Stockholm's 17 SK: a case study in community football

17 SK is a community sports club based in Stockholm, Sweden. Its members play different sports, but the football groups are by far the most popular. In this paper, we want to sketch the history of the club and reflect on the aspects of its football activities that seem most relevant from a social and political perspective: gender, integration, community building and matters of organization. We are both co-founders and board members of the club and regularly partake in its activities. The article is therefore mainly based on participatory observation and on numerous discussions we have had with other 17 SK participants over the past three years.     

Hypermedia and discovery-based learning: a historical perspective

The history of education shows a long-standing, comprehensive rejection of teaching based on discovery, exploration and individual experience—the cornerstone of the hypermedia revolution in education which we are told to expect in the near future. By looking at some of the many failed past attempts to change rigid educational practices into malleable, free-form ways of learning, the author argues that any such revolution in education is probably further away than is supposed by many of those working in the field of interactive technologies.     

Judging students' achievement goal orientations: Are teacher ratings accurate?

Using the theoretical framework of achievement goal theory, this study investigated the accuracy of teachers' judgments of their students' motivation. Self-report data were gathered on the mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goals of 1140 German secondary school students (mean age = 14.24) in five academic subjects (English, Mathematics, German, second foreign language, and Biology). Their teachers in each of the five subjects (N = 176) were asked to judge students' achievement goals. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that teacher ratings of students' motivation statistically significantly predicted student ratings in all five subjects for mastery and performance-approach motivation, but not for performance-avoidance motivation. Assessment of differences in teachers' judgment accuracy across classrooms revealed some variability in teachers' ability to judge their students' mastery and performance-approach goals. Exploratory analyses showed that teaching experience, teacher gender, student age, and student gender did not systematically explain variation in judgment accuracy. Future research should examine other characteristics potentially influencing teachers' judgment accuracy and investigate the effect of teachers' judgment accuracy on students' motivation.     

Proof constructions and evaluations

In this article, we focus on a group of 39 prospective elementary (grades K-6) teachers who had rich experiences with proof, and we examine their ability to construct proofs and evaluate their own constructions. We claim that the combined “construction–evaluation” activity helps illuminate certain aspects of prospective teachers’ and presumably other individuals’ understanding of proof that tend to defy scrutiny when individuals are asked to evaluate given arguments. For example, some prospective teachers in our study provided empirical arguments to mathematical statements, while being aware that their constructions were invalid. Thus, although these constructions considered alone could have been taken as evidence of an empirical conception of proof, the additional consideration of prospective teachers’ evaluations of their own constructions overruled this interpretation and suggested a good understanding of the distinction between proofs and empirical arguments. We offer a possible account of our findings, and we discuss implications for research and instruction.