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Eric.ed.gov – What Parents Want: Education Preferences and Trade-Offs. A National Survey of K-12 Parents

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This groundbreaking study finds that nearly all parents seek schools with a solid core curriculum in reading and math, an emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, and the development in students of good study habits, strong critical thinking skills, and excellent verbal and written communication skills. But some parents also prefer specializations and emphases that are only possible in a system of school choice. “Pragmatists” (36 percent of K-12 parents) assign high value to schools that, “offer vocational classes or job-related programs.” Compared to the total parent population, Pragmatists have lower household incomes, are less likely themselves to have graduated from college, and are more likely to be parents of boys. “Jeffersonians” (24 percent) prefer a school that “emphasizes instruction in citizenship, democracy, and… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Investigation of Finnish and German 9th Grade Students’ Personal Meaning with Relation to Mathematics

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: This study focuses on a comparison of personal meanings that students from Finland (FIN) and Germany (GER) assign to (learning) mathematics. Participants are 256 Finnish and 276 German ninth graders. The survey consists of 18 scales that are based on the theory of personal meaning. The original German version was translated into Finnish. Using item response theory (IRT) partial credit models, the psychometric properties of the scales were found to be good. As statistical procedure, Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analysis and mean comparisons were conducted to compare the two groups’ (FIN and GER) responses. Indicators of educational system and curriculum could be found in students’ responses to explain similarities and differences between the two samples. In both countries, social inclusion is meaningful for most of the students… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Prospective Mathematics Teachers’ Self-Referential Metaphors as Indicators of the Emerging Professional Identity

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Ideals play a key role in a student teachers’ identity work. They form targets to strive for and a mirror for reflection. In this paper, we examine Finnish mathematics student teachers’ metaphors for the teacher’s role (N=188). We classified the metaphors according to a model that identified teachers as subject matter experts, didactical experts, and pedagogical experts, with the addition of another two categories, self-referential and contextual. For the exploration of emerging professional identities, we studied the self-referential metaphors, which formed the most common category in the data. We observed that every third metaphor described either student teachers’ personalities or their incompleteness as teachers, or new beginnings or eras. Although these aspects were expected, they also inform us as teacher educators of the values and ideals that… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Teacher Identity and Tensions of Learning to Leverage Student Thinking in Math Teaching

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: In mathematics teaching, high-leverage practices include eliciting, analyzing, and responding to students’ ideas and reasoning (Kazemi, Franke, & Lampert, 2009). While a focus on student thinking in professional development can be a powerful mechanism for linking pedagogy, mathematics, and student thinking, it is less clear how to support teacher candidates (TCs) to leverage student thinking in their mathematics teaching. Findings suggest developing an understanding of self as mathematics teacher relates to TCs’ capacity for leveraging student thinking as a pedagogical practice and for making sense of their relations to the complex dynamics in schools. The tensions TCs experienced when leveraging student thinking in the actual socio-political contexts and constraints of schooling and the influence of their identity on their representations of practice lead to implications for mathematics… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Professional Identity Development in Teachers of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Science and Math Education

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Much of the science education community has advocated for a new vision of instruction emphasizing inquiry-based teaching (National Research Council, 1996). Unfortunately, as Anderson (2002) notes, many science teachers are not adopting inquiry-based teaching practices for a variety of reasons such as that teachers commonly favor text-book approaches to instruction. To facilitate the adoption of reformed teaching, Luehmann (2007) argues that teacher education must address the development of one’s professional identity as a teacher. Unfortunately, little is known about the beliefs, values, experiences, and ways of acting and interacting that teachers in science and related fields use to form their professional teaching identity. Through repeated interviews with 18 graduate students who taught science and related disciplines, this study outlined generalizations defining the developmental trajectory of science educators’… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – “Change My Thinking Patterns towards Maths”: A Bibliotherapy Workshop for Pre-Service Teachers’ Mathematics Anxiety

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: In small-group workshops, a joint initiative of the researcher and the student counsellor, primary (elementary) pre-service teachers (PSTs) wrote about critical incidents in their mathematics learning, and shared them with the group. Then, PSTs read extracts about mathematics anxiety (maths anxiety), and wrote and shared their reflections (bibliotherapy). Their experiences illuminated factors in their maths anxiety and helped them identify alternative conceptions. The discussion highlights the need for teacher educators’ awareness of perspectives of PSTs, verbalisation and sharing of emotions, and includes recommendations for further research. Link til kilde