Children's Temperament and Academic Skill Development During First Grade: Teachers' Interaction Styles as Mediators

The present study followed 156 Finnish children (M_age = 7.25 years) during the first grade of primary school to examine to what extent parent‐ and teacher‐rated temperament impacts children's math and reading skill development during the first grade, and the extent to which this impact would be mediated by teachers' interaction styles with the children. The results showed that the impact of children's low task orientation and negative emotionality on their math skill development was mediated via teachers' behavioral control and, among girls, also by psychological control. The negative impact of children's inhibition on math skill development, in turn, was not mediated via teachers' interaction styles. Temperament did not predict the children's reading skill development during first grade.     

An analysis of burnout and job satisfaction between Turkish headteachers and teachers

This study attempted to explore Turkish headteachers’ and teachers’ burnout and job satisfaction relating to work status, gender and years work-experiences. The purpose of this study is to find out whether there is difference between headteachers’ and teachers’ burnout and job satisfaction in terms of work status, gender and years work-experiences. In this study, quantitative approach was used. A total of 290 subjects (80 headteachers and 210 teachers) responded to the survey. As research instruments, the Job Satisfaction Scale (JSS) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), were used to measure dimensions of headteachers’ and teachers’ burnout. The study results indicated that headteachers have more job dissatisfaction and depersonalisation than teachers. Males have less emotional exhaustion but higher depersonalisation than their female counterparts. Subjects participated in this study seemed to be different on depersonalisation and personal accomplishment dimensions on the scale in relation to their work years. More experienced subjects have higher depersonalisation and less job satisfaction than their less experienced counterparts. In contrast, more experienced subjects have higher personal accomplishment than the others.     

Between a rock and a hard place: decolonising religious and human rights education

ABSTRACT

Human rights education and Islamic education are typically presented as finished products without room for critique that do not always align with local and personal realities, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes called ‘decoupling’. To examine the ways in which decoupling might occur in one setting, this proposed article reports on the results of a quantitative study that analysed the responses of 470 education students at a university in Kuwait who were asked to rate on a 4-point scale their level of agreement with statements of women’s rights in general terms and in specific situations. Mean differences in their responses to women’s rights in general were compared to their responses to women’s rights, in particular, using a one-sample t-test, along with comparisons of demographic differences in responses analysed using ANOVA. The results showed that the students agreed with women’s rights in general but there was significantly less agreement with women’s rights in particular, suggesting that even on an individual level, a decoupling effect takes place when translating universalised value systems, like human rights and religion, to local realities.     

UNIVERSITY TEACHERS’ CONCEPTIONS OF GOOD TEACHING IN THE UNITS OF HIGH-QUALITY EDUCATION

This article explores teachers in the units of high quality education in Finland. It focuses on three questions. First, What are conceptions of good teaching of teachers teaching in the quality units? Second, What do they consider important in their teaching? And third, What is the relation between teachers’ conceptions and the criteria used in the quality unit selection? Findings reveal that teachers’ conceptions of good teaching are in line with the theories of good teaching and with the main selection criteria of the quality units in Finland. Still, the role of appropriate assessment is not emphasised by the teachers.     

Students’ collaboration in technology-enhanced reciprocal peer tutoring as an approach towards learning mathematics

Education and Information Technologies - Technology-enhanced Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) was carried out with Finnish, nine to ten year-old primary school students (N=40). The RPT as a method of...     

Understanding Early Childhood Science Education: Comparative Analysis of Australian and Finnish Curricula

Research in Science Education - This research is a comparative study of Finnish and Australian science curricula in early childhood education (EC). The study aims to figure out the constructivist...     

What's sexy? Adolescent girls discuss confidence,danger, and media influence

Building on qualitative research about sexualisation by media and culture and the impact on girls' development, in this article we present a discourse analysis of three focus groups of teen girls of colour and of diverse ethnicities asked to talk about sexiness. We focus on the ways the girls both support and resist hegemonic discourses about femininity and sexuality as well as on the discursive strategies used by the girls to separate sexiness from lack of respectability and present themselves as both knowing consumers of media and passive responders. The girls constructed sexiness in three ways that we refer to as interpretive repertoires and analyse each for paradoxes, contradictions, and resistance to mainstream conceptualisations of sexiness. These are sexy as confident; disadvantages and advantages to sexy; and sexy as sold to you.     

Study-strategy use in learning from text. Does gender make any difference?

Two studies explored the existence of gender differences in spontaneous study-strategies use while learning from texts. In Study I, the Learning-from-text test (LFT), intended to measure deep-level text comprehension skills by high-school graduates, was about philosophy (n = 200) and in Study II about statistics (n = 487).The results of two sets of data showed significant gender-associated differences in strategy use: female participants used overt study strategies, in particular notetaking more often than male participants. However, no differences between men and women in comprehending either statistical or philosophical texts were found. It was concluded that different study strategies more than gender differentiate the learning outcomes.     

Reading comprehension difficulty is often distinct from difficulty in reading fluency and accompanied with problems in motivation and school well-being

Abstract

This paper examined if difficulty in reading comprehension (PISA) is distinct from difficulty in reading fluency and if the distinct types of reading difficulties are differently associated with learning motivation, school burnout, and school enjoyment. The participants were 1324 Finnish ninth graders. Findings suggested that difficulties in reading comprehension are often distinct from difficulties in reading fluency. Three reading difficulty groups were identified: (1) poor readers with both fluency and reading comprehension difficulties (n?=?46, 3.5%), (2) slow readers with only fluency difficulties (n?=?70, 5.3%), and (3) poor comprehenders with only reading comprehension difficulties (n?=?88, 6.5%). The slow readers had low scores only in reading-related motivation. Poor comprehenders and poor readers reported low motivation also in math and science, as well as higher level of burnout and lower school enjoyment than typical readers. The findings were similar for boys and girls.