Management of Innovations from a Cultural-Individual Perspective

The history of education and schooling is characterised by not only the attainment of results but also ongoing critique of the existing situation in education and schooling. Developers and researchers are, as a result, constantly seeking new strategies and methods for the improved implementation of innovations in actual educational practice. The central question is which factors and which conditions facilitate the effects of innovations. In an attempt to answer this question, many educators will not so much be concerned with objective structural factors such as available funds, classmates, et cetera. They will be concerned, rather, with the questions of which socially constructed realities and which particular forms of involvement on the part of teachers, school administrators, and counsellors facilitate successful innovation. In our search for an answer to these questions, moreover, we will be guided by a cultural-individual perspective on innovation. Traditional innovative strategies – and, in particular, large scale strategies – seem not always suitable to deal with today's educational problems. Alternative scenario's for the management of innovations are considered.     

Coherence,dissonance, and personal style in learning to teach

Concern that practical realities in classrooms will ‘trump’ theories has led some universities to design residency teacher education programs that maximize coherence between university coursework and field experiences. Yet, some research suggests that student teachers can learn from dissonance. This qualitative case study of one cohort in an urban teacher residency program that sought to maximize coherence asks how the apprentice teachers experienced connections between the university and the field. Although apprentices experienced dissonance, they nonetheless expressed coherent philosophies aligned with university values. Coherence was something that individual apprentices constructed for themselves as they developed a personal ‘style’ or way of teaching in a program that welcomed their prior identities. Coherence was achieved through early development of a personal professional identity, not perfect alignment between field and university.     

Children with Down Syndrome Sharing Past Personal Event Narratives with Their Teacher Aides: A Pilot Study

Personal narrative ability is crucial for social–emotional well-being and classroom participation. This study investigated the ability of 10 school-age participants with Down syndrome to share past personal experiences with their teacher aides in their school environment. To participate, children were required to speak in short sentences and be largely intelligible to unfamiliar listeners. Personal narratives were elicited using photo prompts, comprising a set of the child’s own photographs and a standard set of photographs and accompanying verbal prompts, utilising a clinical language sampling protocol. Personal narratives were analysed on quality, syntactic complexity, verbal fluency and intelligibility. Examiner behaviour was evaluated for measures of syntactic complexity, mean turn length in utterances and number of utterances. Results indicated significant difficulties in producing quality personal narratives in both photo conditions. Examiner behaviour was negatively correlated to the participants’ spoken language performance. Clinical implications are highlighted.     

Observing and analyzing children’s mathematical development,based on action theory

Children who experience difficulties with learning mathematics should be taught by teachers who focus on the child’s best way of learning. Analyses of the mathematical difficulties are necessary for fine-tuning mathematics education to the needs of these children. For this reason, an instrument for Observing and Analyzing children’s Mathematical Development (OAMD), based on action theory, has been developed. The use of levels of action is a new insight in the diagnostic process. Using the OAMD makes it possible to explore and analyze a child’s knowledge, proficiency and possible difficulties on four levels of acting in the domain of Number (counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). The research concerns children from kindergarten up to grade three. In this article, we will discuss the purpose and the construction of the instrument with the focus on the usability of the OAMD. The study examines the quality and the diagnostic value of the instrument by means of the internal consistency, the test–retest reliability and the construct validity. The analyses show positive results. The conclusion of the research is that the OAMD is a suitable instrument for the analysis of numerical development of young children and their possible difficulties in this domain.     

The Effect of Subconscious Performance Goals on Academic Performance

We investigated the impact of subconscious goals on academic performance in two field experiments. We show that unobtrusive priming of goals with regard to achievement motivation by means of a photograph improves performance in different educational contexts. High-school students who were exposed to an achievement-related photograph achieved higher grades than students in two control conditions. This effect was not affected by students’ prior performance. University students exposed to a photograph representing a specific, difficult goal reached even higher performance than students taking the exam with a general achievement photograph. For practice, subconscious goals may form a powerful, cost-effective tool to enhance academic performance. However, varying results across the experiments also prompt the need for further investigations of such effects.     

Four and twenty blackbirds: how transcoding ability mediates the relationship between visuospatial working memory and math in a language with inversion

Writing down spoken number words (transcoding) is an ability that is predictive of math performance and related to working memory ability. We analysed these relationships in a large sample of over 25,000 children, from kindergarten to the end of primary school, who solved transcoding items with a computer adaptive system. Furthermore, we investigated the nature of transcoding difficulty of over 300 two- and three-digit numbers. All data come from a Dutch sample, meaning that transcoding is complicated by decade-unit inversion: 24 is pronounced as ‘four-and-twenty’. Omission to invert the digits of a spoken number when writing it down is an inversion error: the incidence of these declined but did not disappear in later elementary school. Furthermore, transcoding ability mediated the relationship between visuospatial working memory and mathematics performance, a strong effect that declined with age. Inversion error making mediated this same relationship in an inverted U-shaped curve, peaking around grade 2 (8 years old). At the item level, structural characteristics related to inversion and irregular pronunciation of units and decades explained a large part of the variance in item difficulty. We conclude that number transcoding is an important ability to develop mathematical proficiency and discuss the implications of these findings.