Swiss student‐teachers' views of social pedagogy

In recent years a number of policy and practice initiatives concerning pastoral care in schools in England have led to schools increasingly being expected to take a leading role in addressing a widening range of concerns regarding the welfare, care and education of children, and in working more closely with parents and other professional agencies in addressing these. This has included a consideration of the notion of ‘social pedagogy’ as widely practiced in mainland Europe. This paper explores the views of student‐teachers in Switzerland, a country where social pedagogy is well developed, regarding the role of the school in addressing pupil problems. The findings indicate that these Swiss student‐teachers felt schools should take the lead role primarily in areas regarding poor academic progress, bullying, general misbehaviour and disaffection, and less so in areas of a more personal nature for pupils where schools may be less accountable. The findings provide some pointers concerning how Swiss student‐teachers would benefit from greater attention being given to considering such pastoral care issues in their training course.     

The state of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions

This article provides a systematic review and meta-analysis of the current evidence for universal school-based (USB) social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions for students in kindergarten through 12th grade available from 2008 through 2020. The sample includes 424 studies from 53 countries, reflecting 252 discrete USB SEL interventions, involving 575,361 students. Results endorsed that, compared to control conditions, students who participate in USB SEL interventions experienced significantly improved skills, attitudes, behaviors, school climate and safety, peer relationships, school functioning, and academic achievement. Significant heterogeneity in USB SEL content, intervention features, context, and implementation quality moderated student experiences and outcomes. Strengths and limitations of this evidence and implications for future USB SEL research, policy, and practice are discussed.     

Accreditation and Power: A Discourse Analysis of a New Regime of Governance in Higher Education

This article studies discourses within the accreditation of Norwegian higher education conducted by the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT), using one concrete case (the accreditation of bachelor programs in nursing). Analysis of policy documents and accreditation reports are influenced by two of Foucault's concepts of power; governmentality and panopticon. The analysis provides insights into firstly, how the two forms of power are woven into the schemes used for quality control by redefining quality to be a quantifiable concept; secondly, how the supervision of quality gives privilege to specific types of knowledge; thirdly, how supervisory power is reformulated to require self-control mechanisms within higher education in terms of constant quality development and realization of unexploited potentials; and fourthly, how this power legitimates itself by making all parties guardians of quality control, deconstructing the difference between evaluator and evaluated.     

Fortune is fickle: null-effects of disfluency on learning outcomes

Recently, Diemand-Yauman et al. Cognition, 118, 114–118 (2011) demonstrated that learning with disfluent (hard-to-read) materials is more effective than learning with easy-to-read materials – a study that has since stipulated a number of follow-up studies (with mixed results). However, there is a potential confound in the original experiments: The disfluent materials were not only disfluent but also rather unusual. Therefore, they might have been particularly distinctive and have attracted more attention, which then resulted in better learning. We conducted three experiments to address this confound, all of them slightly modified replications of Diemand-Yauman et al.’s Experiment 1. Participants received five lists, either at their own pace on a computer screen (Experiment 1) or experimenter-paced on paper (Experiments 2 & 3). In Experiments 1 and 2, participants either received one fluent and four disfluent lists or they received four fluent lists and one disfluent list. The position of the distinct list varied across participants. In Experiment 3, the distinct list was always the penultimate one. In none of the experiments, learning performance was affected by any of the experimental manipulations. Our results question the generality of the disfluency effect with respect to learning.     

Drawing pictures during learning from scientific text: testing the generative drawing effect and the prognostic drawing effect

Does using a learner-generated drawing strategy (i.e., drawing pictures during reading) foster students' engagement in generative learning during reading? In two experiments, 8th-grade students (Exp. 1: N = 48; Exp. 2: N = 164) read a scientific text explaining the biological process of influenza and then took two learning outcome tests. In Experiment 1, students who were asked to draw pictures during reading (learner-generated drawing group), scored higher than students who only read (control group) on a multiple-choice comprehension test (d = 0.85) and on a drawing test (d = 1.15). In Experiment 2, students in the learner-generated drawing group scored significantly higher than the control group on both a multiple-choice comprehension test (d = 0.52) and on a drawing test (d = 1.89), but students who received author-generated pictures in addition to drawing or author-generated pictures only did not. Additionally, the drawing-accuracy scores during reading correlated with comprehension test scores (r = .623, r = .470) and drawing scores (r = .620, r = .615) in each experiment, respectively. These results provide further evidence for the generative drawing effect and the prognostic drawing effect, thereby confirming the benefits of the learner-generated drawing strategy.     

Changes in British adult education during the last 20 years and their effects on the morale of the profession

My project attempts to identify the changes in British adult education during the last 20 years and their effects on the morale of the profession. Data were gathered from interviews, questionnaires, visits to various institutions and participation in course sessions.

The findings show that government funding is geared to vocational education and courses offering qualifications. Therefore, every institution/organisation has to ensure its survival by changing its curriculum regardless of the effects on its nature and ethos. The various implications affect the morale of the professionals in an ambivalent way. Adult educationalists have to master the inner conflict between two emotions: on the one hand confusion and in many cases sore feelings result from either the poor management of changes or the character of the changes and the fact that they are imposed. On the other hand there is the love for the rewarding work with adults and the enthusiasm which ensues. The balance between those emotions varies and is influenced by factors such as age as well as time and degree of involvement in the field of adult education.     

Profiles of change in motivation for teaching in higher education at an American research university

The current study employed an emergent theoretical model of teaching role identity and motivation to investigate the change in conception of and motivation for teaching in higher education of research graduate students who teach in the United States. Fifteen participants took a graduate-level seminar as part of a two-course teaching professional development (PD) program. Qualitative content analysis of the participants’ pre-seminar and post-seminar reflective essays focused on change in the theoretical model’s components – participants’ goals, self-perceptions, epistemological beliefs, and action possibilities – and their alignment. The findings suggested four kinds of change in each component, ranging from dramatic change to reversed change, as well as three general profiles of change labeled ‘Transformation,’ ‘Elaboration’, and ‘Stagnation’. The model proved useful in conceptualizing the change in participants’ teaching-related conceptions and motivation and could provide a guide for future research on teaching motivation and for designing and evaluating teaching PD in higher education.