Dynamic and shared sense-making in large-scale curriculum reform in school districts

ABSTRACT

Shared sense-making is suggested to be key for curriculum reform. Shared sense-making entails constructing a collective understanding of the meaning for reform, its significance and its implications for schools, through dialogue and negotiation across the levels of the educational system. This study explored changes in hands-on strategies of shared sense-making, and ways of orchestrating curriculum reform work in the districts in Finland, following the introduction of new national curriculum policy. Longitudinal focus group interview data collected from curriculum coordinating groups during the reform work was utilised. The data were qualitatively content analysed. The two sets of shared sense-making strategies were identified in this study, including those strategies utilised by the groups in building their understanding of what the reform is all about, and those concerning the reform orchestration. The strategies employed evolved from simple to more complex, during the progression of curriculum work. Results also showed that the coordinating groups were well aware of their high autonomy and resulting responsibility in orchestrating the district-level curriculum work. However, the advance in shared sense-making strategies employed by the groups indicated that they were highly committed to constructing collective understanding about the reform, its significance and implications for schools through dialogue and negotiation with practitioners.     

The Importance of Language Strategy in Simple Arithmetic

Students who seemingly are about equally adept at two languages differ considerably in their language strategy in mental arithmetic. The present findings suggest that language strategy has an important effect on simple arithmetical performance, affecting the mean reaction time of responses, the frequency of errors, and the experience of difficulty. Bilinguals who retrospectively reported a single language strategy during task performance showed a clear tendency for faster response times, fewer errors, and less perceived difficulty than bilinguals who used their two languages simultaneously or interchangeably. The degree of interference that occurs seems to depend on individual strategies and can be held to a minimum if the domains of use are clearly defined.

     

Socioscientific issues via controversy mapping: bringing actor-network theory into the science classroom with digital technology

ABSTRACT

What are the current challenges and opportunities for bringing actor-network theory (ANT) into issues-based science education? This article discusses experiences gained from introducing an educational version of ANT deploying digital technology into an upper secondary school science class. This teaching innovation, called controversy mapping, has been pioneered in different contexts of higher education before being adapted to school education. Experimenting with controversy mapping in a Swedish science class raised both conceptual and practical issues. These centre on: (1) how ANT-inspired controversy mapping redesigns the citizenship training enacted by institutionalized approaches to issues-based education as socioscientific issues (SSI); (2) how controversy mapping reconfigures the interdisciplinarity of issues-based science education; and (3) how controversy mapping displaces scientific literacy and knowledge of the nature of science as guiding concerns for teaching in favour of new preoccupations with digital literacy and digital tools and methods as contemporary infrastructures of free and open inquiry.     

Prediction of elementary mathematics grades by cognitive abilities

European Journal of Psychology of Education - In the present study, the relationship between the mathematics grade and the three basic cognitive abilities (inhibition, working memory, and...     

What do second-order judgments tell us about low-performing students’ metacognitive awareness?

According to the unskilled and unaware effect (Kruger and Dunning 1999), low-performing students tend to overestimate their performance. Differentiating the assessment of metacognitive judgments into performance judgments (PJs) and second-order judgments (SOJs), PJs of low-performing students tend to be inflated, while their SOJs are usually lower than those of high-performing students (Händel and Fritzsche 2016; Miller and Geraci 2011). This suggests some level of awareness. The present study investigated whether low-performers’ lower SOJs actually indicate metacognitive awareness. We studied SOJs after adequate and inadequate PJs, and investigated whether low-performers’ lower SOJs are made by default or whether their lower SOJs differ in a similar magnitude compared to those of high-performers (indicating metacognitive awareness). We address this issue by disentangling student and item effects via generalized linear mixed models. Reanalyzing the data of Händel and Fritzsche (2016) from N?=?116 students, we found that SOJs depended on the students who provided the SOJ and on the items on which the SOJ was made. Overall, SOJs depended on the PJs and on the interaction of performance and PJs, but not on the performance itself. Separate analyses for students of different performance levels revealed that low-performing students showed less awareness, indicated by a non-significant interaction effect of performance and PJs. Thus, it takes mixed models to tell the whole story of low-performing students’ lower SOJs.     

Die offene Ganztagsgrundschule in Nordrhein-Westfalen

Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrags stehen konzeptionelle Hintergründe der 2003/04 begonnenen offenen Ganztagsschule (OGS) in Nordrhein-Westfalen sowie erste Ergebnisse der wissenschaftlichen Begleitung, wie sie sich im Rahmen einer explorativen Erkundungsstudie zeigen. Hintergrund der konzeptionellen Debatte sind zwei Elemente: zum einen die vielschichtiger gewordene Debatte über Betreuungs-, Bildungs- und Erziehungskonzepte, zum anderen die st?rkere Kooperation zwischen der Schule und der Kinder- und Jugendhilfe im Rahmen der offenen Ganztagsschule. Die OGS in Nordrhein-Westfalen beansprucht durch die verst?rkte Einbeziehung au?erschulischer Partner zu einem neuen Verst?ndnis von Schule und Lernen beizutragen. Im Konzept und Modell dieser neuen Angebotsform begegnen sich somit die Vorstellungen beider Bereiche zur ad?quaten Gestaltung schulischer und au?erschulischer Lern- und Bildungsprozesse. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden erste Befunde und sich abzeichnende Trends der realen Entwicklung in diesem Land dargestellt.     

Bias hypotheses under scrutiny: investigating the validity of student assessment of university teaching by means of external observer ratings

To advance the discussion on the validity of student evaluations of university teaching, student ratings of two teaching dimensions – student involvement and rapport – were compared with corresponding observer ratings. Seven potential bias variables were tested with regard to their impact on the students’ teaching assessment: three teacher characteristics (first impression, enthusiasm, humour) and four student characteristics (prior interest, expected grades, study experience, class attendance). Bias was defined as an impediment of the students’ assessment of teaching on course level. By means of bivariate correlations with course averages and two-level latent moderated structural equations, data of 1,716 students in 80 courses were analysed. Results showed that all three teacher characteristics were genuinely connected to rapport, and even explained variance of the student-rated variable when controlling for observer-rated rapport. The assessment of student involvement was not modified by the teacher characteristics except for teacher enthusiasm, which affected the student evaluation when controlling for observed involvement and, moreover, moderated the relation between the observed and the student-rated variable. For the examined student characteristics, no biasing effects were found – neither on rapport nor on student involvement.