Toward an understanding of how teachers change during school reform: Considerations for educational leadership and school improvement

As the concept of distributed leadership and its concomitant organizational structures become more prevalent in schools, studying how teacher capacity can be enhanced and can be used as a catalyst for reform is important. This article documents the nature of how the implementation of a research-validated reform influenced what teachers thought about their own teaching, student achievement, and expectations. A case study approach documented the experiences of elementary school teachers in a high poverty, historically low-performing elementary school as they implemented a researched-validated instructional reform targeting the most at-risk students in the school. The teachers experienced significant professional growth that encompassed self-doubt, resistance, acceptance, and finally advocacy. Implications for the practices that define educational leadership and school improvement are discussed in light of how successful reform can improve teacher capacity.     

Bridging History of the Concept of Function with Learning of Mathematics: Students’ Meta-Discursive Rules,Concept Formation and Historical Awareness

In this paper we present a matrix-organised implementation of an experimental course in the history of the concept of a function. The course was implemented in a Danish high school. One of the aims was to bridge history of mathematics with the teaching and learning of mathematics. The course was designed using the theoretical frameworks of a multiple perspective approach to history, Sfard’s theory of thinking as communicating, and theories from mathematics education about concept image, concept definition and concept formation. It will be explained how history and extracts of original sources by Euler from 1748 and Dirichlet from 1837 were used to (1) reveal students’ meta-discursive rules in mathematics and make them objects of students’ reflections, (2) support students’ learning of the concept of a function, and (3) develop students’ historical awareness. The results show that it is possible to diagnose (some) of students’ meta-discursive rules, that some of the students acted according to meta-discursive rules that coincide with Euler’s from the 1700s, and that reading a part of a text by Dirichlet from 1837 created obstacles for the students that can be referenced to differences in meta-discursive rules. The experiment revealed that many of the students have a concept image that was in accordance with Euler’s rather than with our modern concept definition and that they have process oriented thinking about functions. The students’ historical awareness was developed through the course with respect to actors’ influence on the formation of mathematical concepts and the notions of internal and external driving forces in the historical development of mathematics.     

Valid inferences of teachers’ judgements of pupils’ reading literacy: does formal teacher competence matter?

The primary aim of this study was to investigate whether and, if so, how formal teacher competence relates to the relationship between pupil reading achievement and teachers judgements’ of pupils’ reading achievement. The data come from the Swedish participation in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001 in Grade 3. Information was obtained from pupils (N = 5271) and teachers (N = 351). Analyses were conducted using multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM) with random slopes. Teacher competence was operationalized using multiple observed indicators and defined as a latent variable. A higher correspondence between teacher judgements and pupil reading achievement for teachers with higher competence was found. The results highlight the importance of teacher competence in assessment practice.     

Students' Argumentative Writing Skills in Science and First-Language Education: Commonalities and differences

The ability to build arguments is a crucial skill and a central educational goal in all school subjects including science as it enables students to formulate reasoned opinions and thus to cope with the increasing complexity of knowledge. In the present cross-sectional study, we examined the domain-specificity of argumentative writing in science by comparing it with a rather general type of argumentation as promoted in first-language education and with formal reasoning to gain insight into different forms of argumentation on theoretical and empirical levels. Using a paper-and-pencil test, we analyzed written argumentations and the reasoning abilities of 3,274 Grade-10 students in German secondary schools. Correlation and multiple regression analyses as well as a qualitative analysis of students' answers to a subset of tasks in the domains of science and first-language education were conducted. Results showed moderate relations between argumentation in science, argumentation in first-language education, and reasoning. Half of the variance in argumentation in science was explained by individual differences in argumentation in first-language education and reasoning. Furthermore, the examination of written arguments revealed differences, for example, in students' weighing of pros and cons. We assume that the familiarity of the underlying scientific information may play an essential role in the argumentation process and posit that it needs to be investigated in more detail. Overall, the study indicates that investigating the argumentational abilities of learners in first-language education and reasoning abilities can help to shed light on the domain-specificity of argumentation in science.     

No child,no school,no state left behind: schooling in the age of accountability 1

Why and under which conditions do international student assessment programmes like PISA have success? How can the results of these assessments be useful for advocates of different, even contradictory, policies? What might explain different patterns of using assessment as a tool for school governance? Drawing on historical and comparative research, and using PISA as an example, this paper provides a frame for discussing these and other questions around the international rise of accountability as a key tool of social change. The basic argument is that even though accountability is a global phenomenon, the ways and means of enacting and encountering accountability are not. How accountability is experienced depends on deeply engrained ‘constitutional mind‐sets’, i.e. diverse cultures of conceptualizing the relation between the public and its institutions.     

Formal Teacher Competence and its Effect on Pupil Reading Achievement

The main aim of this study was to investigate the impact of formal teacher competence on pupils' reading achievement. The data comes from the Swedish participation in PIRLS 2001 in grade 3. Information was obtained from pupils (n = 5271) and teachers (n = 351). The analyses were conducted using 2-level structural equation modeling. Teacher competence was operationalized with multiple observed indicators and defined as a latent variable. Two measures of achievement were used: PIRLS 2001 reading test results and teacher judgement of pupil performance in the Swedish language. The results reveal that teacher competence was positively and similarly related to both achievement measures. No selection effects in terms of pupil socioeconomic status were found. The current study provides evidence for a strong impact of teacher competence on pupil reading achievement.     

Some Reflections on Motivating Situations and Situational Teaching

Debates about the crisis of school teaching in the Western world have focused more on education as a state of the art and on psychological problems of either teachers or pupils than on situational features which are of importance for teaching and learning situations. In applying K. R. Popper's propensity theory and his idea of situational logic, a preliminary analysis of problem situations is attempted with the aim of identifying biopsychological situational elements in children's preschool life‐conditions that could be simulated at school in their first years thereby enabling them to draw upon already acquired knowledge and skills. Two principal ways of acquiring experience — one instructive, the other selective — are described and discussed in relation to learning, exploration and play. It is argued that, while selection procedures are found in exploration, play and the like, instruction procedures are most often used in teaching situations despite growing evidence that instruction learning is less motivating than learning by action and selection, as various experiences with situational teaching indicate.     

The Development of Word‐decoding Skills in Young Readers

Most of the research on the acquisition of word‐decoding skills has almost exclusively focused on the ability to read words in isolation. The purpose of this article is to extend our knowledge to the independent role of phonological and orthographic word‐decoding skills in the reading tasks which children encounter in school. The data were quite consistent with the general core of models suggesting that children first become proficient in phonological decoding then gradually shift towards a more direct orthographic‐decoding strategy. As such, these findings have helped to generalize models of the acquisition of word‐decoding skills to reading comprehension.     

How Simple is the Simple View of Reading?

According to the Simple View of Reading, reading ability can be divided into decoding and language comprehension. In the present study, decoding and comprehension's contribution to reading ability was studied both in children with reading difficulties and in children with typical reading ability. Decoding and comprehension was further divided into sub-components, and the contribution from non-verbal ability and general processing speed was also studied. The results demonstrated that decoding made the largest contribution to reading ability for children with reading difficulties, while language comprehension contributed the most for children with typical reading ability. The contribution of non-verbal ability was not significant, and general processing speed only made a significant contribution to decoding for typical children. The two factors in the Simple View of Reading, decoding and comprehension, together explained less of the variance in reading ability for children with reading difficulties than for children with typical reading ability.