本科生导师制管见

本科生的导师制在西方部分高校具有悠久的历史。国内在教学改革背景下也开始了本科生导致制的探索。大多研究都集中在如何制定制度与规范、导师制的评估、导师制与其他相关制度之间的关系以及导师制实行的必要性等方面展开。导师制的实行应注重中外的文化与社会差异,合理确立导职责和导师权重,注重学生的反馈与需求。     

浅析大学英语教师专家型与新手型教学能力的差异

随着时代发展的需要,大学英语教学改革对教师教学能力的要求日益提高,本文对专家型教师和新手型教师教学能力进行对比,以期找到提高大学英语教师教学能力的方法,从而进一步提高英语教学质量。     

The private problem with public service: rural teachers in educational markets

Staffing rural and remote schools is an important policy issue for the public good. This paper examines the private issues it also poses for teachers with families working in these communities, as they seek to reconcile careers with educational choices for children. The paper first considers historical responses to staffing rural and remote schools in Australia, and the emergence of neoliberal policy encouraging marketisation of the education sector. We report on interviews about considerations motivating household mobility with 11 teachers across regional, rural and remote communities in Queensland. Like other middle-class parents, these teachers prioritised their children's educational opportunities over career opportunities. The analysis demonstrates how teachers in rural and remote communities constitute a special group of educational consumers with insider knowledge and unique dilemmas around school choice. Their heightened anxieties around school choice under neoliberal policy are shown to contribute to the public issue of staffing rural and remote schools.     

Thai pre-service science teachers engaging action research during their fifth year internship

As a key element in teacher education programmes, action research is a learning process in which pre-service teachers inquire, reflect on and improve their teaching practices. This qualitative study sought to understand what enhanced or hindered Thai pre-service teachers' action research projects during their student teaching. This study drew upon written reflections, focus-group interviews and observations of seminar sessions. Data analysis was inductive, involving categorical aggregation followed by a search for correspondence and patterns. The results indicated that the pre-service teachers misunderstood action research, and also held a negative attitude toward it, both of which led them to superficial analyses of practice. They struggled with time limitations, data gathering and interpretation strategies. In spite of the struggles they experienced, these pre-service science teachers did learn more about the action research through collaboratively working with cooperating teachers and university supervisors and on-campus seminar discussions held concurrently with the fifth year internship. Recognizing and understanding the reasons and thinking patterns at the root of these teachers' difficulties with learning about action research can form the basis for reflecting on and rethinking the components of science teacher preparation programmes in Thailand.     

The influence of teacher education on mentor teachers’ role perception in professional development schools

Apprenticeship and professional development schools (PDSs) are two models for teacher education. The mentors that are the focus for this research completed their initial teacher training through one of these models and now mentor in PDSs. The paper reports on how the way in which they were trained as student teachers influenced their role perceptions. The findings suggest that mentor teachers who were trained via the PDSs model have a broader conceptual understanding of their role perception.     

Using one’s own professional activities to promote research and publishing

This paper explores issues related to teacher educators publishing in journals. They do so for obvious reasons such as tenure, career advancement, personal satisfaction and university prestige. In order to offer an extra means of helping teacher educators achieve these publishing goals, the paper explores how using one’s own professional experiences in a number of spheres may offer substantial opportunities for publishing. Using a Grounded Theory analysis, the author presents an analysis of his own publications. These are laid out in five categories in which his professional pursuits with teacher trainees have led to a considerable number of publications, 34 of which have appeared in international journals, 25 of them in international Grade A and B journals. The author calls for academics to examine their own practices, suggesting that there is much in one’s own professional experiences that can be of worth to the international community.     

Research on teaching practicum – a systematic review

The aim of the present study is to conduct a systematic review research which focuses on research studies into the school practicum. In order to identify the main issues and also to provide a contemporary picture of practicum, 114 studies published on the topic are reviewed and analysed in terms of: (i) aims, (ii) main participants, (iii) methodology used and (iv) the main outcomes emerging. Many of the reviewed studies take pre-service teachers as their main participants. The review also shows that many practicum studies are relatively small-scale studies since they are mainly qualitative focused and findings derived from a relatively small sample. This suggests that more large-scale studies are needed in the field in order to provide greater insight into teaching practicum. Finally, this systematic review provides some food for thought in the area of practicum research and promotes further studies in this complex field.     

Transcultural analysis of the effectiveness of a program to promote self-regulated learning in Mozambique,Chile, Portugal,and Spain

The current investigation aims at assessing the effectiveness of an intervention program designed to enhance self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies at the university level, with students from different cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds. The central tool of the program is a set of letters in which a fictional first-year student describes his experiences as an SRL student. The program was implemented in four universities in different countries and continents (Portugal, Spain, Chile, and Mozambique), with an experimental group and a comparison group at each university (263 students from experimental groups and 247 from comparison groups). Findings display the effectiveness of the program in enhancing a set of motivational variables related to the study process and the use of SRL strategies. Data were consistent across the different cultural and academic contexts in which the program was implemented. The implications of these findings for university administrators and faculty are discussed.     

Instrument adaptation in cross-cultural studies of students’ mathematics-related beliefs: learning from healthcare research

Much comparative research into education-related beliefs has exploited questionnaires developed in one culture for use in another. This has been particularly the case in mathematics education, the focus of this paper. In so doing, researchers have tended to assume that translation alone is sufficient to warrant a reliable and valid instrument for cross-cultural research, prompting concerns that a number of necessary equivalences are unlikely to have been addressed. In this paper, we consider the nature of these equivalences before examining the literature of a different field, healthcare research, to synthesise an approach to instrument adaptation that is pragmatic but rigorous. Finally, we demonstrate how this pragmatic approach, incorporating extensive cognitive interviews, enabled us to adapt and refine a mathematics-related beliefs questionnaire, developed in Flanders, for use with students aged 14–15 in England and Spain. Analyses indicate that the instrument so developed is multidimensional, reliable and cross-culturally valid. Some implications are discussed.     

‘It’s very much taken as an insult if I say anything’: do new educators have a right to speak their mind?

This article describes the challenges beginning teachers face in schooling contexts that have become increasingly subject to direct political intervention. To tell the story it focuses on the experiences of five teachers in their first year of teaching in an urban jurisdiction in Australia, examining the ways in which they taught literacy, and were required to teach literacy. Government-driven political agendas of national testing, teacher standards and performance pay were all gaining traction as they commenced their first year of teaching. The ways in which these new educators felt they were discouraged from voicing their own opinions about these issues are examined and the consequences of silencing new educators are considered. The article concludes with recommendations for teacher education programmes to better prepare teachers for the politics of teaching.