Effect of professional development on teaching behaviors and efficacy in Qatari educational reforms

Qatar is undergoing major educational reform that is shifting its educational policy toward an instructional orientation grounded in constructivism and student-centered instruction. Differences in cultural conceptions of knowledge acquisition and the purpose of education are examined to highlight challenges to Qatar’s reform implementation efforts. Self-efficacy theory is reviewed to provide a theoretical framework for our examination of the adequacy of professional development to impact teacher efficacy for implementing reform-based teaching practices. Teaching behaviors in line with the reform and teacher efficacy were quantitatively measured before and after professional development for treatment and control groups. Regression methods were used to examine the impact of professional development on the relationship between teaching behaviors and teacher efficacy. Results indicate a significant interaction effect; for teachers who received the training, the relationship between behaviors and teacher efficacy was negative, while for teachers in the control group this relationship was positive. Implications of the findings for teacher efficacy and professional development are discussed.     

Refutational text and multiple external representations as a method to remediate the misinterpretation of box plots

The ability to interpret graphs is highly important in modern society, but has proven to be a challenge for many people. In this paper, two teaching methods were used to remediate one specific misinterpretation: the area misinterpretation of box plots. First, we used refutational text to explicitly state and invalidate the area misinterpretation of box plots. Second, we used multiple external representations (MERs): Histograms were used as an overlay on box plots in order to give students a better insight in the way box plots represent data distributions. Third, we combined refutational text and MERs. We found that refutational text was successful in improving students’ interpretation of box plots, but that the use of MERs did not improve students’ interpretation of box plots. The addition of MERs also did not increase the effect of refutational text.     

Ambidextrous Scholarship: A Review Essay

This essay reviews three recent works in the field of philosophy of education, each of which brings the work of a major philosophical thinker to bear on contemporary topics within education: Michael Peters, ed., Heidegger, Education, and Modernity ; Randall Curren, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education ; and Mordechai Gordon, ed., Hannah Arendt and Education . I argue that these works are representative of a current trend in educational philosophers' ideas, including their political, social, and ethical philosophy. This approach to philosophy of education differs in significant ways from past approaches, in which the connection between philosophy and education was conceived narrowly. In the works under consideration here, education is not understood as an isolated field that is connected to philosophy only through a concerted effort; rather, education is understood as a presence within the broad constellation of philosophical questions. These books therefore not only shed light on educational matters, but they also demonstrate an elegant way to bring together theory and practice, mind and body, philosophy and education.     

Effects of postconditioning inflation on odor + taste compound conditioning

The within-compound association approach has been proposed as an account of synergistic conditioning in flavor aversion learning. One prediction from the within-compound association approach is that following taste + odor compound conditioning, postconditioning inflation of one element of the compound should increase responding to the second element. In four experiments with rats, the AX+/A+ design was used to determine whether postconditioning inflation of A would increase responding to X. In Experiments 1 and 3, responding to X was significantly stronger after AX+/A+ conditioning, as compared with AX+ conditioning. In Experiments 2 and 4, the specificity of the inflation effect was demonstrated, because AX+/A+ conditioning produced a stronger aversion to X than did AX+/B+ conditioning. Furthermore, it appears that the taste + odor association is symmetrical because inflation of the taste aversion increased responding to the odor (Experiments 1 and 2) and inflation of the odor aversion increased responding to the taste (Experiments 3 and 4).     

Prediction of School Outcomes Based on Early Language Production and Socioeconomic Factors

Early differences in family SES, child language production, and IQ were related to outcomes in early elementary school in the present prospective, 10-year longitudinal study. In a prior study of family interactional variables associated with language learning, major differences in parenting (i.e., time, attention, and talking) were found to be associated with differences in child productive vocabulary between 7 to 36 months of age, and child IQ, favoring higher-SES parents. Lower-SES children were exposed less often than higher-SES children to diverse vocabulary through their parents' attention and talking, and they were prohibited from talking more often. In the current study, 32 children involved in the earlier study were repeatedly assessed between 5 to 10 years of age, while in kindergarten through third grade. Results indicated that SES-related differences in child language prior to school were predictive of subsequent verbal ability, receptive and spoken language, and academic achievement assesed on standardized tests in kindergarten through grade 3. However, none of the predictor variables were related to direct measures of elementary schooling. When combined with a composite SES indicator, early child language production significantly increased the variance accounted for in the prediction of elementary language and academic competencies in each subsequent year in elementary school. Implications are discussed in terms of the stability of performance on language and academic performance measures of children who entered school with different early language learning experiences, and the need to consider early home- and school-based intervention designed to prevent or ameliorate these trends.     

Insights from a social model of literacy and disability

This article considers the role of literacy in the lives of four people with physical disabilities. Interviews with them reveal that despite experiencing potential barriers to participating in literacy activities, literacy is nevertheless an important dimension to their identities. Limitations of the traditional models of disability and literacy are explored and alternative, social models are found to offer a more helpful framework, in which engagement with text is seen in the context of people's lives. It is suggested that interventionists still have some way to go before their practice will fully reflect these perspectives.     

Developing teacher knowledge using a tool for creating tasks for the classroom

In this paper we illustrate the use of a tool from a teaching programme with one year graduate students. This tool is designed to help them to develop tasks for the classroom. It is described in its three stages, for analysing mathematics, for connecting the curriculum, and for informing in-the-moment shifts. We finally discuss the role of tools in developing a pedagogy for teacher education.     

Prospects of adolescent students collaborating with teachers in addressing issues of bullying and conflict in schools

Advice to schools on countering bullying has emphasised the need for a whole school approach. This implies close collaboration between students and teachers. Little attention, however, has been paid to how students view the prospects of such collaboration. Two student surveys (n=7091 and n=632) were conducted among Australian adolescent schoolchildren, average age 14 years. The results suggest that approximately 40% of the students believed that teachers were not usually interested in taking action to stop bullying and a similar proportion were either opposed or unsure whether they should collaborate. Multiple regression analysis indicated that students who were more involved in bully/victim encounters as either as bullies or as victims were more likely than others to disparage the conflict resolution skills of teachers. In addition, bullies were particularly inclined to judge teachers as unfair in their behaviour toward students. The implications of these findings for the implementation of whole school approaches to conflict and bullying and for teacher education are discussed.     

Automated Selection of Robust Individual-Level Structural Equation Models for Time Series Data

In order to analyze intensive longitudinal data collected across multiple individuals, researchers frequently have to decide between aggregating all individuals or analyzing each individual separately. This paper presents an R package, gimme, which allows for the automatic specification of individual-level structural equation models that combine group-, subgroup-, and individual-level information. This R package is a complement of the GIMME program currently available via a combination of MATLAB and LISREL. By capitalizing on the flexibility of R and the capabilities of the existing structural equation modeling package lavaan, gimme allows for the automated specification and estimation of group-, subgroup-, and individual-level relations in time series data from within a structural equation modeling framework. Applications include daily diary data as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging data.