What's so hard about teaching science?

Early Childhood Education Journal - Do you feel that science is sifficult to understand and hard to teach? Do you designate only a small amount of time for a science period? Are you afraid of the...     

Early career teachers’ resilience and positive adaptive change capabilities

This research is an investigation of the link between adaptive functioning and resilience in early career teachers (ECT). Resilience is considered an important capability of teachers and research has shown that teachers who are resourceful, demonstrate agency and develop positive management strategies overcome adversity. In this research, we aim to examine more closely the strategic processes associated with resilience and whether these vary in a cohort of ECT. A sample of ECT (n = 160; M = 31.09, SD = 6.92) participated in the study. The findings showed that, consistent with previous research on adaptive change, three groups emerged from the cohort: stabilisers, adapters, and innovators. Stabilisers were the least resilient, adapters were more resilient, and innovators were most resilient. Length of service was not significantly associated with resilience, while a weak interaction was found between years of service and adaptive functioning. Resilience was strongly associated with adaptive functioning. Findings are discussed in relation to resilience and ECT’s self-care.     

Threats to the Valid Use of Assessments

Validity is the most important quality of an assessment, but its evaluation is often neglected. The step‐by‐step approach suggested here provides structured guidance to validators of educational assessments. Assessment is depicted as a chain of eight linked stages: administration, scoring, aggregation, generalization, extrapolation, evaluation, decision and impact. Evaluating validity requires careful consideration of threats to validity associated with each link. Several threats are described and exemplified for each link. These sets of threats are intended to be illustrative rather than comprehensive. The chain model suggests that validity is limited by the weakest link, and that efforts to make other links particularly strong may be wasteful or even harmful. The chain model and list of threats is also shown to be valuable when planning assessments.     

The impact of higher education on adult students in Australia

This article is part of a study of the impact of higher education on aspects of the employment of a national sample of adult students (25 and over) who enrolled in higher education in Australia in 1978. The study shows that from the point of view of employment these adult students drew much benefit from their higher education. Females tended to benefit more than males. A further article in a later issue will consider for the same group the impact of higher education on the person.     

Ours to reason why

This is a story of what happened on the Aiguille du Grepon. It is based on fact and designed to reveal both the appearance and reality of motivation in climbing, a combination that is often difficult to express in a traditional academic style. The story differentiates motivation along two dimensions, a goal dimension with intrinsic and extrinsic rewards at opposite ends and a relational dimension with exclusive and inclusive rewards at opposite ends. These polar opposites are integrated in the experience of outdoor adventure through the story. They are further reflected in the attitudes of a previous generation of climbers. It is suggested that these motivations define the games of outdoor adventure in general, and that we should be self-conscious of them both in education and in play.     

Predicting persistence at university from information obtained at intake

This study is part of an ongoing project investigating the first stage of the process of student transition to university. The aim of this study was to determine whether information about student approaches to making their course choices could have been used to identify those who subsequently changed or withdrew from their courses. Retrospective studies of discontinuing students have frequently identified factors based on such information as being associated with withdrawal, however there have been few attempts to use such factors in predictive studies. Multivariate analysis indicated that combinations of the information obtained could discriminate between students who persisted and those who withdrew from their studies. As the proportions of variance accounted for by these combinations were small, it was concluded that the information had value in describing types of conditions under which students were likely to be at risk, rather than in making predictions about individual students. The methodology should be of interest to other researchers as it demonstrates ways in which multivariate strategies may be applied to survey data, in this instance to identify stereotypes of students likely to behave in particular ways with regard to their enrolment.The authors contributed equally to this paper.     

How Children Regulate their Own Collaborative Learning

In this article we analyze the dialogic learning of one pair of students in order to investigate how these students cope with a collaborative learning situation in the classroom. Our aim is to substantiate the claims that not only are young students (8 year olds) capable of solving mathematical problems collaboratively, but that they also take an active role in regulating their collaborative learning activities. More specifically, our claim is that children appear to apply constructs of “mathematical level raising”, “social interaction” and “division of time” to steer their own collaborative learning and that they are rather successful in balancing these three aspects. The analysis is exploratory, but this new perspective on collaborative learning is relevant theoretically and consequential for classroom practice.     

Getting to Evo-Devo: Concepts and Challenges for Students Learning Evolutionary Developmental Biology

To examine how well biology majors have achieved the necessary foundation in evolution, numerous studies have examined how students learn natural selection. However, no studies to date have examined how students learn developmental aspects of evolution (evo-devo). Although evo-devo plays an increasing role in undergraduate biology curricula, we find that instruction often addresses development cursorily, with most of the treatment embedded within instruction on evolution. Based on results of surveys and interviews with students, we suggest that teaching core concepts (CCs) within a framework that integrates supporting concepts (SCs) from both evolutionary and developmental biology can improve evo-devo instruction. We articulate CCs, SCs, and foundational concepts (FCs) that provide an integrative framework to help students master evo-devo concepts and to help educators address specific conceptual difficulties their students have with evo-devo. We then identify the difficulties that undergraduates have with these concepts. Most of these difficulties are of two types: those that are ubiquitous among students in all areas of biology and those that stem from an inadequate understanding of FCs from developmental, cell, and molecular biology.     

The Reciprocal Relationship Between Technology and Psychology

This article describes the design and implementation of the year 2 curriculum and student learning experiences in the Michigan State University Master of Arts in Educational Technology program. We discuss the ways that this second set of courses builds on the first year of the program that students encounter, and also describe the theoretical impetus and design-based implications for learning how to teach with technology in effective and creative ways. Students in this group usually come in with some prior knowledge of educational theory, as well as some experience of working with classroom technologies. We intentionally build upon this prior knowledge, to take it to the next level of a more sophisticated TPACK-oriented understanding of learning in technology-driven contexts. Our year 2 courses move classical educational psychology theories of learning, along with educational research issues, squarely into the modern context of educational technology and teacher leadership. Our curriculum design focuses centrally on making meaningful experiences for teachers around technology, and helping them develop the knowledge and skills to create such experiences for their students. Our goal is to develop teachers who see themselves as flexible designers of learning experiences through the creative re-purposing of existing technologies.