Subject Matter Knowledge in a Master of Arts in Teaching Program: Ensuring candidates’ content knowledge through an arts and sciences/education collaboration

All teacher education programs face the challenge of ensuring that their graduates know their subject matter and can teach it effectively. For graduate level teacher education programs, whose candidates may complete their education in the content area at various institutions, this challenge is even greater. The following article describes one institution’s system of assessing candidates’ content knowledge and efforts to incorporate additional content coursework into a Master of Arts in Teaching program. Also provided is information on a set of courses that the arts and sciences and education faculty team teach, with the course for prospective English teachers described in detail.     

Duck and corn

A duck walks into a bar and asks the bartender for corn.The bartender says,＂We have no corn,get out of here.＂So the duck leaves.The next day he comes back and asks for corn again,     

USING SELF‐MANAGEMENT INTERVENTIONS TO ADDRESS GENERAL EDUCATION BEHAVIORAL NEEDS: ASSESSMENT OF EFFECTIVENESS AND FEASIBILITY

A comprehensive self‐management intervention was utilized to increase the on‐task behavior of three African American students within an urban middle‐school setting. The intervention was designed to necessitate minimal management on the part of the general education classroom teacher by utilizing an electronic prompting device, as well as a centralized intervention coordinator for the management of training, implementation, and progress monitoring. Results suggested that implementation of the intervention resulted in improvement in on‐task behavior across all three students; however, problems with inconsistent implementation necessitated that modifications be made to the intervention procedures. Implications for the design and implementation of self‐management interventions within general education secondary‐level settings are discussed.     

Relational Turbulence in College Dating Relationships: Measurement,Construct Validity,and Comparison to Marriage

This study seeks to examine a relationship ignored by most communication researchers: the long‐distance friendship. In this study, geographically close friends reported more maintenance behaviors than long‐distance friends. However, no significant differences were found concerning how satisfied or close they perceive their friendship to be or whether they expected their friendship to continue. Differences in the maintenance behaviors reported for each type of friend suggest that some maintenance behaviors may be more important than others for maintaining a close, satisfactory friendship. Implications for current conceptualizations of relational maintenance are discussed.     

Demographics of scholarly publishing and communication professionals

Scholarly publishing plays a pivotal role in the dissemination of research. While a great deal is known about the companies active in this sector, we need to know more about the employees of the firms that edit, produce, market, and distribute today's scholarly books and journals. To achieve this goal, the researchers conducted an international survey in late 2014 and early 2015 of approximately 6,121 scholarly publishing employees in 33 nations. The researchers received 828 usable questionnaires. Some of the substantive findings about the respondents include: 90.79% identified themselves as white; 85.07% worked in scholarly publishing for more than 5 years; 60% held graduate or professional degrees; and 49% worked in editorial departments. Key suggestions include the need for annual surveys of this type and that the majority of scholarly publishing firms need to address the issue of diversity.     

Opting Out or Opting In? Test Boycott and Parental Engagement in American Public Education

This article provides a “thick” understanding of how public school parents understand their decision to opt their children out of standardized tests. In it, Amy Shuffelton draws from qualitative research interviews with Chicago parents to explore how three mothers connected opting out of standardized testing to their broader commitments to public schools. In probing the democratic potential of their logic, Shuffelton points to avenues of hope for democratic and equitable public schooling. As scholars have argued on multiple grounds, public schools have generally preserved inequitable power relations and resource allocations rather than changed them, and this happens in part because of parental resistance to reforms they believe to be detrimental to the interests of their children. Precisely because privileged parents have and implement the power to use schooling to pass advantages to their own children, however, it is important to consider when and why some of these parents instead see reason to build a public school system that shares those advantages widely. Putting these parents' explanations for opting out of testing into conversation with ideas about the democratic public in texts by John Dewey and Bonnie Honig, Shuffelton finds potential pathways, as well as hurdles, to reviving commitment to public schooling.     

Mathematical Modeling in the Elementary Grades: Developing and Testing an Assessment

Mathematical modeling is a high-leverage topic, critical for college and career readiness, participation in STEM education, and civic engagement. Mathematical modeling involves connecting real-world situations, phenomenon, and/or data with mathematical models, and in this way applies across various STEM disciplines, including mathematics, engineering, and science. Although research has begun to explore mathematical modeling instruction in the elementary grades, questions remain about how to assess student learning at the elementary level. We addressed this need by designing an assessment of mathematical modeling competencies for students in grades 3 through 5. Informed by international research, our assessment includes a hybrid structure to assess mathematical modeling competencies holistically (as students engage in the complete modeling process) and atomistically (as students engage in different components of the modeling process, including making sense of phenomena and real-world situations, setting up and operating on mathematical models, and interpreting results in relation to the real-world context). We conducted student interviews, followed by two rounds of pilot testing to inform item development and ensure acceptable psychometric properties. The final assessment included 13 items (9 multiple choice, 3 open-response, and 1 complete modeling task). We describe our assessment development process, and provide sample assessment items and detailed coding rubrics. We summarize quantitative analyses which established high reliability and low standard error for our assessment, supporting its use for grades 3 to 5. Implications of our framework and assessment for mathematical modeling instruction and future research on STEM learning are discussed.

     

Hands-on Computer Use in Science Classrooms: The Skeptics Are Still Waiting

Journal of Science Education and Technology -     

Measuring teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs: Development and use of the TEBS-Self

This paper distinguishes between teacher efficacy and teacher self-efficacy beliefs and describes a need for theory and research-based measures of teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs that are grounded in the context of the classroom. To meet this need, a new measure of teacher self-efficacy beliefs, the Teachers’ Efficacy Beliefs System-Self (TEBS-Self), is described by the authors. Principal components analysis results are presented from three independent studies performed in the United States (n=2373 K-6 teachers) using the TEBS-Self.     

Microaggressions in graduate students’ lives: How they are encountered and their consequences

This article explores the experiences of teaching assistants from nonmainstream backgrounds in a predominantly white institution (PWI) of U.S. education. We focus on how such teaching assistants experience and respond to “microaggressions” or subtle challenges to their teaching based on race and ethnicity. We also explore the consequences of microaggressions for teaching assistants’ future career plans. Analyses of life history interviews show how processes of microaggressions permeated teaching assistants’ relationships with white prospective and cooperating teachers. The authors suggest ways to interrupt these in teacher education programs.