Teaching and learning in a multilingual Europe: findings from a cross-European study

School classrooms within the EU are multilingual learning environments. The diversity of pupils in classrooms raises significant challenges for teachers, but to date, there are no data from large-scale surveys that compare views within and across European countries. A bespoke questionnaire was designed to examine views of current classroom learning environments with respect to the multilingualism. The questionnaire was piloted and subsequently completed by 2792 teachers across different European countries. Eleven countries provided sufficient data for analyses. Results from structural equation modelling showed that teachers’ attitudes could be reliably measured across Europe with the use of carefully devised questionnaire, whose loading and factor structure remained invariant across countries. Teachers’ views about multilingualism were most challenged by the numbers of children in their classes, not the percentage of multilingual pupils in the class. Countries differed in how they perceived multilingualism, with their differences leading to distinctive country clusters. Gender and education level (elementary vs. secondary) differences were also observed irrespective of country. These findings enhance our understanding of the role that the characteristics of teachers and their classrooms play in a multilingual setting across diverse European settings. The practical relevance of the results and new opportunities for teacher training are discussed.

     

Induction and Early-career Support of Teachers in Europe

The deep economic, social, technological and cultural changes in Europe represent a real challenge for teacher education. The teacher's role is becoming more complex and demanding, while the expectations of society are rising. Teachers are expected not only to enable optimal development of increasingly heterogeneous groups of pupils, but also to mitigate the effects of social inequality. All this requires qualitative changes in pre-service and in-service teacher education. In this regard, the transition from school/university to professional life — the induction period and early career years — requires special attention. In this phase, a fruitful synthesis of theory and practice can occur if novices are systematically introduced and supported by good mentoring in the transition from study to school life and culture, but a ‘practice shock’ is also possible during which many positive effects of pre-service education are lost. Our aim is to identify some principles and optimal solutions that would foster teacher's professional development in this important phase of their career.     

Teacher–student relationship and academic achievement: a cross-lagged longitudinal study on three different age groups

Although the relation between teacher–student relationship and academic achievement has been addressed in many studies, the reciprocal relations between these two constructs have not been explored sufficiently. The aim of the present study was to test three competing models that hypothesized directionality of influence in relations between teacher acceptance, student-perceived teacher support, and academic achievement. Eight hundred sixteen students from 3 different grade levels in Slovenian elementary and secondary schools, covering the age range from late childhood through early-to-middle adolescence, participated in the study at the beginning and at the end of the school year. Structural equation modeling was used. Different models of relations between teacher acceptance, student-perceived teacher support, and academic achievement were analyzed using the cross-lagged panel correlation technique. The results supported the hypothesized reciprocal model, indicating the relation between teacher acceptance and academic achievement in both directions. Student-perceived teacher personal support partially mediates the relation between teacher acceptance and achievement in both directions on the whole sample but not in specific age groups. Finally, we found some age-specific differences in the relations between teacher acceptance, teacher personal support, and achievement.     

Development of Art Appreciation in 11–14 year‐old Students

Modern art curricula derive from the assumption that visual arts education can be of a high quality only if productive and receptive artistic activities are implemented. In art education practice, we are able to follow incentives for artistic expression but pay less attention to developing art appreciation that is based on developing as subtle perceptions of artwork as possible. Students have few opportunities to observe, enjoy and understand artwork. This discussion presents the results of a study that monitored the development of art appreciation abilities of 11–14 year‐old students in Slovenian compulsory education. The level of art appreciation abilities is rather average and more developed with older students and girls. There were no statistically significant differences with regard to school stratum.     

Supervised sentiment analysis in Czech social media

This article describes in-depth research on machine learning methods for sentiment analysis of Czech social media. Whereas in English, Chinese, or Spanish this field has a long history and evaluation datasets for various domains are widely available, in the case of the Czech language no systematic research has yet been conducted. We tackle this issue and establish a common ground for further research by providing a large human-annotated Czech social media corpus. Furthermore, we evaluate state-of-the-art supervised machine learning methods for sentiment analysis. We explore different pre-processing techniques and employ various features and classifiers. We also experiment with five different feature selection algorithms and investigate the influence of named entity recognition and preprocessing on sentiment classification performance. Moreover, in addition to our newly created social media dataset, we also report results for other popular domains, such as movie and product reviews. We believe that this article will not only extend the current sentiment analysis research to another family of languages, but will also encourage competition, potentially leading to the production of high-end commercial solutions.     

Didactic competencies of teachers from the learner’s viewpoint

Teacher competencies can be researched in many different ways. In the present article they are studied from the learner’s viewpoint. The article presents results of the extensive project “Teacher Education for New Competencies for the Knowledge Society and the Role of these Competencies in Educational Goal Attainment at School”, carried out at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, with the financial support of the Slovenian Ministry of Education and Sport. We present the results of the learner’s judgement of the teacher’s didactic competencies. We formed a questionnaire with which we operationalised teacher competencies with the purpose of measuring the teacher’s efficiency of instruction. In order to achieve the goals of modern instruction it is important to engage both models: learner‐centred and teacher‐centred education. The research showed that elements of the traditional instruction model are more frequently used than the model that demands a changed learner role.     

The reasons students choose teaching professions

The purpose of the paper is to present the reasons students at the Faculty of Education in Maribor, Slovenija, chose pedagogy for their study direction, and therefore becoming a teacher. A total 237 second‐year students of the academic year 2003/04 were included in the research. Of the five groups of reasons for choosing this program (altruistic, material, self‐realization and alternative, and reasons arising from aspiration stereotype), students most often asserted self‐realization, including: teaching provides a useful public function for the whole society; as a teacher, I can be an example to children and young people; this profession will give me a chance for professional development during my whole career; and teaching will enable me to use all my abilities (and talents—for example, music, verbal, dancing, etc.) Important differences were found to exist between students of different disciplines.     

Teacher Education in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic

Teacher education in Czechoslovakia is part of a unified national provision of education; this covers in‐service as well as pre‐service training. The basis is that of training at Higher education level followed by life‐long upgrading.

The Marxist‐Leninist view is that the quality of the teacher is central to the educational process. Consequently, the initial and in‐service training of the teacher are of paramount importance, and the Czechoslovak system aims at an integrated approach to the entire process. In this process, acquisition of ideological, as well as professional, maturity, is seen as essential. Equally, the teacher must master his chosen discipline (s) in the scientific sense.

Additionally, it is important that the teacher be able to participate actively in the community—in, for example, family education, health care and concern for the environment.

Against this background of goals, the author outlines the Czechoslovak institutional provision for initial training, conditions for enrolment and the process of obtaining a post, before providing an in‐depth examination of the country's provision of in‐service education. A final section emphasises the position of the teacher in society, and specifically in socialist society. The teacher is, quite simply, a key figure and teacher education has to be built around this fact.

Svatopluk S. Petrá?ek is Professor of Education and Director of the European Centre of the Charles University for Further Education of Teachers.     

Teaching about thermal expansion: investigating the effectiveness of a cognitive bridging approach

Background: It is widely known that for many students it is very difficult to correctly predict how thermal expansion affects the appearance of a metal plate with a circular hole. Interviews with school teachers show that the source of this difficulty could stem from the fact that students’ internal visualizations of an arbitrary object’s thermal expansion often boil down to visualizing changes along one dimension only.

Purpose: In this study, we investigated how students’ mental models about one-dimensional expansion can be extended for purposes of running mental simulations about expansion along two dimensions.

Sample: To that end a pretest-posttest quasi-experiment has been conducted, with 100 students in the control group and 95 students in the experimental group.

Design and methods: Whereas control group students received traditional instruction with a focus on formal representations, in the experimental group the students were led to draw an analogy between heating of a straight rod and a circular rod of same length, whereby the internal structure of the rods was represented by springs.

Results: Eventually, it has been found that students from the experimental group were significantly more successful at predicting the effects of thermal expansion, especially within contexts of objects with holes.

Conclusion: Analogies and extreme case reasoning can be effectively used for helping the students to correctly transfer their mental models about one-dimensional expansion to situations that require reasoning about expansion along two dimensions.     

Integrating alternative learning and assessment in a course of English for law students

Alternative approaches to learning and assessment have become common practice in higher education today. While these approaches have several learning, instructional and assessment advantages for students and teachers, a need exists for a better understanding of their consequential evidence. The purpose of this study was to examine students’ perceptions of, and satisfaction with, the experience of learning English for Law in the environment of a comprehensive learning and assessment system integrating the project component and academic writing portfolio component into the framework of traditional learning. A sample of 58 law majors from Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, Lithuania participated in the study. The main findings of the study indicate that the integrated approach to learning English for Law was very well accepted by the students due to the following benefits it presented: (i) this approach is effective and useful in promoting students’ productive and receptive language skills; (ii) it enhances students’ satisfaction with their results; (iii) it fosters one’s motivation to learn a foreign language; (iv) it promotes students’ development as independent learners. It is recommended that this study be extended to the investigation of the impact of such an approach on the students’ final results in ESP in comparable groups.