Bodies and Houses Metamorphosing from Schools in Tegucigalpa to a Liverpool Tate Exchange Event

Social a/r/tography combines three dimensions of a/r/tography (artistic creation, education and research) incorporating a fourth collaborative, participatory community‐based approach. This ongoing project began in two primary and secondary schools located in the slums of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as cooperative action for curricular development in art education. As participatory action, students created a mural drawing inspired by Sol Lewitt's wall drawings, as well as photo pairs on the theme of body and nature inspired by a lithograph by Uta Barth. The drawings and photographs created by the students in Honduras were presented at an event in the Exchange space of the Tate gallery in Liverpool as visual provocation for the creation of drawings and visual metaphors. The concept of visual dialogue, which we define as ‘to teach human beings to have visual conversations with other humans through the visual content of images’, helps us to consider images as questions which are answered with new images whose meaning is subsequently transformed in function of artistic, school and social contexts.     

Does rhetorical competence moderate the effect of rhetorical devices on the comprehension of expository texts beyond general comprehension skills?

Many studies have demonstrated the facilitating role of rhetorical devices in text comprehension, but there are also studies where rhetorical devices have not shown such effect. The present study sets out to explore whether readers’ knowledge of rhetorical devices (that is, rhetorical competence) moderates their effectiveness beyond general comprehension skills and, consequently, whether rhetorical competence may be considered a component skill of reading comprehension. 192 sixth- to seventh-grade students were assessed on rhetorical competence and were required to read a difficult marked text with specific rhetorical devices (a refutation, an objective, and four organizational signals) or the same text without them. After reading, students produced a summary in order to obtain three dependent variables: main ideas (as a measure of participants’ ability to select relevant information from the text), causal links between them (as an indicator of participants’ ability to grasp the logical structure of the text and to organize its ideas), and the combination of main ideas plus causal links (as an indicator of participants’ global comprehension of the text). Analyses controlling for general comprehension skills and other important variables (working memory, prior knowledge, decoding) demonstrated that: (a) readers of the marked text scored higher in terms of all dependent variables, and (b) rhetorical competence level moderated the effect of rhetorical devices on the composite measure (main ideas plus causal links) and on the organization of the summary by means of causal links.