Roots and Wings Community Mentoring: An Evaluation of the Manchester Pilot     

Jan Green  Bill Rogers 《Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning》2013,21(2):26-38

This article is a continuation of the exploration started by Sylvia Ashley in Mentoring and Tutoring, Autumn 1994, of the ‘Roots and Wings' mentoring initiative. The Roots and Wings programme is a Business in the Community initiative using the principles of community group mentoring. Sylvia Astley reported on the London and Bristol pilots. We follow this through with a digest of the evaluation of the Manchester pilot. In this pilot the British Telecom Personal Communications division offered mentoring support to the pupils from a Manchester high school. The evaluation attempted to capture the experiences of the mentors and mentees and the perspectives of the teaching staff involved. Recommendations were made with a view to expanding the scheme into other schools and businesses.  相似文献   

Vertical Grouping in the Primary School     

Jan Lee 《School Leadership & Management》2013,33(2):133-142

The introduction of new school inspection procedures is going to place great emphasis on classroom practice at a time when teacher appraisal is returning to the centre stage of the national debate on how to improve quality in education. The Government argues that it is seeking to encourage teacher professional development in the context of the school development plan but teachers fear that it is seeking to use appraisal as a means of ‘weeding out’ weak teachers and rewarding those who are successful by offering performance‐related pay. There are many contentious issues involved in such an appraisal system, which on the one hand encourages teacher professional development and on the other regards schools and teachers as being consumable products. This paper examines some of the issues that divide these two conflicting approaches and then criticises the current legislation‐driven approaches which are legitimately open to various usages. It then explores a new approach which is supportive to the profession but which produces clear performance indicators that can be used to provide a stricter monitoring of the effectiveness of teaching. This paper reflects upon the experiences of a school where a system of collective self‐appraisal was established. Underpinning the approach is a basic belief that teachers can be professionally responsible as well as being publicly accountable.  相似文献   

Assessing instructional conceptions: A task-based approach     

Geraldine Clarebout  Jan Elen  Rebecca Léonard  Joost Lowyck 《Educational Research and Evaluation》2013,19(2):109-125

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the labour market effects of two rather different forms of vocational education, full‐time education with practice periods that have no employment status versus dualized education with an emphasis on continuous on‐the‐job/in‐service training and employee status for the apprentice. Although most developed countries know both forms of vocational education, these usually have clearly different positions in a qualitative (standardization of curricula and degrees) and a quantitative (cohort shares) sense. The Netherlands present an interesting case, because in this country both systems coexist and contribute largely to the vocational training of each new generation. That provides a good opportunity for investigating differences in the labour market effects of these ‘treatments’ in vocational education. In this article, differences in labour market careers (i.e. the chances of getting promoted or getting unemployed) between graduates from full‐time vocational education and from the dual system are explored, using event history analysis. The results show that graduates from full‐time tracks have higher chances of getting promoted. However, the period of transition to the labour market is very unstable, involving job shifts and periods of unemployment. Graduates from the dual system on the other hand experience a more stable period of labour market entry. At the same time their careers often involve many dead‐end jobs, from which no promotion takes place. Moreover, they have difficulty in transfering their skills to other sectors than the sector for which they are trained.  相似文献   

Effects of Training in the Use of Social and Cognitive Strategies: An Intervention Study in Secondary Mathematics in Co‐Operative Groups     

Dirk Hoek  Jan Terwel  Pieter van den Eeden 《Educational Research and Evaluation》2013,19(4):364-389

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an intervention study into the effects of a training in the use of social and cognitive strategies on the learning outcomes of students in secondary mathematics education. Special attention is given to differential effects for high‐ and low‐achieving students. The focus on differential effects is derived from studies into learning in small co‐operative groups, and from the results of meta‐analyses into the effects of training in learning strategies. From these studies it can be concluded that in general such programs contribute to learning. However, it seems that low‐achieving students are unable to benefit from interventions of the kind investigated (i.e., co‐operative learning and training in learning strategies). The main question is whether it is possible to design an instructional program from which all students benefit, and from which the low‐achieving students profit more than their counterparts in the control‐program. In the present study three instructional programs for co‐operative learning were compared: (i) an experimental program with special instruction in the use of social strategies; (ii) an experimental program with special instruction in the use of cognitive strategies; and (iii) a control program without training in either cognitive or social strategies. The programs were identical with respect to mathematical content and general instructional settings (a combination of whole‐class instruction, working in co‐operative groups and individual work). The experiment addressed the following research question: what are the general and differential effects of a training in the use of social and cognitive strategies on the results of learning in secondary mathematics? The research was conducted in two schools for secondary education in a total of 21 classes, involving a total of 511 students. The design was a pretest‐posttest control group design, using two experimental groups and one control group. The data were analysed from a multi‐level perspective. The outcomes of the investigation clearly show the effects of the intervention. Teaching cognitive and social strategies has the expected, positive effects. In addition to this main effect, a compensatory effect for the low‐achieving students was found. The low‐achieving students in the experimental conditions outperformed their counterparts in the control group.

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Early Literacy From a Longitudinal Perspective     

Cor Aarnoutse  Jan van Leeuwe  Ludo Verhoeven 《Educational Research and Evaluation》2013,19(3):253-275

The goal of this longitudinal study was to examine which skills in early literacy determine the development of word recognition, reading comprehension, and spelling in the 2nd grade of the elementary school. A cohort of pupils was followed and tested during the 2nd year of kindergarten and the beginning of the 1st and 2nd grade. It appeared that mainly 2 skills determined the development of word recognition: rapid naming of letters and knowledge of letters. Reading comprehension was predicted to a large extent by vocabulary, rapid naming of letters, letter knowledge, and phonemic awareness. The skills that determined the development of spelling were rapid naming of numbers and letter knowledge.  相似文献   

Computer‐Assisted Instruction and Conceptual Change     

Harm J. A. Biemans  P. Robert‐Jan Simons 《Educational Research and Evaluation》2013,19(1):81-108

Abstract

In this study, the question was addressed which instructional conditions are required to teach students how they themselves can initiate and perform learning activities aimed at conceptual change. The CONTACT‐2 strategy (a computer‐assisted instructional strategy for promoting conceptual change in the domain of basic physical geography) served as starting point for the design of several training procedures aimed at enhancing self‐regulated learning. With the first experimental condition, strategic support was gradually withdrawn ('faded') within each instructional step, while, with the second experimental condition, the number of steps was reduced as the training continued. The original CONTACT‐2 condition served as control condition. Subjects were 65 fifth‐ and sixth‐graders (primary education). Dependent variables concerned students’ abilities to initiate and perform learning activities aimed at conceptual change, the quality of their conceptions, and their learning performance. Results suggested that ‘fading’ can be a fruitful instructional approach to foster self‐regulated learning aimed at conceptual change, provided that the ‘fading’ procedure is tuned to the students’ actual level of self‐regulated learning: external control should not be withdrawn until students are able (and prepared) to initiate and perform the learning activities being required. When these conditions are met, designing effective training procedures aimed at ‘learning for conceptual change’ seems possible.  相似文献   

Sex education,state policy and the principle of mutual consent     

Jan Steutel 《Sex education》2013,13(1):49-62

Constitutive of the prevalent sexual morality in most Western European countries is the liberal principle of mutual consent (PMC). This sociological fact may give rise to the ethical question as to whether or not the state has the right to make sure that its citizens will observe PMC, among other ways by prescribing some form of sex education which has PMC as its moral content. With reference to the ambiguity of the term ‘morally permissible’, it is argued that PMC can be interpreted in two fundamentally different ways, namely, as the freedom to arrange one's sexual life according to one's own values and preferences (PMC(a)) or as the view that consensual sex is morally all right or morally unobjectionable (PMC(b)). The claim is defended that PMC(a) should be taken as part of the public morality, whereas PMC(b) should be seen as a private morality. Accordingly, the state has the right to take PMC(a) as a basis for its educational policy, but the state is not allowed to prescribe any form of sex education that has PMC(b) as its moral content. The importance of the distinction between PMC(a) and PMC(b) is shown by giving an evaluation of the Dutch state's responses to recent public statements of orthodox religious leaders about the moral status of homosexuality. Also on the basis of this distinction, the central differences between liberal orthodox and fundamentalist orthodox religious views on sexuality and the role of the state are pointed out. In this connection, it is argued that any view which takes PMC(b) as part of the public morality should be disavowed as a kind of ‘liberal funda‐ mentalism’.  相似文献   

EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG CLASSROOM CLIMATE, SELF-EFFICACY, AND ACHIEVEMENT IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS: A MULTI-LEVEL ANALYSIS     

Michelle L. Peters 《International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education》2013,11(2):459-480

For nearly 50 years, leaders in American industry, military, education, and politics have focused considerable attention on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. Given the increased societal demand for STEM careers, the relationships among classroom climate, self-efficacy, and achievement in undergraduate mathematics needed to be examined. A purposeful sample of college algebra instructors (n = 15), employed at public 4-year universities in various states (n = 10) across the nation, was administered the Principles of Adult Learning Scale at the beginning of the semester to assess classroom climate. At the end of the course semester, their college algebra students (n = 326) were administered the Mathematics Self-Efficacy Scale-Revised and final college algebra examinations. The results of the multi-level analysis indicated: (a) students having higher mathematics self-efficacy also had higher mathematics achievement, (b) teacher-centered classroom climates had greater mathematics self-efficacy levels, (c) classroom climate was not a significant predictor of mathematics achievement, (c) classroom climate did not moderate the relationship between mathematics self-efficacy and achievement, and (d) although boys reported higher mathematics self-efficacy than girls, gender differences were not found to exist in regard to mathematics achievement.  相似文献   

Constructing teaching and research relations from the top: an analysis of senior manager discourses on research-led teaching     

Susan Mayson  Jan Schapper 《Higher Education》2012,64(4):473-487

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Investigating the effectiveness of computer simulations for chemistry learning     

Jan L. Plass  Catherine Milne  Bruce D. Homer  Ruth N. Schwartz  Elizabeth O. Hayward  Trace Jordan  Jay Verkuilen  Florrie Ng  Yan Wang  Juan Barrientos 《科学教学研究杂志》2012,49(3):394-419

Are well‐designed computer simulations an effective tool to support student understanding of complex concepts in chemistry when integrated into high school science classrooms? We investigated scaling up the use of a sequence of simulations of kinetic molecular theory and associated topics of diffusion, gas laws, and phase change, which we designed and experimentally tested. In the two effectiveness studies reported, one in a rural and the other in an urban context, chemistry teachers implemented two alternate versions of a curricular unit—an experimental version, incorporating simulations, and a control version, using text‐based materials covering the same content. Participants were 718 high school students (357 rural and 361 urban), in a total of 25 classrooms. The implementation of the simulations was explored using criteria associated with fidelity of implementation (FOI). Each context provided insights into the role of FOI in affecting the effectiveness of the interventions when working with groups of teachers. Results supported the effectiveness of this sequence of simulations as a teaching tool in a classroom context, and confirmed the importance of FOI factors such as adherence and exposure in determining the specific environments in which these materials were most effective. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 394–419, 2012  相似文献