Conceptual Framework to Articulate Teachers’ Knowledge in an Interdisciplinary, Skills-Centered, Ever-Evolving School

We examined the growth of teachers knowledge in the context of interdisciplinary teaching which has been adopted by many educational settings in the last decade Following teams of interdisciplinary teachers in design sessions for two school years we sought to reveal what knowledge emerges and how it expands under these conditions Our findings point to the need for a new framework to discuss knowledge growth outside of one discipline We articulate the different knowledge components that emerged and offer a framework to capture teachers knowledge in interdisciplinary teaching model KIT This framework is sensitive to the context in which teachers work and can be useful to articulate teachers knowledge in other dynamic teaching and learning context

Collaborative, Multi-perspective Historical Writing: The Explanatory Power of a Dialogical Framework

There is an increased interest within the history education community in introducing students to the multi-perspective and interpretative nature of history. When these educational goals are pursued within collaborative contexts, what are the relationships of individuals from conflicting groups with historical accounts that they produced as a group? How does the joint writing influence their historical understanding?  We analyzed the joint accounts produced by high-school Israeli students, Jews and Arab/Palestinians, who collaboratively investigated historical events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Employing a thematic analysis and a Bakhtinian-inspired discourse analysis, we found that the joint texts were constructed of themes from both in-groups’ perspectives. The students constructed a dialogic relationship between these themes, which enabled them to legitimize the other’s voice, yet keep the voices unmerged. Additionally, although they never abandoned their in-group narratives, the joint account reflected a new, multi-perspective historical meaning of the historical event

DPJ Editorial: Launching the new journal

We welcome and invite new readers, authors, reviewers and editors to the new journal.  A short history of the journal foundation is given along with the reasons for launching this publication. A long, but not finished, list is provided of important and interesting themes and areas of interest for dialogic educational practice, research and theory

A multinational, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students

In computer science, an expected outcome of a student's education is programming skill. This working group investigated the programming competency students have as they complete their first one or two courses in computer science. In order to explore options for assessing students, the working group developed a trial assessment of whether students can program. The underlying goal of this work was to initiate dialog in the Computer Science community on how to develop these types of assessments. Several universities participated in our trial assessment and the disappointing results suggest that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. For a combined sample of 216 students from four universities, the average score was 22.89 out of 110 points on the general evaluation criteria developed for this study. From this trial assessment we developed a framework of expectations for first-year courses and suggestions for further work to develop more comprehensive assessments

Exploring Students’ Understanding of Concurrency : A Phenomenographic Study

This paper continues previous efforts in understanding the problemsstudents face when learning concurrency. In this paper, weexplore students’ understanding of the subject using phenomenographyin order to gain insights that can aid in explaining the underlyingcauses for common student mistakes in concurrency, whichhas been studied in depth previously. Students’ experience of concurrencyand critical sections were analyzed using a phenomenographicstudy based on interviews with students attending one oftwo courses on concurrency and operating systems. We present6 categories describing students’ experience of concurrency, and4 categories describing students’ experience of critical sections inthis paper. Furthermore, these categories are related to previousresults, both to explore how misconceptions in the categores relateto student mistakes and to estimate how common it is for eachcategory to be discerned