What they think, what they know, what they do: Rural secondary teachers’ motivational beliefs and strategies

This research examined how rural high school teachers’ beliefs and perceptions of themselves, their students and the challenge of motivation influence their strategic classroom and interpersonal motivating practice. Participants were 13 teachers in three rural, public high schools in two US states. Teachers’ beliefs about motivation generally, and their students’ motivation specifically, reflect a position favouring need and willingness to intervene for unmotivated students. However, their self-perceptions reflect a relatively weak efficacy to intervene successfully. Generally, teachers’ prevalent choice of strategies aligned with their perceptions of reasons that students were undermotivated. In contrast, some teachers’ narratives of actual efforts to motivate a specific student were inconsistent with their self-reported philosophies and style of motivation, and with their general statements of how they would motivate students who needed it. These findings suggest implications for design of teacher education and inservice teacher professional development.     

Research self-efficacy sources and research motivation in a foreign language university faculty in Mexico: implications for educational policy

The research self-efficacy and motivation of foreign language (FL) faculty in periphery countries is under-researched, yet there is a need to understand the impact of public policies that drive such faculty to conduct research. This paper reports a qualitative case study investigating research self-efficacy and research motivation in a group of Mexican FL professors. Interview data show variation in self-efficacy levels connected with academic degree, motivation types and strategic behaviors. Professors with doctorates, intrinsic motivation and use of strategies showed the highest self-efficacy. Professors with master's degrees and low motivation show the lowest self-efficacy. Previous experience and mentoring are influential sources of self-efficacy. Policies such as forced collaboration, financial rewards and the threat of employment termination seem to exert some effect on self-efficacy. It is recommended that policies be enacted to recognize and promote mentoring formally.     

Emigration and education. Galician emigration to America and its impact on the processes of literacy,schooling and civic education amongst the rural and seafaring popular classes

Over the course of the final 30 years of the nineteenth century, and well into the early decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Galician people migrated to different areas of America. There they found a new world to contend and interact with – a world that was more advanced and developed socially and culturally. From the perspective of a new awareness and heightened by processes of collective organisation, mainly identity-based, many of them set out to help advance the cultural and social development of Galicia through self-organised political, social and educational processes. In this way, during the 1920s, a growing number of primary schools – roughly 300 – all over Galicia felt the influence of the Galician emigrants. This is a genuine phenomenon characteristic of Galician emigration that has not been observed in the collective actions carried out by any of the other European migrant communities.     

Gender violence in schools in the developing world

This paper explores gender violence in schools in what is commonly known as the ‘developing world’ through a review of recent research written in English. Violence in the school setting has only recently emerged as a widespread and serious phenomenon in these countries, with the consequence that our knowledge and understanding of it is embryonic; much of it remains invisible or unrecognized. Informed by research from elsewhere, we use theories of gender/sexual relations to provide a more coherent understanding of the issues, to point to absences and open up spaces for further research with the potential to contribute to strategies through which it might be addressed. We start by clarifying the purposes and the broad position adopted in writing this paper. Then, we trace the conceptual connections between gender/sexual relations and gender violence in schools, acknowledging the importance of locating understanding of the phenomena within the context of the school’s culture, its structures and processes. We organize the review using two overlapping categories: implicit gender violence, which relates to the everyday institutional structures and practices, and explicit gender violence, which relates to more overtly sexualized encounters. Both categories cover gender violence perpetrated by students on other students, by teachers on students, and by students on teachers. In the final section, the theoretical connections (and distinctions) generated by the research allow for a critical overview of the strategies that have been used to address the problem to date.     

Technology in Support of Collaborative Learning

This paper reviews the research conducted in the last 20 years on the application of technology in support of collaborative learning in higher education. The review focuses primarily on studies that use Internet-based technologies and social interaction analysis. The review provides six sets of observations/recommendations regarding methodology, empirical evidence, and research gaps and issues that may help focus future research in this emerging field of study.

Food for Education in Honduras: Psychosocial correlates of childhood literacy

School feeding programs in low- and middle-income countries tend to focus on school attendance and literacy. Some evidence suggests that bolstering schools as a nexus of community plays an important psychosocial function for children and families. This study examines the extent to which childhood literacy rates are associated with parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of community violence and cohesion, following participation in a large-scale school feeding program in the Department of Intibucá, Honduras. Primary school children (n = 3,147) from 176 schools completed standardized literacy tests. Scores were linked to parents’ (n = 328) and teachers’ (n = 537) responses about community cohesion and violence. Social bonding among parents was positively associated with children’s literacy. Community violence reported by teachers exerted a negative influence. The authors discuss these results in light of how vertically focused interventions such as school feeding can be integrated to account for the specific contextual factors that affect, and are affected by, the program itself.     

Picking up the threads. Languaging in a Swedish mainstream preschool

This paper examines the strategies monolingual teachers use to scaffold meaning and encourage and enhance verbal communication with emergent bilingual children in a Swedish mainstream preschool. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a preschool group in which seven of twelve children spoke Swedish as their second, additional language. The basic assumption in this paper is that knowledge is scaffolded in talk between teachers and children. Several scaffolding strategies are identified such as guessing, qualified guessing, interactive scaffolding and co-construction of meaning. The analysis shows that successful languaging assumes a high level of trust between the children and their teachers and that it is essential that the teachers can identify each child’s zone of proximal development. Some educational implications and dilemmas are identified on the basis of the results.     

Neural Correlates of Self and Its Interaction With Memory in Healthy Adolescents

Adolescence is marked by the development of personal identity and is associated with structural and functional changes in brain regions associated with Self processing. Yet, little is known about the neural correlates of self‐reference processing and self‐reference effect in adolescents. This functional magnetic resonance imaging study consists of a self‐reference paradigm followed by a recognition test proposed to 30 healthy adolescents aged 13–18 years old. Results showed that the rostral anterior cingulate cortex is specifically involved in self‐reference processing and that this specialization develops gradually from 13 to 18 years old. The self‐reference effect is associated with increased brain activation changes during encoding, suggesting that the beneficial effect of Self on memory may occur at encoding of self‐referential information, rather than at retrieval.