Students' understanding of cloud and rainbow formation and teachers' awareness of students' performance

This study describes primary school students’ knowledge about rainfall, clouds and rainbow formation together with teachers’ predictions about students’ performance. In our study, primary school students’ (N?=?177) knowledge about rainfall and rainbow formation was examined using structured interviews with open-ended questions. Primary school teachers’ (N?=?110) awareness of students’ understanding was measured with questionnaires and the results will be discussed in relation to teaching experience and the use of different teaching practices. Our results show that students in every grade hold a wide-ranging set of misconceptions that reflect different combinations of their own understanding and learnt scientific knowledge. Teachers tended to overestimate students’ performance and described second-grade students’ knowledge more accurately than fourth- and sixth-grade students’ knowledge. Teachers with less teaching experience were found to less overestimate and more underestimate sixth-grade students’ knowledge than teachers with more teaching experience.     

Unterricht mit digitalen Medien — zwischen Innovation und Tradition?

Konzepte zum Einsatz von digitalen Medien verdeutlichen deren Potenziale hinsichtlich einer Unterstützung des problemorientierten, selbstbestimmten und kooperativen Lehrens und Lernens. Offen ist aber, ob Lehrerinnen und Lehrer dieses Potenzial auch wirklich nutzen. M?glicherweise werden die neuen Medien lediglich in überlieferte Handlungsmuster integriert. Ziel des Forschungsprojekts, über das hier berichtet wird, ist es, einen Beitrag zur Entwicklung einer Theorie zum Lehrerhandeln im Medienzusammenhang zu leisten. Dabei wurden (1) Handlungsmuster von Lehrpersonen beim Einsatz neuer Medien im Unterricht identifiziert und (2) Hypothesen über m?gliche Zusammenh?nge von Handlungsmuster, Medien-Expertisegrad und Fachzugeh?rigkeit generiert. — Es wurden Videoaufnahmen von 20 Unterrichtsstunden mithilfe eines niedrig-inferenten Kategoriensystems analysiert und hinsichtlich zugrundeliegender Grundmuster clusteranalytisch ausgewertet. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass auf einer zugrunde gelegten Skala mit den Polen „instruktional“ und „konstruktivistisch“ unterschiedliche Muster von Lehrerhandeln beim Einsatz digitaler Medien im Unterricht identifiziert werden k?nnen, die sich als traditionell-lehrerzentriert bzw. als innovativ-schülerorientiert beschreiben lassen.     

New structures of power and regulation within ‘distributed’ education policy – the example of the US Common Core State Standards Initiative

Abstract

This article focuses on the growing development towards new forms of ‘distributed’ governance within current large-scale educational reforms. The emphasis is on so-called ‘governance through standards’ as a transformative reform complex which manifests itself in a simultaneous process of regulative destabilisation and (global) reconstruction of policy control. This newly emerging regulative policy ‘ensemble’ is found to be directly related to the growing collaborative activity of cross-field networks between governmental, non-governmental and private actors. Empirically, this article refers to the so-called Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative which has fundamentally reshaped US education policy since 2001. The initiative comprised the negotiation, implementation and controlling of supra-state core skill standards for K-12 education as the benchmark for other regulating instruments such as assessments, monitoring and teacher training. In the context of the CCSS, the aforementioned new structures of regulation can then be located within an entrepreneurial alliance around the non-profit organisation Achieve, Inc. Through its function as a core policy network manager, Achieve generated simultaneous practices of collaboration and distinction, discourse initiation and (invisible) norm stabilisation.     

Pädagogisches Wissen von angehenden Lehrkräften

Whilst experience of testing subject-specific knowledge of prospective and practicing teachers is generally available, the standardized capture of their cross-subject, pedagogic knowledge remains a new field of inquiry. This contribution will present a way of defining and capturing this knowledge with reference to standards for teacher training and insights from general didactic and teaching theory. We focus on five vocational requirements with which teaching staff see themselves confronted: structuring lessons, motivation, dealing with heterogeneity, leading lessons and assessing performance. Using the Rasch-Model, we carried out an empirical study on the structure of cross-subject knowledge based on 802 student teachers. As expected, the model, which differentiates between the five areas of knowledge, reflects the data better than a model, which assumes pedagogic knowledge to have a homogeneous structure. This provides empirical insights into long-going theoretical discussions on pedagogical knowledge. The results also reflect the context of typical learning opportunities in teacher training.     

Towards a topological re-assemblage of education policy? Observing the implementation of performance data infrastructures and ‘centers of calculation’ in Germany

The ongoing trend towards educational globalisation has brought about various dynamics of education policy ‘rescaling’, resulting in a growing number of governmental arrangements, which are operating across traditional scales, levels or sectors of policy. This contribution takes up the conceptual frameworks of topological spatialisation and assemblage theory to better understand the pivotal role of new information technologies, data infrastructures and also the increasing power of ‘centers of calculation’ within education policy reforms that have been implemented in Germany after the launch of the Programme for International Student Assessment.     

Modellierung von Lehrerkompetenzen

This contribution will investigate both the subject-specific and the didactic competencies of trainee teachers for lower secondary education in mathematics on the basis of the study “Mathematics Teaching in the 21st Century (MT21)”, which compares criteria-based samples from Germany, Bulgaria, South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico and the USA. In order to analyze their strengths and weaknesses more precisely, the paper considers both traditional IRT-scaling of competencies, which involves a simple loading of test performance in mathematics and didactics of mathematics, and an alternative. Under the assumption that solving items concerning didactics of mathematics requires competencies in didactics of mathematics and mathematics itself, a double-barreled approach was used in the alternative. In a further elaboration of this model, knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, functions, geometry and stochastic was used as a set of further explanatory factors for solving the items. This third model, which presumes a hierarchical structure of teaching competencies, displays the best data fit. Only this model reflects the specialisms and focal points of the education and training systems in the countries participating in MT21 concerning the relative learning opportunities in mathematics and didactics of mathematics and concerning the five subject areas in the field of mathematics.     

Academic resilience: underlying norms and validity of definitions

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - Academic resilience refers to students’ capacity to perform highly despite a disadvantaged background. Although most studies using...