Documentation for students in residential care: network of relations of human and non-human actants

Swedish and international research points to serious problems for the education of students with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD) in the care of social welfare, for example, in residential care. The aim of this article is to elucidate how documentation, care plans (CPs) and individual educational plans (IEPs) outline the educational prospects for SEBD students in residential care. A more specific aim is to study how the form or template partakes in the production of educational trajectories. Using post-structural theory and the concepts of actor-network theory, this paper highlights the forms or templates as agentive forces in a network with students, parents, teachers and social workers. Documentation reveals few expectations that these teenagers can become capable learners and almost all of the subjects have been given a reduced curriculum. The lack of headings such as ‘Student's or parents’ opinion’ or ‘School subjects’ can be understood as indications that these topics are considered to be of less importance. Individual differences between students disappear when the electronic document enables the use of the exact same phrases and words to describe different students. These results, along with previous research, point to an immediate need to discuss both the form and content of documentation in educational practice and to consider what, for what reason and for whom to document.     

Rhetorical Agency, Resistance, and the Disciplinary Rhetorics of Breastfeeding

Drawing on interviews from a qualitative study, this article extends theorizing about rhetorical agency and resistance by analyzing how breastfeeding advocates and their clients resist medical regulatory rhetoric. The resistant acts that interviewees describe begin with a negotiation of discursive alternatives and subject positions framed by the grid of disciplinary rhetoric about breastfeeding. But in some acts of resistance, breastfeeding women use both discursive and bodily actions to disrupt the intelligibility of this grid and what it deems possible. When such disruption occurs, the results are unpredictable and so must be understood as more than the occupation of preexisting subject positions.     

Special gender studies for engineering?

Today we are confronted with a new challenge in product development: “Diversity” needs to be implemented in the engineering design and development teams. Such diversity means to “mirror” within the teams the characteristics of different customer groups: the two genders, the different age groups, and the different cultural background corresponding to the cultural differences represented in today’s society. Thus the products and services developed in this way are expected to serve more specifically the different customer groups within society. This approach has already been proven successful, {\rm e.g.}, in some areas of car design and consumer goods. Therefore, science and engineering should in this sense become concerned with diversity across society. In particular engineering education needs to focus on different student groups, especially women. Both enterprises and universities have to put emphasis on co-operation in order to achieve such focus on these new and different customers groups. But what sounds so easy in a pragmatic view, becomes more and more difficult under considerations of the traditional patterns in engineering education. It means accepting different motivations and experiences of students, especially women. It means also to accept different ways of teaching and learning and thus, different strategies in both engineering education and research. One way to develop engineering education further as suggested here, shows the new approach of “Gender Studies in Engineering” to be described in this paper.     

Teachers’ student-specific self-efficacy in relation to teacher and student variables

This study aims to show the importance of explicitly identifying student-specific teachers’ self-efficacy. Data from 43 regular teachers who rated their self-efficacy towards 611 fourth-grade students from inclusive classes in Austria were analyzed. In addition, 15 regular teachers and 15 special needs teachers rated their student-specific self-efficacy levels of 136 students. Teachers’ sense of self-efficacy towards individual students was assessed using a short, adapted version of Tschannen-Moran and Woolfolk Hoy’s Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale. Results of multilevel-regression analysis showed that the higher the teachers’ general self-efficacy the higher was their student-specific self-efficacy. In addition, teachers’ student-specific self-efficacy was lower for students whose special needs regarded learning or behavioural and emotional disorders. The outcomes of the study imply that measuring teachers’ self-efficacy specifically for individual students compared to a teachers’ general self-efficacy towards inclusion is an important addition to previous research.     

A closer look at social skills and school performance: students’ peer relations skills and assertion skills as predictors for their written and oral performances

Students’ individual learning is supposed to be based on cognitive and social processes. Therefore, students’ social skills are assumed to play an important role for school performance. This study set out to investigate the links between students’ peer relations skills and assertion skills and their grades for written performances and oral performances. In the middle of the school year, 94 ninth-grade students of a German secondary school reported on their peer relations skills and assertion skills. Additionally, at this point of measurement, students’ initial school performance in German and mathematics was measured by standardized academic achievement tests. In these two subjects, students’ grades in in-class tests and for oral participation were collected during the following 5 months. These grades were given by the students’ respective subject teachers. Path analysis revealed that students’ peer relations skills were positively associated with their grades in in-class tests, but they were not linked to their grades for oral participation. In contrast, students’ assertion skills were positively related to their grades for oral participation, whereas no correlation was found between students’ assertion skills and their grades in in-class tests. These results are discussed with respect to the role of peer relations skills and assertion skills for students’ academic learning and the fostering of these skills in the classroom.     

Key considerations in assessing young children’s emotional competence

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a surge in evidence on preschoolers’ emotional development as crucial for both concurrent and later well-being and mental health, and for learning and academic success. Given the importance of building such strengths, assessing emotional competence skills is important to aid early childhood educators in focusing programming for individuals and classrooms. Based on these assertions, this article is structured as follows: (1) outline important issues regarding developmentally appropriate early childhood assessment, particularly of emotional competence; (2) discuss use of culturally relevant standards of attainment of such skills in assessing student progress; (3) define the skills of emotional competence; (4) describe a model leading from developmentally appropriate emotional competence skills to assessment and programming; (5) suggest some possible tools for schools to use in assessing emotional competence of young children; (6) give guidance for new measurement development, and (7) suggest needed policy and practice in this area.     

The Impact of School Improvement Grants on Student Outcomes: Findings From a National Evaluation Using a Regression Discontinuity Design

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program received more than $3 billion with the goal of substantially improving student achievement. The SIG program’s funding was to help states turn around the nation’s persistently lowest-achieving schools using one of four school intervention models—transformation, turnaround, restart, or closure. We used a regression discontinuity design and a large sample of schools from more than 20 states to evaluate the impact of implementing a SIG-funded intervention model on use of SIG-promoted practices and student outcomes. Our regression discontinuity design exploited cutoff values on the continuous variables used to define the SIG eligibility tiers to compare outcomes in schools that just met the eligibility cutoff for receiving SIG funding to outcomes in schools that just missed it. We found that SIG had no impact on any of the outcomes we examined, including math and reading test scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates. Using a correlational analysis, we found the turnaround model was associated with larger student achievement gains in math than the transformation model for grades 6 through 12.     

Suggestions for Vocabulary Focused Reading Lessons for Mainstream Classrooms Addressing Both L1 and L2 Learners

The increasing number of second language learners in classrooms all around the world has required teachers to adapt their teaching methods and materials to the various learners’ needs. Second language learners in particular need specific learning strategies, which not only aim at helping them understand the linguistic structure of the language of instruction, but also enable them to remember and comprehend the many different words in this “foreign” language. For second language learners, developing reading skills and improving language abilities need to go hand in hand independent of the language. This article presents suggestions for reading lessons emphasizing vocabulary for both first and second language learners of various linguistic backgrounds. These suggestions are especially useful for reading lessons in mainstream second and third grade classrooms. Approaches to vocabulary building are discussed with particular focus on aspects to be considered for vocabulary selection (e.g. linguistic aspects); followed by recommendations on the instruction of the selected vocabulary. All the presented suggestions are based on materials developed in the context of a project in Austria, hence in a German speaking environment. Applicability of these suggestions for other languages is emphasized.     

Competencies and career choice motives: characteristics of high school students interested in teacher education programmes

In contrast to other career choices, the teaching profession seems familiar to those interested in teaching because they have had the chance to observe teachers for years. This phenomenon is known as the apprenticeship of observation and manifests in naïve ideas and expectations of teaching among teacher students. Therefore, characteristics of students interested in becoming teachers are important for early teacher education and counselling. These characteristics include competencies and motives, but nothing is known about their relationship to each other. Following international teaching standards and the expectancy-value framework, this paper analyses associations between both. Three competencies (i.e. planning, communication and cooperation) and seven career choice motives were examined using a paper–pencil survey of 907 high school students. Altogether, 463 students were able to imagine becoming a teacher and were included in the analyses. SEM analyses showed that (1) of all the competencies, communication had the most associations with motives, (2) the motive ‘low difficulty of study’ is positively related to planning, (3) the findings regarding extrinsic motives are ambiguous, and (4) gender differences are marginal. Practical implications for early teacher education and counselling are discussed.