‘Get real – we can't afford kindergarten’: a study of parental perceptions of early years services

The Australian Early Childhood Universal Access Agreement stipulates all children three and a half years of age and older access to 15 hours of a quality early childhood education programme. While most states and territories in Australia have a 90% or higher attendance rate, in 2010, in Queensland the attendance rate was a comparative 40%. This study explores parental perceptions of barriers to early years services in Queensland, Australia. Using content analysis, it explores comments from an online forum with 65 self-selected participants. Findings provide important insights for policy-makers interested in improving the quality of, access to, and participation in, early childhood education. Parents perceived the cost, limited number of places and small hours of kindergarten as the main barriers to accessing quality early childhood care in Queensland. Furthermore, they questioned the actual necessity of kindergarten programmes. Therefore, if the goal is to improve kindergarten attendance rates, it is important to gain an understanding of the reported perceived barriers in order to reduce these in the future.     

Threat Perception and Attitudes of Adolescents Towards Re-Introduced Wild Animals: A qualitative study of young learners from affected regions in Germany

Conservation efforts such as the restoration of European bison or the support of wolf immigration into Germany are often socio-scientifically controversial. In many cases, disputes are based on individuals’ threat perception and attitudes towards the animal involved. The herewith reported study provides qualitative insights into German adolescents’ (n?=?31, M_age?=?16.6 years) attitudes towards animal reintroduction, their threat and coping appraisal about wildlife and their knowledge of local endangered species. We found that students had rather limited knowledge of local endangered species. After Kellert's categories of animal attitudes, the adolescents showed a strong moralistic view on wildlife return. Naturalistic, ecologistic and utilitarian views were also strongly apparent. According to the Protection Motivation Theory, perceived threats could be identified as threats to animals on the one hand and threats to human interests on the other. Such threat perceptions often lead to a dilemma, which made it difficult to decide upon the priorities of wildlife protection versus protection of human interests. Coping mechanism to reduce threats to human interests as mentioned by the participants included restrictions of the animal as well as strategies that focused on responsibility by humans. Regarding coping mechanism to prevent the species’ extinction, participants showed a relatively superficial understanding. Furthermore, we found that participants from regions where wolves are currently immigrating or European bison are being reintroduced showed a more positive understanding of the respective animal. Our findings are discussed in the light of this topic's potential as an example of a real-life socio-scientific issue in classroom discussions.     

Emotional and Behavioral Predictors of Preschool Peer Ratings

It was predicted that social cognitive, behavioral, and affective aspects of young children's social development would predict stable peer ratings of their likability. Measures of likability, emotion knowledge, prosocial and aggressive behavior, peer competence, and expressed emotions (happy and angry) were obtained for 65 subjects (mean age = 44 months). Sociometric ratings, particularly negative, were stable over 1- and 9-month time periods. Correlational analyses showed that emotion knowledge and prosocial behavior were direct predictors of likability. Prosocial behavior mediated the relations of gender and expressed emotions with likability (i.e., gender and expressed emotions were each related to prosocial behavior, and prosocial behavior was related to likability, but neither gender nor expressed emotions were related to likability with prosocial behavior partialled out). Knowledge of emotional situations similarly mediated the age-likability relation. Results uphold the early development of stable peer reputations and the hypothesized centrality of emotion-related predictors of likability.     

Neo-liberalism and universal state education: the cases of Denmark,Norway and Sweden 1980–2011

This article investigates neo-liberal policy on education in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Traditionally, the edifice of the education system in these Scandinavian countries has been built on egalitarian values, but over the last 20 years they have increasingly adopted market-led reforms of education. The extent of neo-liberal policy varies between the countries. Denmark and Norway have remained more hostile toward such policies, thus protecting the education system from extensive deregulation and privatisation. Conversely, in Sweden a greater credence has been given to market forces, allowing private providers to play a much more significant role in delivering education services. This variation in neo-liberal policy on education in Scandinavia is usually ascribed to the increasing power of the Right. However, this article differs from most other education research in that it argues, on the contrary, that the answer is to be found mainly within the social democratic parties themselves.     

INFLUENCES ON TEACHERS’ JUDGMENT ACCURACY OF READING ABILITIES ON SECOND AND THIRD GRADE STUDENTS: A MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS

The present study aims at examining variables (at individual and class level) that influence the accuracy of teacher judgments of second and third graders’ reading abilities (decoding and reading comprehension). Data of 1,468 students and 86 teachers were collected. Due to the nested structure of the data, multilevel regression analyses were applied. Results revealed about 5% of the variance in judgment accuracy at class level. Generally, teachers judged reading comprehension abilities more accurately than decoding abilities. Low‐achieving students’ abilities, though, were judged less accurately. Accuracy in judging decoding was higher in small classes and in students with special educational needs. Accuracy in judging reading comprehension grew along the years (higher in Grade 3 and at the end of the academic year). Additionally, teachers judged second language learners' reading comprehension less accurately. The results are discussed in the light of implications for teacher training.     

"... a certain amount of engineering involved": constructing the public in participatory governance arrangements

This paper argues that it is time for public understanding of science to develop a critical inventory of the forms, formats and methods of public participation and their respective implications and ambiguities. It highlights the need for analysing not only the limitations and deficiencies of participatory arrangements but also their constructive dimension, in particular the construction of the subject of participation. Looking into participatory governance arrangements in the issue area of genetic testing in Germany and the UK the paper presents a typology of formats according to the way the respective public is constructed and identifies four major constructions of publics: the general public, the pure public, the affected public and the partisan public. Each of these enables certain speaking positions while foreclosing others. The study shows that the main purposes of participatory arrangements in this issue area are knowledge production and education rather than political deliberation and decision-making.     

Towards detection of learner misconceptions in a medical learning environment: a subgroup discovery approach

Ill-structured problems, by definition, have multiple paths to a solution and are multifaceted making automated assessment and feedback a difficult challenge. Diagnostic reasoning about medical cases meet the criteria of ill-structured problem solving since there are multiple solution paths. The goal of this study was to develop an adaptive feedback mechanism that is capable of identifying and responding to novice physician misconceptions by mining the log trace data of user interactions in BioWorld, a computer-based learning environment designed to support medical students in regulating their own diagnostic reasoning. We applied a series of text pre-processing algorithms to extract the linguistic features that characterized symptoms identified by 30 medical students solving three endocrinology cases: diabetes mellitus (type 1), Pheochromocytoma, and Hyperthyroidism. A subgroup discovery mining algorithm was applied in two steps. First, rules were induced to predict an incorrect diagnosis submitted as the final solution for a case on the basis of symptoms highlighted by medical students as being pertinent, that were in fact not pertinent. Second, rules were induced to predict a distractor hypothesis (an incorrect hypothesis listed as the most probable) during the differential diagnosis process while solving the case. The rule set discovered through the subgroup discovery task was shown to predict both incorrect and distractor hypotheses set by novice physicians while solving the case. We discuss the implications in terms of developing an adaptive feedback mechanism that can detect physicians’ misconceptions and errors during problem-solving as a means to deliver prompts and feedback that promote the acquisition of metacognitive monitoring and control skills.     

Teachers’ and principals’ reflections on student participation in a school science and technology competition

Background The European Union asks for renewed pedagogies in schools according to teaching strategies and necessary competences for the twenty-first century, instead of the often-used transmissive pedagogies. The national Swedish competition in science and technology for grade eight, The Technology Eight, provides an opportunity for teachers to work with instructional strategies in line with suggested pedagogies.

Purpose To investigate teachers’ and principals’ reflections on the competition in schools.

Sample Seventeen secondary school teachers and three principals from districts in the south-western part of Sweden participated in the study. All teachers had long experience of the competition, and their classes had reached at least the regional finals during the last year.

Design and methods Semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and then analysed using content analysis. Focus was put on why the teachers decided to participate, how the teachers integrated the competition in their education and roles of the principals.

Results There were various reasons for participating in the competition. Teachers reported development of twenty-first-century skills such as better cooperation between the students. They also noticed an increased interest in science and technology and how learning in the subjects was stimulated. Furthermore, the teachers found participation in the competition to be positive for them too. They integrated the competition in ordinary education and gained teaching ideas as well as found connections to the curriculum. Participating in the competition seemed to be a tradition in most of the schools. The principals’ role was to facilitate the organisation around the competition and to provide social support.

Conclusions Participation in a school competition was considered as an instructional strategy with several positive outcomes. Use of this strategy can be supported by earlier suggestions to use pedagogies that are opposite to transmissive methods, enhancing students’ development of important skills for the future.