Spatial thinking in science,technology, engineering,and mathematics: Elementary teachers' beliefs,perceptions, and self-efficacy

Fostering students' spatial thinking skills holds great promise for improving Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. Recent efforts have focused on the development of classroom interventions to build students' spatial skills, yet these interventions will be implemented by teachers, and their beliefs and perceptions about spatial thinking influence the effectiveness of such interventions. However, our understanding of elementary school teachers' beliefs and perceptions around spatial thinking and STEM is in its infancy. Thus, we created novel measures to survey elementary teachers' anxiety in solving spatial problems, beliefs in the importance of spatial thinking skills for students' academic success, and self-efficacy in cultivating students' spatial skills during science instruction. All measures exhibited high internal consistency and showed that elementary teachers experience low anxiety when solving spatial problems and feel strongly that their skills can improve with practice. Teachers were able to identify educational problems that rely on spatial problem-solving and believed that spatial skills are more important for older compared to younger students. Despite reporting high efficacy in their general teaching and science teaching, teachers reported significantly lower efficacy in their capacities to cultivate students' spatial skills during science instruction. Results were fairly consistent across teacher characteristics (e.g., years of experience and teaching role as generalist or specialist) with the exception that only years of teaching science was related to teachers' efficacy in cultivating students' spatial thinking skills during science instruction. Results are discussed within the broader context of teacher beliefs, self-efficacy, and implications for professional development research.     

Recovery Supports for Young People: What Do Existing Supports Reveal About the Recovery Environment?

This article seeks to address how our understanding of the recovery process and resulting supports can be made more comprehensive: How can links from treatment to home to school to communities be made so that there are fewer and fewer recovery gaps for adolescents? Using the ecology of recovery model developed by White (2009) as the impetus for such a review, the article discusses the challenges inherent within adolescent substance abuse recovery, factors impacting successful recovery, and programs addressing this issue that have been empirically studied. Studied programs can be categorized as (a) formalized aftercare recovery and (b) recovery communities, and both examples are described using existing literature. From the review of existing recovery support research and resources, the discussion highlights gaps and future research areas in order to address the complexity of recovery among young people.     

Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai'i

Whereas earlier research has shown that (traditional) cricket was invented in Flanders (i.e. the Southern Low Countries), this article focuses on the introduction of modern cricket in the Netherlands (i.e. the Northern Low Countries). The result is a broad textual study, based on large-scale digital analysis. We show that the integration of this sport textually took place in three phases: first in small groups via billingual translation dictionaries (starting in 1724), translated literature and ego documents, then through educational leisure books and manuals, and finally by means of articles in periodicals and news papers (with information about cricket matches). With regard to the practice and propagation of cricket, pupils and former pupils of Noorthey, a Protestant-Christian boarding school for boys, played a very important role. Clubs were founded all over the Netherlands, and in 1883 the Dutch cricket federation was established. In the end, however, cricket did not become a popular national sport in the Netherlands.     

Counting the nouns: simple structural cues to verb meaning

Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in--subcategorization frames--to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant roles in events. This account predicts that subcategorization frames should guide very early verb learning, if the number of nouns in the sentences is informative. In 3 experiments, one hundred and thirty-six 21- and 19-month-olds assigned appropriately different interpretations to novel verbs in transitive ("He's gorping him!") versus intransitive sentences ("He's gorping!") differing in their number of nouns. Thus, subcategorization frames guide verb interpretation in very young children. These findings constrain theoretical proposals about mechanisms for syntactic bootstrapping.     

Graphing as a Means to Improve Middle School Science Learning and Mathematics-Related Affective Domains

Research in Science Education - This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Mathematics Infusion into Science Project (MiSP), which integrated science and mathematics in an engaging middle school...     

Liminality,disruption, and change: A prismatic look at pandemic education

PROSPECTS - Using prismatic inquiry, a team of researchers documented a variety of personal experiences that spanned elementary through higher education, with the goal of determining what helped...     

数字技术支持的教师学习:研究与项目综述(上)

本文在系统回顾教师知识与教师学习本质的基础上,讨论了数字技术与教师学习活动之间的关系,主张将数字技术的效用描述为教师学习中有目的的一组活动,即：知识建构、分布式认知、社群与沟通以及约定,通过对五个技术支持的教师学习的典型案例。分析了数字技术对教师学习的支持作用。最后指出了数字技术支持的教师学习与专业发展之方向。     

Children's memory for orientation in the absence of external cues

Some have interpreted children's reliance on external visual cues as evidence that they are unable to use internal cues for orientation. This hypothesis was examined in experiment 1, where 24 preschoolers were tested on left-right, vertical-horizontal, and mirror-image oblique discriminations under essentially context-free conditions. Subjects succeeded on all discrimination problems and performed equally well on vertical-horizontal and mirror-image oblique discriminations. Thus, preschoolers can use an internal frame of reference to code orientation. Experiment 2 contrasted children's performance under context-free conditions with their ability to discriminate orientation in the presence of external visual cues. Children who had discriminated left-right oblique and nonoblique mirror-image forms in experiment 1 failed to so discriminate in experiment 2. This result is discussed in terms of a breakdown in the ability to use internal cues when external visual cues are available.     

Teacher Education,Evacuation and Community in War-Time Britain: The Women of Avery Hill at Huddersfield 1941–46

The evacuation of civilians during Second World War Britain included the relocation not only of school children and teachers but of whole schools and, in some instances, of teacher training colleges. This paper examines the evacuation of Avery Hill College, a leading teacher training college, from London to Huddersfield between 1941 and 1946. Focusing on issues of gender and community, it provides an account of the circumstances of the move, institutional relations and resources, the social milieu of war-time Huddersfield, the challenges arising from evacuation, the responses of staff and trainees, and the broader institutional and teacher education policy transitions that ensued.     

Toward a science for and of the people: promoting civil society through the application of developmental science

Applied developmental science (ADS) is scholarship that seeks to advance the integration of developmental research with actions-policies and programs-that promote positive development and/or enhance the life chances of vulnerable children and families. Through this integration ADS may become a major means to foster a science for and of the people. It may serve as an exemplar of the means through which scholarship, with community collaboration, may contribute directly to social justice. In so doing, ADS helps shift the model of amelioration, prevention, or optimization research from one demonstrating efficacy to one promoting outreach. When this contribution occurs in the context of university-community partnerships, ADS may serve also as a model of how higher education may engage policy makers, contribute to community capacity to sustain valued programs, and maintain and perpetuate civil society through knowledge-based, interinstitutional systems change.