Benefits of collaborative action research for the beginning teacher

Beginning teachers are confronted with many issues as they begin their teaching careers, issues, such as classroom management, individual differences, behaviour problems, dealing with parents, and so on. Many beginning teachers take professional development seminars in an attempt to deal with these and other issues. Professional development seminars, however, may not address the specific issues faced by beginning teachers but rather focus on approaches that are more global. In this paper, we argue that the best approach to professional development is through a collaborative action research model. By extending the partnerships established between student teachers, mentor teachers and university supervisors during student teaching into the beginning teachers' career, many of the everyday problems can be confronted within a supportive network. Several recommendations are offered for beginning and maintaining productive CAR relationships.     

Girls’ participation in post‐16 mathematics: a view from pupils in Wales

A number of studies have highlighted that anxiety, confidence and enjoyment are influential factors on students’ participation in mathematics, and in particular girls’ participation. This paper, based upon data collected as part of a PhD thesis, examines the effect of these influences on pupil choices within different types of secondary schools in Wales and, rather interestingly, the findings show that such factors are significantly less marked in one category of school in Wales. Girls were more likely than boys to report feelings of anxiety and a lack of confidence in mathematics in all schools in Wales, apart from in Language Streamed schools. Furthermore, students in the Language Streamed schools were most likely to enjoy mathematics compared to pupils in other schools in Wales. Reasons for such findings are related to certain school practices. Smaller classes, retaining a teacher and teacher gender all appear to have positive benefits on girls’ and boys’ attitudes towards mathematics.     

Encouraging IT students to get serious about assignment writing: evaluation of a Web-based initiative

Traditionally, students attending university have received support for their assignment writing within a face-to-face framework. Academic writing support delivered via the Internet needs to be rendered in very subject-specific terms for the resource to be perceived as valuable. This paper reports on a project involving writing support staff and a computer science subject leader to develop and evaluate a Web-based academic skills tutorial. The tutorial sought to provide online learning support for interpreting an information technology (IT) assignment topic, extracting information from sources, and integrating the material into a report with the support of online lexical tools. The evaluation sought to determine whether the students found the resource helpful, if improvements were still required, and what implications there were for integrating the resource with subject teaching. Students perceived most value in those sections of the resource that provided them with examples and models, and least in those that required them to engage in interactive activity.     

Critical review of the TEMAS: A step within the development of thematic apperception instruments

The TEMAS (acronym for Tell‐Me‐a‐Story)—an objectively scored, projective thematic personality instrument for children and adolescents—is analyzed, reviewed, and critiqued with regard to theoretical underpinnings and rationale for development, administration, scoring, psychometric properties, and research to date. The TEMAS appears to be an improvement over existing projective personality measures used by school psychologists. Although it requires more training than other projective techniques, competency in administration, scoring, and interpretation can be achieved within a one semester course in personality assessment. The test has evidence of reliability and validity, and it is a multicultural alternative to the TAT and other thematic apperception instruments. The use of the TEMAS by psychologists may achieve more accurate assessment of Black and Hispanic children. Limitations include geographically limited standardization samples and little research conducted by individuals other than the authors. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.