The effects of teacher-introduced multimodal representations and discourse on students’ task engagement and scientific language during cooperative,inquiry-based science

The study sought to determine the effects of teacher-introduced multimodal representations and discourse on students’ task engagement and scientific language during cooperative, inquiry-based science. The study involved eight Year 6 teachers in two conditions (four very effective teachers and four effective teachers) who taught two units of inquiry-based science across two school terms. The results show that the very effective teachers spent significantly more time engaged in using embodied representations to illustrate points or communicate information. They also spent significantly more time engaged in interrogating students’ understandings and scaffolding and challenging their thinking than the effective teachers. In turn, the students in the very effective teachers’ classes spent significantly more time on-task and used significantly more relevant basic and scientific language to explain the phenomena they were investigating than their peers in the effective teachers’ classes. These are behaviours and language that are associated with successful learning in science.     

Secondary Education and Research in New Zealand

Through the 1990s the secondary sector was a site of considerable change as the Government sought to ensure that the curriculum and associated assessment practices were designed to meet student needs and the long-term goals of New Zealand society. The new regime aimed to promote student achievement and in particular to attain more equitable educational outcomes for all New Zealand students. These were policy rather than practice driven initiatives that linked somewhat tenuously to research based evidence. This paper begins by giving an overview of the secondary sector in New Zealand and these educational reforms. The overview sets the context for the following section that describes links between educational research, policy and practice during this time. Key issues within the sector are highlighted and some of the ways research has been used to monitor changes and inform policy are identified. It is argued that much of the research over the past decade has been small scale and short term and while this has served the immediate policy agenda it has provided only fragmentary evidence to inform longer term goals such as improving student performance. The paper concludes by discussing some of the current initiatives that might contribute to improving the interface between research and policy/practice in secondary education. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Teachers' scaffolding behaviours during cooperative learning

This paper outlines the types of verbal interactions teachers engage in to challenge children's thinking and problem‐solving during cooperative learning. The paper also provides examples of how children model many of the verbal interactions they have seen demonstrated in their discourse with each other. It appears that when teachers are explicit in the types of thinking they want children to engage in, it encourages children to be more focused and explicit in the types of help they provide. Understanding the key role that teachers play in promoting thinking and problem‐solving in their students is particularly important given that it is the quality of talk that children generate that is a significant predictor of their learning.     

Touching the void: arts education research in Australia

This article is an overview of arts education research in Australia. The authors argue that there is an urgent need for key arts organisations to form strategic partnerships with arts educators to provide stronger research in the area of arts education. This research base would enhance the ability of policymakers, arts administrators and arts educators to argue for a stronger presence for arts education in schools. Many arts educators and researchers believe that engagement with the arts has value beyond the specific arts subjects themselves. International studies have indicated that important cognitive and social processes and capabilities are developed in arts-enriched experiences, which can be particularly significant for students who are at risk, disengaged and/or underachieving. While this realisation has stimulated action in other countries such as China, Singapore and Japan, arts education researchers in Australia currently make do with small-scale and often ad hoc research in an attempt to argue their case. The conclusions and recommendations of this article call for a series of strategic partnerships to touch or even fill the current void in arts education research in Australia.     

Constructivism as a liberal bourgeois discourse

Using the theoretical tools offered through the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper develops a critique of constructivism. Constructivism has assumed a dominance with the field of mathematics education but, as an epistemology, it ignores the social implications of the construction of meaning. It is argued that constructivism is a liberal discourse which valorises the individual construction of meaning. In doing this, the social and political contexts in which mathematical knowledge is located is ignored and the marginalisation of many social and cultural groups is legitimated.     

Contents of Volume 4

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 4     

Activity theory,complexity and sports coaching: an epistemology for a discipline

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it is to advance the case for activity theory (AT) as a credible and alternative lens to view and research sports coaching. Second, it is to position this assertion within the wider debate about the epistemology of coaching. Following a framing introduction, a more comprehensive review of the development and current conceptualisation of AT is given. Here, AT's evolution through three distinct phases and related theorists, namely Vygotsky, Leont'ev and Engeström, is initially traced. This gives way to a more detailed explanation of AT's principal conceptual components, including ‘object’, ‘subject’, ‘tools’ (mediating artefacts), ‘rules’, a ‘community’ and a ‘division of labour’. An example is then presented from empirical work illustrating how AT can be used as a means to research sports coaching. The penultimate section locates such thinking within coaching's current ‘epistemological debate, arguing that the coaching ‘self’ is not an autonomous individual, but a relative part of social and cultural arrangements. Finally, a conclusion summarises the main points made, particularly in terms in presenting the grounding constructivist epistemology of AT as a potential way forward for sports coaching.     

Teacher Actions to Maximize Mathematics Learning Opportunities in Heterogeneous Classrooms

The basic unit of school based mathematics teaching is the lesson. This article is a contribution to understanding teacher actions that facilitate successful lessons, defined as those that engage all students, especially those who may sometimes feel alienated from mathematics and schooling, in productive and successful mathematical thinking and learning. An underlying assumption is that lessons can seek to build a sense in the students that their experience has elements in common with the rest of the class and that this can be done through attention to particular aspects of the mathematical and socio-mathematical goals. We examine three teacher actions that address the mathematical goals: using open-ended tasks, preparing prompts to support students experiencing difficulty, and posing extension tasks to students who finish the set tasks quickly; as well as actions that address the socio-mathematical goals by making classroom processes explicit. To illustrate and elaborate these actions, we describe a particular lesson taught to a heterogeneous upper primary (age 11–12) class.