Trying to Include but Supporting Exclusion Instead? Constructing the Roma in Slovak Educational Policies

Based on a social constructivist theoretical framework, this research study examines how the design of proinclusive educational policies and the general public construct the Roma students and parents in Slovakia. For this purpose, data from two selected educational policies and five focus groups conducted in five regions in Slovakia were analyzed. The findings demonstrate that the Roma are constructed negatively as irresponsible dependents and deviants not valuing education and incapable of making wise decisions about their lives. These findings can be considered relevant for policy formulation processes because proinclusive policies may sabotage their own goals if negative social constructions of a certain societal group are embedded in them.     

Hard Cash and Soft Skills: Experimental Evidence on Combining Scholarships and Mentoring in Argentina

Abstract

We evaluate a long-standing program run by one of the largest education foundations in Argentina that offers scholarships and nonacademic mentoring to secondary school students. We randomly assigned 408 grade 6 students within 10 public schools in the Province of Buenos Aires to either receive the program throughout secondary school or not to receive it. After three years, the program improved students’ academic behaviors (e.g., studying before an exam or catching up on missed work), but we find little evidence that these changes translated into broader improvements in students’ academic mindsets (e.g., self-beliefs about performance and efficacy), perseverance (e.g., grit), or learning strategies (e.g., metacognition). The program also improved students’ performance in school during the first year (e.g., grades, attendance, and passing rates), but we do not find similar gains in subsequent years. This may be due to a large share of treatment students being expelled from the program for not meeting its requirements. The program did not improve student learning or personality traits (e.g., conscientiousness). Finally, we find some heterogeneous effects for female students and students from low-income families.     

Teacher collegiality and electronic communication: A study of the collaborative uses of email by secondary school teachers in Uruguay

Teacher collegiality has been consistently highlighted in recent years as a crucial factor in the success of processes of educational change and professional development. Consequently, there is considerable interest both from researchers and practitioners, in investigating strategies capable of supporting interactions and collaborations between teachers. Research, mostly carried out in industry, suggests that computer‐mediated communication (CMC) technologies may support collegiality in a diversity of contexts. Following the technological developments of the last few years, which have driven down the costs and complexity of computers and telecommunications, CMC technologies are becoming increasingly available to schools around the world. One of the more widespread of these new CMC technologies is electronic mail. The aim of this article is to discuss some of the results of a research project that investigated the potential of electronic mail for supporting the development of collegiality and professional exchange among secondary school teachers in Uruguay. At the time of this study, relatively little research had been carried out into the use of electronic mail for professional purposes by schoolteachers, especially in Latin America. The evidence suggests that email may support the formation of communities of highly committed users, where seeking and sharing professional resources are accepted behaviours.     

Analogical reasoning in restructuring scientific knowledge

This study presents the results of an experiment which investigated analogical reasoning in knowledge acquisition in a natural school setting. The aims were to evaluate the efficiency of analogy in the conceptual restructuring of a science topic and compare the effects of analogy in different learning conditions. Two analogical topics of physics (water flow and heat flow) were studied by means of two experiments performed in the classroom with concrete objects. Eighty-four 5th graders, divided into three experimental conditions (given analogy, constructed analogy, no analogy), took part in the study. The quantitative analysis mainly confirms the hypothesis that analogy can be a productive way to trigger a process of knowledge restructuring while students learn a new topic. However, the effective use of the analogy was affected by the experimental condition: When the analogy was constructed by the learners themselves, instead of being presented and justified by the teacher, it acted indeed as a more powerful tool in understanding the new topic which required changing their initial conceptions. The qualitative analysis shows the children’s explanations of the heat flow phenomenon and different conceptual outcomes of the learning process. Finally, educational implications are considered.     

The effect of image quality,repeated study,and assessment method on anatomy learning

The use of two‐dimensional (2D) images is consistently used to prepare anatomy students for handling real specimen. This study examined whether the quality of 2D images is a critical component in anatomy learning. The visual clarity and consistency of 2D anatomical images was systematically manipulated to produce low‐quality and high‐quality images of the human hand and human eye. On day 0, participants learned about each anatomical specimen from paper booklets using either low‐quality or high‐quality images, and then completed a comprehension test using either 2D images or three‐dimensional (3D) cadaveric specimens. On day 1, participants relearned each booklet, and on day 2 participants completed a final comprehension test using either 2D images or 3D cadaveric specimens. The effect of image quality on learning varied according to anatomical content, with high‐quality images having a greater effect on improving learning of hand anatomy than eye anatomy (high‐quality vs. low‐quality for hand anatomy P = 0.018; high‐quality vs. low‐quality for eye anatomy P = 0.247). Also, the benefit of high‐quality images on hand anatomy learning was restricted to performance on short‐answer (SA) questions immediately after learning (high‐quality vs. low‐quality on SA questions P = 0.018), but did not apply to performance on multiple‐choice (MC) questions (high‐quality vs. low‐quality on MC questions P = 0.109) or after participants had an additional learning opportunity (24 hours later) with anatomy content (high vs. low on SA questions P = 0.643). This study underscores the limited impact of image quality on anatomy learning, and questions whether investment in enhancing image quality of learning aids significantly promotes knowledge development. Anat Sci Educ 10: 249–261. © 2016 American Association of Anatomists.     

Discussing the Greenhouse Effect: children's collaborative discourse reasoning and conceptual change

In environmental education the construction of appropriate knowledge is not enough, but is undoubtedly a fundamental component of individual and collective environmental responsiveness. The aim of this study was to investigate fifth graders' changes of conceptions about the greenhouse effect and global warming, due to socio‐cognitive interaction developed in small and large group discussions in an authentic classroom context during the implementation of an environmental education curriculum unit. We hypothesized that a classroom transformed into a community of discoursei.e. a learning environment which stimidates and supports giving verbal explanations, comparing and critically evaluating different points of view on the examined environmental phenomenon, would be a fruitful breeding ground for knowledge revision. The results show that classroom discussions, the core of the proposed learning activity, led the children, although at different levels, to the integration of new scientific knowledge into their conceptual ecology, based on the personal revision of pre‐instructional conceptions. As hypothesized, a high positive correlation was found between conceptual change and metaconceptual awareness of the changes in pre‐existing representations of the examined phenomenon. Some implications are drawn from the standpoint of environmental education.     

The association between homework and primary school children's academic achievement. International evidence from PIRLS and TIMSS

The association between time devoted to homework and children's academic achievement has long been an issue of great debate. A small number of mainly correlational studies have been conducted into this issue in a primary school setting, but have produced somewhat mixed results. In this paper we contribute to this literature by investigating the relationship between time spent upon homework and children's outcomes across 24 countries. By using a student fixed-effects approach, capturing differences in homework time amongst the same student across different school subjects, we argue that our results are likely to be subject to less confounding than much of the existing literature. We find little evidence that the amount of homework time primary school children are assigned is related to their academic achievement. This holds true across a large number of countries, survives various robustness tests and does not vary by gender or socio-economic status. We interpret this finding as suggesting that the homework assigned to primary school pupils may not be adequate to produce a positive association, and needs be improved if this time-consuming activity is ever going to bring benefits for children's academic achievement.     

Dignifying the educational process through conscientização

Teaching is a very complex endeavor. Embedded within this complex environment are issues of power, culture, ethnicity, and race. When teachers and students come together, in the classroom, some of these issues become visible and others remain invisible. Attempting to make influences on teaching and learning visible is one of the steps toward developing a practice framed by conscientização. Ms. Cook, the teacher of this story, is empowering herself and her students; through critical reflection that serves to deneutralize educational acts by recognizing they are embedded in issues of culture, ethnicity, politics, power, and, race. Classroom based research must be more inclusive and indeed cognizant of the mediating macrostructures that teachers deal with everyday. For example, Goldberg and Muir Welsh describe some of the students as being Latinos. In doing so, they adopts a third person as opposed to a first person view of these students. A first person view can acknowledge a dialectical relationship between race and ethnicity.