Women in engineering in Turkey – a large scale quantitative and qualitative examination

The underrepresentation of women in engineering is well known and unresolved. However, Turkey has witnessed a shift in trend from virtually no female participation in engineering to across-the-board proportions that dominate other industrialised countries within the 76 years of the founding of the Turkish Republic. This paper describes the largest known direct cross-sectional study of women in engineering in Turkey with over 800 participants. The methods include survey and facilitated focus groups. The study shows that women in Turkey choose engineering mainly because they enjoy the underlying mathematics and science. There is no gender bias on the part of teachers or fellow students; however, women students believe that they have fewer opportunities than male peers and acutely feel the lack of role models. Working professionals in industry or government perceive that women assume a more indirect, supporting role; however, women overall strongly affirm their selection of engineering despite some negative factors.     

Disciplinary cultures in an Australian college of advanced education

Recently scholars have called for more detailed historical study of the teaching lives of academics across countries, systems and institutions. This article contributes to the research on the professoriate in its widest sense. The article focuses on the disciplinary perspectives and cultures of academic staff employed in one of Australia’s oldest colleges of advanced education during the period 1965–1982. It examines official beliefs, slogans, and truisms, which formed part of these perspectives. Disciplinary perspectives include the academics’ views of the subject, the important problems for the subject, and the criteria of utility of the subject. Australia’s Commonwealth Advisory Committee on Advanced Education saw colleges of advanced education compared to universities enrolling students with different interests, stressing part‐time studies, concentrating on applied courses rather than humanities, being closely attuned to the labour market and workforce needs and being principally teaching institutions. They were to be equal but different to universities, but came to be viewed as equal but cheaper. A crucial issue is the extent to which the disciplinary perspectives of college of advanced education academics matched those that the legislators envisaged.     

Assessing the Practicum in teacher education – Do we want candidates and mentors to agree?

One of the most important components of teacher education is the practical part, the Practicum, and assessment of the candidates’ performance plays a major part in forming the future generation of teachers. Little is known about the extent of agreement between the two main actors in the Practicum, the candidates and the school-based teacher educators. The aim of this paper is to add information about a rather blurred area of assessment in teacher education. The findings indicate there is a considerably extent of disagreement about assessment in the Practicum between the mentors and the candidates. It is suggested that instead of seeing the disagreements merely as obstacles to valid assessment, they can be exploited to initiate professional learning for the candidates.     

Current Status of Research in Teaching and Learning Evolution: II. Pedagogical Issues

This is the second of two articles that address recent scholarship about teaching and learning about evolution. This second review seeks to summarize this state of affairs and address the implications of this work for the classroom by addressing four basic questions: (1) What is evolution?/What components of the theory are important at the introductory level? (2) Why do students and members of the public at large need to understand evolution? (3) What makes evolution difficult to teach and learn? and (4) What promising instructional approaches have been developed and tested? The paper will also focus on concerns about both the research designs and the measures used in this work. Based on this review, I will then propose a set of pedagogical implications and recommendations for the classroom instructor and call for studies to address specific gaps identified.     

Student audiences for international broadcasts

This field experiment identified two types of television programmers—High Risk and Low Risk. Information processing differed in judgment‐formation and decision‐making conditions.