Sources of Job Satisfaction in Science Secondary School Teachers in Chile

The paper aims to augment the limited literature on teacher job satisfaction in developing countries, specifically in Chile. The nature of job satisfaction in Chilean secondary science teachers is investigated and causes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction identified. Teachers mentioned most often their satisfaction with interactions with students, relationships held within the school and opportunities to contribute to the development of society, future generations or the individual. Sources of dissatisfaction are poor salary, excessive workload, student characteristics, resources and infrastructure. Associations between teachers' characteristics (age, gender, experience), the type of school administration and job satisfaction are also made and suggestions on how to address the issues of teacher satisfaction and dissatisfaction are discussed.     

The changing demand for higher education in the seventies: Adaptations within three national systems

Aspects of decline in the demand for higher education have become apparent in most Western systems of higher education in the mid-seventies. Although these are usually associated with deteriorating labor markets and falling relative earnings of university graduates, analyses of enrollment trends in Belgium, the United States and France reveal that other factors have an important influence upon enrollment levels. In the comparatively elite Belgian university system the maintenance of rigorous academic standards in secondary schools and the universities appears to be responsible for the stagnation in enrollments since 1971. The surprising decline in the enrollment rates of white males in the United States seems to be due to both worsening labor markets and declining academic achievement levels. French university students have responded to the devaluation of university degrees by decreasing the time and effort applied to university study; but even under these circumstances the traumas of the 1976 confrontation have apparently discouraged potential students from enrolling. These developments suggest that the expansion of higher education has reached a set of inherent limitations created by social conditions and educational organization; and that inducing further expansion would do little to raise real educational levels or further social advancement.     

The formal setting as context for cognitive activities. An empirical study of arithmetic operations under conflicting premisses for communication

The general concern of the present article is to contribute to an understanding of the contextual determination of cognitive activities. More specifically, the focus of the empirical research reported has been to study how pupils define and deal with cognitive tasks in situations that are recognised as pedagogical in character. Within the context of their everyday mathematics teaching, 206 twelve year old primary school pupils were given work sheets containing elementary arithmetic problems. The experimental treatment consisted of introducing (through headings and instructions) pedagogical definitions of problems that were in conflict with the nature of the problems themselves. The results indicate that the predefinitions of cognitive activities typical of educational contexts have a strong impact on the way problems are dealt with. Clear differences could be discerned between groups at different achievement levels in the extent to which the cues present in pedagogical contexts were used in defining the problem. A crucial aspect of what are conventionally conceived as differences in mathematical ability seems, judging from the present results, to have more to do with the capacity to decipher ambiguous communicative situations than with the mastery of a mathematical algorithm per se.     

Employability and mobility in the valorisation of higher education qualifications: the experiences and reflections of Chinese students and graduates

ABSTRACT

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of higher education in Mainland China and Taiwan, recording a significant increase in higher education enrolments in these two Chinese societies. The massification of higher education in China and Taiwan has inevitably resulted in an oversupply of university graduates, with growing social concerns for skills mismatches being found in the labour market, stagnant graduate employment and social mobility. This article critically examines how university students and graduates in these two Chinese societies reflect upon their employment experiences. Human capital theory predicts that other things being equal, raising participation in higher education will initially increase inequality as rates of return rise, and then it will reduce inequality as expansion reaches mass levels and rates of return decline. If the output of graduates outpaces the demand for their skills, which appears to be the current case in many countries, then supply and demand pressures reduce the pay premium for degrees and lower income inequalities. However, this study clearly demonstrates that the massification and the universalisation of higher education in Mainland China and Taiwan, respectively, have actually intensified inequality.     

Studies of information processing rates in science learning and related cognitive variables. II: A first approximation to estimating a relationship between science reasoning skills and information acquisition

Performance in science reasoning tasks is a significant objective in modem science instruction and increasing emphasis is being placed on the development of higher cognitive processes in science education. An empirical analysis of the relationship between science reasoning skills and the amount of information acquired during science learning as predicted by a neuromathematical model of information processing is presented. As the neuromathematical model includes a variable representing verbal ability, it is to be expected that a direct relationship exists between the amount of knowledge gained as predicted by the model and reasoning ability. The purpose of this research is to derive a formal quantitative statement for the relationship between knowledge acquisition predicted by the neuromathematical equation and scientific reasoning skills. A linear regression equation is obtained relating performance on a science reasoning task to the amount of information acquired as predicted by the neuromathematical model. This research provides a first approximation to providing a theoretical and empirical link between information processing and higher cognitive thought processes in science education.     

How linguistically‐informed are phonics programmes?

Successive UK government policies have strengthened the phonics element of the National Curriculum for English in England. The policies have included inviting publishers to submit completed self‐assessments of their systematic phonics programmes. The self‐assessment criteria focus on what is deemed to be ‘high‐quality provision’, as defined in the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading chaired by Jim Rose. The programmes whose self‐assessments were judged to be accurate by small panels of independent evaluators have been subsequently listed on a central government website. The authors have acted as independent evaluators in this process and, between them, had the opportunity to inspect the content of over 100 phonics programmes. They have noted that many of these programmes (most of which did not meet the Rose criteria) contained numerous linguistic inaccuracies, particularly in relation to the English spelling system and its grapheme‐phoneme correspondences. The existence, number and range of these errors jeopardise policy implementation and National Curriculum delivery and pose risks for the quality of teaching and learning. The article suggests some reasons for these findings in related published debates and in policy documents, and that phonics programmes need to be more linguistically‐informed. The article concludes with some implications for practice.     

The Effect of Fine Motor Skill Activities on Kindergarten Student Attention

This study explored the effect of fine motor skill activities on the development of attention in kindergarteners (n = 68) in five classes at a suburban public school in the Intermountain West through a pretest/posttest experimental group (n = 36) control group (n = 32) design. All children received the regular curriculum which included typical fine motor activities such as painting, coloring, writing, and play activities with small items. The treatment was a series of supplemental fine motor activities in which children used tongs, tweezers, and spoons to move small items. The assessment was the attention subtest of the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) (Naglieri, J. A., & Das, J. P. (1997a). Cognitive assessment system. Itasca, IL: Riverside). A significant group × sex interaction with females positively responding to the treatment was found, suggesting that fine motor skill activities are effective in increasing female kindergartners’ attention. Further studies exploring effective materials for males and factors such as student choice and interest are needed.     

Teachers’ assessments of students’ learning of mathematics

This paper reports a study of the classroom assessment practices of 12 sixth form college mathematics teachers in Malta. It explores the extent to which these teachers are knowledgeable about their students’ learning of mathematics and the implications that this has for their classroom practices. It reveals that these teachers’ knowledge of their students’ understanding of certain mathematical concepts is fairly limited. It then goes on to discuss this phenomenon in terms of a process that can hinder rather than promote learning. The research illuminates the position of teachers who appear to lack certain detailed information about their students which, it can be argued, could inform more effective teaching strategies. The paper concludes by exploring possible implications for similar situations where learning could be enhanced by more effective classroom assessment strategies and their use to inform future teaching and learning activities.