The preparation of pre-service student teachers’ competence to work in schools

Competence to work in schools is an important dimension of professional competence, although it is often a neglected dimension of teacher development. This article reports a qualitative study that examined student teachers’ learning experiences in initial teacher education (ITE) in relation to competence to work in schools. In-depth interviews were conducted with 12 student teachers on an undergraduate ITE programme in Hong Kong. The findings of the study show that competence to work in schools is characterised by student teachers’ deep contextualised learning. In addition, it offers a deeper understanding of this competence in the ITE context by identifying its three facets, namely understanding of the micro-political realities of schools, social capital building and social strategies. The study provides insights for ITE and schools to support student teachers’ development of their competence to work in schools, including the design of ITE curricula, ITE processes and co-curricular activities in undergraduate studies. Moreover, it suggests the importance of developing schools as growth-fostering and positive micro-political sites for ITE fieldwork and teacher induction.     

Boys go fishing,girls work at home: gender roles,poverty and unequal school access among semi-nomadic fishing communities in South Western Madagascar

Drawing from data gathered in South Western Madagascar in 2011, the work explores the combination of poverty and traditional gender roles as a critical factor in determining unequal school access among young people from semi-nomadic fishing communities. It demonstrates that from the age of early puberty, most boys go fishing with their fathers and brothers whilst most girls from the same families work at home. In contrast to the school systems observed in many developing society contexts, which demonstrate female marginalisation, in South Western Madagascar both boys and girls are marginalised. Instruments of global policy designs, such as positive discrimination for girls, seem ill-suited to resolve the problem. Instead, the authors call for a more tailored and context-specific approach to address the particular challenges amongst semi-nomadic fishing communities in Madagascar.     

Multipoint Desktop Video Conferencing in Teacher Education: Preliminaries,problems and progress

Members of this research team are investigating the use of multipoint desktop video conferencing (MDVC) technology in Singapore to enhance the National Institute of Education's schools practicum partnership model. The project builds on the Singapore ONE ATM island-wide network and the high-speed ADSL line access provided by Singtel Magix. This infrastructure provides state-of-the-art support for the White Pine CU-SeeMe Meeting Point server and client software that enables students on teaching practice to conference with each other and their university-based supervisors. A typical conference involves four of five students at different schools and one staff member at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. These conferences provide opportunities for professional sharing between staff and students without the limits of time and space which are traditional constraints on conventional teaching practice.     

Effects of Diagrams on Mathematics Performance

Research on the facilitative effect of diagrams on solving mathematics problems is both inconsistent and inconclusive. This study investigates the effects of diagrams on 124 Singaporean pupils in three classes: Primary One and three, and Secondary One. Pupils' performance was measured with the use of teacher-written mathematics problems in the form of worksheets. Number of errors made on problems accompanied with and without diagrams were compared. Whether or not pupils benefit from diagrams was estimated by their patterns of errors made in the presence or absence of diagrams. Results both confirm and disconfirm previous findings and shed further light on the use of diagrams in mathematics.     

Academic motivations of Yi youths in China: Classmate support and ethnic identity

To enhance the academic achievements of Yi ethnic minority youths in rural school settings, the authors examined the effect of classmate support and the meditating role of ethnic identity in promoting their academic motivation. Cross-sectional survey data were collected from Yi youths sponsored by a philanthropic organization to attend local schools in Liangshan, rural China (n?=?657; 7–12 years old; 52% boys). Results of structural equation modelling showed that classmate support positively affected ethnic identity-commitment and ethnic identity-exploration, which then had positive impacts on three academic motivation outcomes: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation-external and identified regulation, and extrinsic motivation-introjected regulation. The mediating effects of ethnic identity-exploration and ethnic identity-commitment were statistically significant, except for the pathway from classmate support to extrinsic motivation-introjected regulation via ethnic identity-commitment. The authors found that ethnic identity can be facilitated through building supportive classroom environment for positive academic motivations in Yi youths. Cross-cultural significance of this study is also discussed.     

The role of stroke knowledge in reading and spelling in Chinese

The present study examined the types of orthographic knowledge that are important in learning to read and spell Chinese words in a 2‐year longitudinal study following 289 Hong Kong Chinese children from Grade 1 to Grade 2. Multiple regression results showed that radical knowledge significantly predicted children's word reading and spelling performance across the years. Stroke knowledge contributed both concurrently (Grade 1) and longitudinally (Grade 2) to children's spelling performance after controlling for rapid naming, phonological awareness, morphological awareness and radical knowledge. These findings support the significance of radical knowledge in Chinese reading and spelling and the specific role of stroke order knowledge in Chinese spelling. The findings have implications for the design of an effective curriculum for teaching children to spell Chinese characters.     

Structural Equation Modeling With Unknown Population Distributions: Ridge Generalized Least Squares

This article proposes 2 classes of ridge generalized least squares (GLS) procedures for structural equation modeling (SEM) with unknown population distributions. The weight matrix for the first class of ridge GLS is obtained by combining the sample fourth-order moment matrix with the identity matrix. The weight matrix for the second class is obtained by combining the sample fourth-order moment matrix with its diagonal matrix. Empirical results indicate that, with data from an unknown population distribution, parameter estimates by ridge GLS can be much more accurate than those by either GLS or normal-distribution-based maximum likelihood; and standard errors of the parameter estimates also become more accurate in predicting the empirical ones. Rescaled and adjusted statistics are proposed for overall model evaluation, and they also perform much better than the default statistic following from the GLS method. The use of the ridge GLS procedures is illustrated with a real data set.     

Is teacher education at risk? A tale of two cities – Hong Kong and Macau

Consequences of competition for global university rankings, such as changes in funding modes, have been extensively discussed in the field of higher education. However, few studies have reviewed its implications on knowledge production. This study provides a contextualised method for theorising the implications of this competition on the development of East Asian higher education, specifically teacher education. It identifies the new forms of knowledge being produced in two teacher education institutions in Hong Kong and Macau by reviewing the publications of new recruits in a five-year period. The study considers the following variables: author(s), date and form of publication, abstract, title, keywords, journal name, language, data source, research context and methods. The findings show that the dominant publication trends are towards quantitative research and multiple authors. Psychological research is the most popular area and studies of other long-term issues in teacher education are being marginalised.