Managing the paradox of control: the case of ground-up implementation of active learning in Singapore’s primary schools     

Christina Lim-Ratnam  Matthew Atencio  Christine Kim-Eng Lee 《Educational Research for Policy and Practice》2016,15(3):231-246

The Singaporean education system has recently shifted emphasis from being highly centralised and standardised towards one that aims to promote innovation and autonomy at the school level. Yet, the concomitant move towards a more decentralised and flexible curriculum enacted and controlled at the local level has not been straightforward. Consequently, Hargreaves, Shirley, and Ng have described five paradoxes of educational and social change that characterise Singapore’s continued performance in academic achievement. One of these paradoxes is the paradox of control: How could the Ministry of Education (MOE) release classroom decision making and curriculum development to teachers and schools, while maintaining overall control across the system? They respond that the MOE maintains a fine balance characterised as bottom-up innovation with top-down support that requires further investigation. In this paper, we illustrate the implementation of an active learning curriculum in four primary schools to illustrate this approach of ‘top-down support for bottom-up’ curricular innovation in schools. In Singapore, the ‘Teach Less, Learn More’ movement has ignited school-based development of innovative curricula to bring about active learning, with the intention of developing pupil attributes such as creativity, collaboration, and self-confidence. Our case study explores how practitioners implement a curriculum that is meant to nurture a more emancipatory spirit in students that builds up their confidence and collaboration through active learning. A key premise is that such a curriculum requires practitioners’ autonomy to interpret the goals and desired outcomes and to plan their pupils’ learning experiences.  相似文献   

Concept-Mapping as a Research Tool: A Study of Primary Children's Representations of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Matthew Pearson  Bridget Somekh 《Education and Information Technologies》2003,8(1):5-22

This paper presents an approach to concept-mapping that was used in an EU-funded project to study ten year old pupils' representations of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The research task – to draw a concept map of computers in today's world – was administered to children in six EU countries twice. In England this took place immediately before and after the introduction of networked PCs in their schools. They were asked to use their maps to communicate their ideas through drawing to the researchers and other children who did not all speak the same language as them. The maps were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively, using phenomenographic methods combined with semiotic interpretation. The maps showed that the children had well-developed mental representations (secondary artifacts) of the role of ICT in today's world, even when they had little or no practical experience of using the Internet. Psychological theories suggest that learning depends to a considerable extent on the development of secondary artifacts of this kind. The extent and variety of knowledge about computers demonstrated by all children in the cohort came as a surprise and suggested that they would be very well prepared to develop sophisticated ICT skills once they had good access to ICT tools. Current approaches to ICT use in primary schools, involving explicit, systematic teaching of ICT skills, may therefore not be making the most cost-effective use of scarce resources. Exploratory use of ICT within open-ended project work, reflecting the kind of use that computer-literate adults make of ICT, might be more likely to provide the context for children's rapid development of a complex range of ICT skills.  相似文献   

In practice—the business of learning at vocational and technical schools     

Richard Scott Mattingly  Matthew R. Shupp 《About Campus》2004,9(4):25-27

The central focus of students at The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College—to enroll, learn, leave, and work—is shared by most of their peers at other vocational and technical schools. Educators at The Restaurant School are finding creative ways for students to squeeze in time for opportunities for growth outside the classroom.  相似文献   

Differences in student reasoning about belief-relevant arguments: a mixed methods study     

Matthew T. McCrudden  Ashleigh Barnes 《Metacognition and Learning》2016,11(3):275-303

This mixed methods study investigated high school students’ evaluations of scientific arguments. Myside bias occurs when individuals evaluate belief-consistent information more favorably than belief-inconsistent information. In the quantitative phase, participants (n?=?72 males) rated belief-consistent arguments more favorably than belief-inconsistent arguments; however, they also rated strong arguments more favorably than weak arguments, which indicated they did not evaluate the arguments exclusively on whether they were belief-consistent. In the follow-up qualitative phase, we conducted interviews with purposefully-sampled students who showed either higher or lower levels of myside bias. Results indicated that students in both groups applied normative evaluation criteria to the arguments. However, students who showed little or no myside bias applied the same evaluation criteria to arguments independent of whether they were belief-consistent, whereas students who showed high levels of myside bias applied different evaluation criteria to belief-inconsistent arguments. These findings suggest that procedural and conceptual metacognition may play a role in the extent to which individuals reason independent of their beliefs.  相似文献   

The retention effects of an adult's emotional displays on infant behavior     

Hertenstein MJ  Campos JJ 《Child development》2004,75(2):595-613

The goal of this investigation was to study the regulatory retention effects of an adult's emotional displays on infant behavior. In Study 1, 11- and 14-month-old infants were tested in a social-referencing-like paradigm in which a 1-hr delay was imposed between the exposure trials and the test trial. In Study 2, 11-month-olds were tested in the same paradigm, but the delay between the exposure trials and the test trial was only 3 min. Study 1 revealed that 14-month-olds, but not 11-month-olds, demonstrated behavior regulatory effects toward the target object linked to the adult's emotional displays. Study 2 indicated that 11-month-olds were affected by the emotional displays if the delay between exposure and test trials was brief enough.  相似文献   

Biopolitics and science education     

Lyn Carter  Matthew Weinstein  Larry Bencze 《Cultural Studies of Science Education》2017,12(4):761-767

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Teacher Performance Ratings and Professional Improvement     

Cory Koedel  Jiaxi Li  Matthew G. Springer  Li Tan 《Journal of research on educational effectiveness》2019,12(1):90-115

Like other public workers, teachers typically receive high and compressed ratings that do little to differentiate them based on performance. Motivated by empirical evidence of substantial variation in effectiveness among teachers, there has been a recent push to develop more informative evaluation systems with greater ratings dispersion. We study one of the first of these new systems, implemented in Tennessee, in order to understand how teachers respond to the provision of new, more differentiated performance ratings. We focus on whether summative ratings influence teachers’ self-reported, self-directed professional improvement activities as measured by four items on a statewide teacher survey. Using a regression discontinuity design we find no evidence that teachers alter their time investments in professional improvement, or adjust their professional improvement activities based on evaluation feedback, in response to their ratings.  相似文献   

Leader noticing of facilitation in videocases of mathematics professional development     

Kristin Lesseig  Rebekah Elliott  Elham Kazemi  Megan Kelley-Petersen  Matthew Campbell  Judith Mumme  Cathy Carroll 《Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education》2017,20(6):591-619

In this article, we report on Researching Mathematics Leader Learning (RMLL), a project designed to support leaders in learning how to facilitate robust opportunities for teachers’ mathematical learning. Our two-phase research design allowed us to construct a set of videocase seminars, enact the seminar design with leaders, analyze these data, refine our seminar design, and implement a second set of seminars with a new group of leaders. We drew on the noticing literature to examine leaders’ pedagogical reasoning as they discussed videocases of professional development. In this article, we demonstrate how changes in our framework for leader development and the resulting changes in the prompts and tasks shaped leader noticing in three ways: (a) accounting for the mathematical work of the facilitator and teachers in the videocase; (b) linking the mathematical work to goals for teacher learning; and (c) reasoning around the facilitator’s work in advancing those learning goals. Analysis indicates that in Phase II, leader discussions were more focused on the mathematical and pedagogical work needed to advance teacher learning. Based on our research and development work with over 70 leaders, we offer a set of design principles for leader professional development.  相似文献   

Promoting Better Classroom Thinking     

Matthew Lipman 《教育心理学》1993,13(3-4):291-304

It is sometimes assumed that the promotion of classroom thinking is wholly the responsibility of the teacher. In this paper, it is contended that while the teacher has an important role in this regard, consideration must be given to the function of curriculum materials, as well as to the development of communal awareness among the students. A text that portrays students engaged in reasoning and whose deliberations follow the paradigm of the inquiry process can be an invaluable modelling instrument. It can also provide a protocol that shows students how young people in a community of inquiry might behave. The experience cited here has to do with elementary school philosophy interventions. It is argued that such interventions, when properly guided, can impressively stimulate the growth of critical and creative thinking.  相似文献   

Worldview Formation,Reflexivity, and Personhood: Their Essential Connectivity in Thick Perspective     

Matthew W. Geiger 《Religious education (Chicago, Ill.)》2017,112(5):504-516

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