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Eric.ed.gov – Process Dimensions of Child Care Quality and Academic Achievement: An Instrumental Variables Analysis

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: Child care quality is usually measured along two dimensions–structural and process. In this paper the authors focus on process quality–the quality of child care center instructional practices and teacher interactions with students. They use an instrumental variables technique to estimate the effect of child care center process quality on academic achievement for children. They use a national data set, focusing on low-income children, to examine the effects of high process quality child care on math, reading and vocabulary outcomes for preschool children. The goal is to discover the causal effect of process quality on children’s academic outcomes in the preschool years. The present study is an analysis of secondary data collected at different sites around the country, which is described in detail here. Data from the Preschool… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Instrumental Appropriation of a Collaborative, Dynamic-Geometry Environment and Geometrical Understanding

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: To understand learners’ appropriation of technological tools and geometrical understanding, we draw on the theory of instrumental genesis (Lonchamp, 2012; Rabardel & Beguin, 2005), which seeks to explain how learners accomplish tasks interacting with tools. To appropriate a tool, learners develop their own knowledge of how to use it, which turns the tool into an instrument that mediates an activity between learners and a task. The tool used in our study is the Virtual Math Teams with GeoGebra (VMTwG) environment. It contains a chat panel and multiuser version of GeoGebra. The learners are seven middle and high school mathematics teachers who participated in a professional development course in which they collaborated synchronously in VMTwG to solve geometrical tasks. We use conventional content analysis to analyze the work… Continue Reading

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Eric.ed.gov – Students’ Perceptions of Emotional and Instrumental Teacher Support: Relations with Motivational and Emotional Responses

eric.ed.gov har udgivet: We explored whether students’ perceptions of emotional and instrumental support provided by their mathematics teacher constitute separate dimensions of teacher support and how they are related. We also analyzed how students’ perceptions of emotional and instrumental support in math lessons relate to math anxiety, intrinsic motivation, help-seeking behavior, and effort. The participants were 309 Norwegian students in 9th and 10th grade. The data were analyzed by means of structural equation modeling (SEM). The results revealed that emotional and instrumental support constitute separate but strongly correlated constructs. Directly or indirectly, both emotional and instrumental support was related to all motivational constructs. The strongest relations were found for instrumental support. Additionally, instrumental support predicted lower levels of anxiety. One implication of this study is that teachers should aim at… Continue Reading