The tensions of preparing pre-service teachers to be assessment capable and profession-ready

There is both a growing appreciation of teacher assessment capability for the improvement of school student learning and achievement and a commensurate drive for graduates in Australian Initial Teacher Education institutions to demonstrate impact on school student learning as part of a national accreditation process. We argue in this article that if institutions are to prepare assessment capable graduates who are “profession-ready”, attention to practice architectures is warranted. Practice architectures are the features in schools that enable and/or constrain practice. Skills, knowledge and understandings do not just cleanly transfer across Initial Teacher Education institutions and practicum contexts into graduate teacher classrooms. Practitioner identities are produced through “relatings” within specific social-political arrangement, “doings” that constitute activities afforded in material-economic conditions, and “sayings” that are a dominating medium in cultural-discursive frameworks.     

The Processing of Inflectional Morphology: A Comparison of Children with and without Dyslexia

Children aged 11–12 years with a diagnosis of dyslexia (DR) were compared to chronological and reading-age matched poor readers (PR), and two normal reader groups, age-matched (CA) and spelling and reading-age matched (SA–RA), on their processing of inflectional morphology. In comparison to SA–RAs and PRs, the DRs made more spelling errors on regular past tense verb endings relative to irregular past tense verbs and non-verbs. In reading, the DRs took longer than the other groups to make decisions in the written but not oral condition of a tense judgement task. In addition, they were less affected than the PR and SA–RA groups by case altered disruption to the morpheme boundary of inflected verbs. The findings suggest dyslexic children do not show deficits in morphological processing in spoken language, but they are slower at reading and less accurate at spelling regularly inflected verbs compared with normally developing younger children. This difference could plausibly be accommodated within the Phonological Deficit Hypothesis of dyslexia.     

A study of handwriting in written stories of normal and learning disabled children

Written stories of normally achieving and learning disabled children in grades one through three were compared, using a Handwriting Evaluation Scale designed for this study. The subjects also were given tests for receptive language, figure copying and spelling. The Non-LD and LD groups differed on figure copying, spelling and written productivity, but not receptive language. The Non-LD grade level groups differed significantly on two components of the handwriting scale (Letter Size and Control), while the LD grade level groups differed on three components (Letter Formation, Alignment and Spacing, and Letter Size). The most pronounced differences between the LD and normally achieving children were on Formation and Size. A separate analysis of the third grade stories revealed that handwriting was less related to productivity than spelling and visual-motor skills. Nevertheless, the results indicated that many LD students have weak visual-spatial-motor skills. Implications for intervention are discussed.     

Assessing emergent literacy in preschool classrooms

Recent research on the literacy development of children during the preschool years has emphasized the notion of “emergent literacy,” according to authors Kontos (1986) and Teale and Sulzby (1986). According to this view, preschool children learn about reading and writing as they participate in a literate culture. Early social interactions involving print are crucial to children's reading and writing development, according to the Early Childhood and Literacy Development Committee (1986).     

A Comparison of Reader Strategies on Two Versions of A Newspaper Editorial

Reading is seen as a communication process, a meaningful interaction between the reader and his reading text. A number of factors are known to affect this interaction. One prominent factor is the type of text being read. That is, reader strategies may vary in relation to text characteristics. This study used miscue analysis to find out patterns of reader strategies on two types of texts: a syntactically complex and high vocabulary loaded text and a syntactically simple and low vocabulary loaded text. To this end, cloze tests of passages derived from two versions of a newspaper editorial completed by twenty undergraduate education students from the University of Jos were analysed. The results indicated that the readers of the difficult text had less access to semantic and syntactic cues than the readers of the simplified text. Readers for whom the difficult text was on frustration level made less use of context than did readers for whom the same text was on instructional level. There was very little difference in quality of miscues by readers of the simplified text reading on independent level as compared with those reading the same text on instructional level. Readers who performed on instructional level on the difficult passage used similar reading strategies to those who performed on instructional level on the simplified passage. The implications of the findings for reading instruction were discussed.     

Spatial concepts and young children

This presentation looks at how young children learn basic geometrical concepts. Piaget's developmental levels will be examined to determine how they fit into the current research project. These will be compared with materials from the Soviet States that have recently become available from the NCTP in the USA.

The research project was constructed in a number of early childhood centres in a variety of socio‐economic areas. All of these centres had an early intervention program in operation so that special needs or ‘exceptional’ children could be observed along with mainstream children.

The researcher is investigating children's learning styles to determine the children's preferred learning styles when exploring spatial concepts. The question of whether exceptional children progress through the same stages and in the same order as the mainstream children is also being considered.

Spatial concepts in early childhood is an area that seems to have been neglected by researchers in favour of the development of number concepts. This research project aims to add to our knowledge of how young children learn spatial concepts.

     

Pedagogical Reflections by Secondary Science Teachers at Different NOS Implementation Levels

This study investigated what 13 secondary science teachers at various nature of science (NOS) instruction implementation levels talked about when they reflected on their teaching. We then determined if differences exist in the quality of those reflections between high, medium, and low NOS implementers. This study sought to answer the following questions: (1) What do teachers talk about when asked general questions about their pedagogy and NOS pedagogy and (2) what qualitative differences, if any, exist within variables across teachers of varying NOS implementation levels? Evidence derived from these teachers’ reflections indicated that self-efficacy and perceptions of general importance for NOS instruction were poor indicators of NOS implementation. However, several factors were associated with the extent that these teachers implemented NOS instruction, including the utility value they hold for NOS teaching, considerations of how people learn, understanding of NOS pedagogy, and their ability to accurately and deeply self-reflect about teaching. Notably, those teachers who effectively implemented the NOS at higher levels value NOS instruction for reasons that transcend immediate instructional objectives. That is, they value teaching NOS for achieving compelling ends realized long after formal schooling (e.g., lifelong socioscientific decision-making for civic reasons), and they deeply reflect about how to teach NOS by drawing from research about how people learn. Low NOS implementers’ simplistic notions and reflections about teaching and learning appeared to be impeding factors to accurate and consistent NOS implementation. This study has implications for science teacher education efforts that promote NOS instruction.