Perceptions about teacher progression among Jamaica's primary schoolteachers should force society to stop and ask itself several questions. Are these perceptions accurate? If not, how did these perceptions emerge and what can national leaders and those in positions of authority do to ‘manage’ if not resolve these perceptions? If there is any truth to them, a different set of questions need to be asked. How did things come to be like this? How can the perception of corruption and mistrust be minimised? What will be done differently going forward? Either way, there is a more fundamental question: Do the current perceptions among teachers mirror perceptions in other areas of public service? The answers to these questions are not easy. The main aim of this small-scale qualitative exploratory study was to identify and understand the perceptions of primary schoolteachers in Jamaica as regards progression to the rank of principal. The findings point to a number of perceived barriers including religious affiliation, political affiliation, ministry- and school-level politicking, social connections and predetermined outcomes. This study concludes that promotion on any basis other than merit is problematic and does not promote trust, openness and transparency, nor does it build confidence in those who are part of the system but themselves do not have such connections and/or affiliations. 相似文献
This paper identifies salient practices of faculty mentors of undergraduate research (UR) as indicated in the extensive literature of the past two decades on UR. The well-established benefits for students involved in UR are dependent, first and foremost, on high-quality mentoring. Mentorship is a defining feature of UR. As more and different types of colleges and universities strive to meet student demand for authentic scholarly experiences, it is imperative to identify what effective UR mentors do in order to ensure student engagement, quality enhancement, retention, and degree-completion. We offer an original analysis of the literature on UR mentoring in which we identify 10 significant “lessons learned,” or evidence-based practices of effective UR mentors that apply broadly across disciplines, students, institutions, and mentoring approaches. 相似文献
Instructional videos are widely used to study teachers’ professional vision. A new technological development in video research is mobile eye-tracking (MET). It has the potential to provide fine-grained insights into teachers’ professional vision in action, but has yet been scarcely employed. We addressed this research gap by using MET video feedback to examine how expert and novice teachers differed in their noticing and weighing of alternative teaching strategies. Expert and novice teachers’ lessons were recorded with MET devices. Then, they commented on what they observe while watching their own teaching videos. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that expert and novice teachers did not differ in the number of classroom events they noticed and alternative teaching strategies they mentioned. However, novice teachers were more critical of their own teaching than expert teachers, particularly when they considered alternative teaching strategies. Practical implications for the field of teacher education are discussed.
In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K-12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge structures. In this study, we investigated how students use mass balance reasoning as a conceptual scaffold to gain a deeper understanding of how matter moves through biological systems. Our aim was to lay the groundwork for a mass balance learning progression in physiology. We drew on a general models framework from biology and a covariational reasoning framework from math education to interpret students' mass balance ideas. We used a constant comparative method to identify students' reasoning patterns from 73 interviews conducted with undergraduate biology students. We helped validate the reasoning patterns identified with >8000 written responses collected from students at multiple institutions. From our analyses, we identified two related progress variables that describe key elements of students' performances: the first describes how students identify and use matter flows in biology phenomena; the second characterizes how students use net rate-of-change to predict how matter accumulates in, or disperses from, a compartment. We also present a case study of how we used our emerging mass balance learning progression to inform instructional practices to support students' mass balance reasoning. Our progress variables describe one way students engage in three dimensional learning by showing how student performances associated with the practice of mathematical thinking reveal their understanding of the core concept of matter flows as governed by the crosscutting concept of matter conservation. Though our work is situated in physiology, it extends previous work in climate change education and is applicable to other scientific fields, such as physics, engineering, and geochemistry. 相似文献
Despite over three decades of legislation and initiatives designed to tackle the traditional gender divide in the science, technology and design fields, only a quarter of the registered architects in Australia are women. There are no statistics available for other design disciplines, with little known about why women choose design as a career path and who or what influences this decision. This qualitative research addresses this knowledge gap, through semi‐structured in‐depth interviews conducted with 19 Australian women who completed an industrial (product) design degree. Thematic analysis revealed three key themes: childhood aptitude and exposure; significant experiences and people; and design as a serendipitous choice. The findings emphasise the importance of early exposure to design as a potential career choice, highlighting the critical role played by parents, teachers, professionals and social networks. 相似文献
The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the perceived motivational climate, achievement goals, perfectionism and indices of peer relationships in a sample of young male and female Norwegian soccer players. The sample consisted of 1719 experienced soccer players (1231 males, 488 females) aged 12?–?19 years (mean = 14.9 years) participating in the Norway Cup international youth soccer competition. The players responded to a questionnaire measuring perceived peer acceptance and quality of friendship in soccer, perceived motivational climate, achievement goals and perfectionism in soccer. Canonical correlation analyses revealed that young female players who perceived the motivational climate as predominantly mastery oriented, and who were moderately task oriented and scored negatively on maladaptive perfectionism, reported better relations with their peers in soccer. Constructive peer relations were evident in that they scored positively on companionship with their best friend in soccer; they perceived this friend as being loyal and of allowing free discussion, and they reported being socially accepted by their peers in soccer. Mirroring these findings, young male players who perceived the motivational climate as predominantly performance oriented, who had a moderately negative score on task orientation but a quite strong positive score on maladaptive perfectionism, reported negative relationships with peers in terms of these aspects. They also reported being in conflict with their best soccer friend. The findings suggest that the qualities of motivation have a systematic relationship with peer acceptance and the quality of friendship in male and female youth soccer. 相似文献