Groundwater in Science Education

Although clean, potable groundwater constitutes one of our most valuable resources, few students or science educators hold complete and appropriate understandings regarding the concept. Recent studies that focus on secondary students’ and preservice science teachers’ understandings of groundwater found little difference between the groups’ conceptualizations of subsurface hydrology. This article discusses possible reasons for the apparent lack of appropriate understanding regarding the complex concept of groundwater. Specifically, we concentrate on the lack of emphasis concerning groundwater content in standards documents, the need for increased attention to students’ spatial reasoning abilities, inadequate formal instruction for science teachers concerning groundwater, and difficulty in designing appropriate assessment of groundwater concepts. We conclude by offering suggestions for enhancing the teaching and learning of groundwater.     

The influence of closing poor performing primary schools on the educational attainment of students

This paper examines whether the closure of poor performing primary schools improved students' educational attainment. It is believed that school closure affects children's educational outcomes positively because children switch to better primary schools. At the same time, school closure creates a social disturbance such that educational outcomes may be affected negatively. There is no previous literature on the effect of this type of school closure on student performance. The empirical results indicate that student test scores are not affected by the school closure. Children are, however, tracked into higher secondary education levels after the school closure if they received more education years at the new primary school. This effect fades out and eventually becomes negative for children who received more than one education year at the new primary school. The results further suggest that there are no detrimental effects of a school closure in terms of educational performance.     

Introduction to the special issue: an international partnership in vocational psychology and career guidance practice

This thematic issue of the International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance includes a selection of papers presented at the IAEVG-SVP-NCDA Symposium, entitled “Vocational Psychology and Career Guidance Practice: An International Partnership”. The articles in this special issue deal with topics that highlight the interconnection between vocational psychology and career guidance. The authors, because of their different geographical and cultural backgrounds, address these points from their own perspectives. The outcome of the general discussion that centred on these topics at the International Symposium is jointly published in a special issue of the Career Development Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 4.     

Written narrations by 8- to 10-year-old Turkish pupils in Flemish primary education: A follow-up of seven text features

This semi-longitudinal study examined the development of narrative writing quality of young Turkish second language learners in mainstream Dutch-only education, and the impact of student-level and classroom-level predictors of narrative writing quality, using hierarchical linear modelling. Writing samples of 106 third graders and 111 fourth graders of seven Flemish primary schools were collected at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Measures included one holistic primary trait judgement, and six objective indices of text quality. Student-level predictors included age, SES and home language, while the classroom-level predictor focused on the home language pattern of the classroom. There was a significant mean growth for each index in each grade, but effect sizes differed from quite large for content and word level indices over moderate for sentence level indices to small for the text level index. Home language (Turkish) had a significant negative effect on all but one variables, particularly in Grade 4, while the negative effect of low SES was much more limited. A supplementary negative effect was found for homogeneity of classroom population. Implications of the study highlight the importance of student and classroom characteristics in writing achievement as well as the need to consider the poor performance of Turkish children.     

Parenting Support and the Role of Society in Parental Self‐Understanding: Furedi's Paranoid Parenting Revisited

The publication of Frank Furedi's Paranoid Parenting in 2001 was trend‐setting in the sense that it addresses parents directly in a way that is intended to be both critical and supportive, by helping parents to look through a sociological lens at their alleged predicament. Furedi's hope is that this will lead to the restoration of parental self‐confidence, which he claims to be sorely lacking in contemporary (Western?) society. I argue that such a project would be more likely to succeed if one were to hold a less dim view of the way both parents and other individuals are connected with their own society. By introducing a cultural‐hermeneutical perspective on human agency, based on a specific reading of Heidegger and Taylor, I suggest a more constructive way to reconnect parents with the ongoing conversations in their communities and to conceptualise parenting support.     

Effects of Schools,Teaching Staff and Classes on Achievement and Well-Being in Secondary Education: Similarities and Differences Between School Outcomes

In this article, effects of schools, teaching staff and classes on achievement and on the well-being of pupils at the end of their first grade in secondary education in Belgium are explored by means of multilevel analysis. Our study affirms that the relative influence of classes and schools on achievement is much higher than on well-being. We find that schools and classes have main and interaction effects on both outcomes. However, the interaction effects on well-being are limited to a few class-pupil interactions. Our results indicate that achievement and well-being can be considered as two different, distinctive school and class outcomes and that the school characteristics investigated act differently on these outcomes. Some school characteristics are always effective independent of the outcome criterium, while the effectiveness of other school characteristics depends on the criterium considered.     

Videos Bridging Asia and Africa: Overcoming Cultural and Institutional Barriers in Technology-Mediated Rural Learning

Abstract

Will African farmers watch and learn from videos featuring farmers in Bangladesh? Learning videos on rice seed management were made with rural women in Bangladesh. By using a new approach, called zooming-in, zooming-out, the videos were of regional relevance and locally appropriate. When the Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice) introduced them to Africa in 2005, many scientists and civil servants thought that the videos would be culturally inappropriate and hence irrelevant to African smallholder farmers. However, African farmers who watched the videos did not experience cultural barriers. In fact, they enjoyed seeing another part of the world where farmers faced similar problems as theirs, and were able to solve these problems by themselves. To promote wider uptake of the videos a key challenge was to overcome the institutional barriers. Public sector agencies especially had to be convinced that African smallholders appreciated Asian videos. By watching the videos with farmers and listening to their feedback, the skeptical scientists and service providers changed their minds. By 2009, the Bangladeshi rice seed videos had been translated into 20 African languages and so became national products. Videos made according to the zooming-in zooming-out approach can bring farmer-to-farmer extension to a higher level of social aggregation.     

Perspectives on teaching and regulation of learning: a comparison of secondary and university teachers

Many factors play a role in the successful transition of students from secondary to university education: one of them is the (university) teacher. In this study the similarities and differences in the perspectives on teaching and learning of secondary and university teachers were investigated. A survey was performed among 675 teachers. Three perspectives on teaching and learning could be distinguished: (1) a development orientation with shared regulation, (2) a knowledge orientation with strong regulation, and (3) an opinion orientation with loose regulation. Secondary teachers scored higher on the first perspective than university teachers who scored higher on the third perspective. These findings have implications for the transition of students from pre-university to university education and especially for teachers' roles.     

Designing for interaction,thinking and academic achievement in a Tanzanian undergraduate chemistry course

Virtual learning environments are used in higher education around the world to promote student learning. However, in many countries it has not yielded the expected effect on student interaction and learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the use of certain pedagogical approaches would promote student interaction, higher-order thinking and achievement. 102 undergraduate students taking an introductory chemistry course at a Tanzanian university participated in the study, and were randomly assigned to three groups. Each group first studied one topic using the control design (non-interactive learning, NIL) to establish a baseline. Then each group studied three further topics using different pedagogical approaches (NIL), discussion forums (medium interactive learning) and podcasts (highly interactive learning). Data included interviews, subject tests, and the content of online discussion forums. All qualitative data were coded, and repeated-measures ANOVA was used to analyze within design and between design effects; student interaction patterns were analyzed using social network analysis. Results show that social interaction, academic achievement and thinking improved progressively over the three topics (iterations) in each design. The changes in instructor pedagogical strategies and the actions of students to bring what they had learned from podcasts to the learning community contributed to the marked improvement. We conclude that effective use of discussion forums in higher education in Tanzania can produce important learning effects (interaction, thinking, and enhanced academic achievement) and is a low-bandwidth strategy, but coupling podcasts with discussion forums may be a powerful way to enhance the effects.