216 research outputs found
Development and Validation of a Scale to Explore Pre-Service Teachers’ Sense of Preparedness, Engagement and Self-Efficacy in Classroom Teaching
Raising the quality of initial teacher education can make an important contribution to raising the overall quality of the school system. In Australia, the National Framework for Professional Standards for Teaching is used as a common framework to set standards for the accreditation of teacher education programs. However, institution-wise assessments need to be carried out regularly to explore the quality of preparation pre-service teachers receive and to what extent they feel well prepared to enter teaching. This will enable teacher education programs to implement strategies to strengthen the link between university coursework and professional practice of pre service teachers. This paper discusses the development and validation of a scale to measure pre- service teachers’ perceptions of preparedness to teach, readiness to engage with the teaching profession and self-efficacy in teaching. The study also proposes a model describing the relationship among these variables. Data was collected from 235 final year pre-service teachers using a newly developed questionnaire at an Australian university. Data shows that the Pre service Teacher Professional Experience (PTPE) scale is a theoretically sound, gender invariant and psychometrically valid instrument. The implications of using the scale in teacher education programmes are discussed in the context of the findings
Shark: introducing an open source, free and flexible semi-analytic model of galaxy formation
We present a new, open source, free semi-analytic model (SAM) of galaxy
formation, Shark, designed to be highly flexible and modular, allowing easy
exploration of different physical processes and ways of modelling them. We
introduce the philosophy behind Shark and provide an overview of the physical
processes included in the model. Shark is written in C++11 and has been
parallelized with OpenMP. In the released version (v1.1), we implement several
different models for gas cooling, active galactic nuclei, stellar and
photo-ionisation feedback, and star formation (SF). We demonstrate the basic
performance of Shark using the Planck15 cosmology SURFS simulations, by
comparing against a large set of observations, including: the stellar mass
function (SMF) and stellar-halo mass relation at z=0-4; the cosmic evolution of
the star formation rate density (SFRD), stellar mass, atomic and molecular
hydrogen; local gas scaling relations; and structural galaxy properties,
finding excellent agreement. Significant improvements over previous SAMs are
seen in the mass-size relation for disks/bulges, the gas-stellar mass and
stellar mass-metallicity relations. To illustrate the power of Shark in
exploring the systematic effects of the galaxy formation modelling, we quantify
how the scatter of the SF main sequence and the gas scaling relations changes
with the adopted SF law, and the effect of the starbursts H depletion
timescale on the SFRD and . We compare Shark with other SAMs
and the hydrodynamical simulation EAGLE, and find that SAMs have a much higher
halo baryon fractions due to large amounts of intra-halo gas, which in the case
of EAGLE is in the intergalactic medium.Comment: Final MNRAS version of accepted pape
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