Spectacles of intimacy? Mapping the moral landscape of teenage social media

This paper explores young people's expressed concerns about privacy in the context of a highly mediated cultural environment, mapping social media practices against axes of visibility and participation. Drawing on interdisciplinary conceptual resources from both the humanities and social sciences, we use ‘spectacles of intimacy’ to conceptualise breaches of privacy, mapping an emergent moral landscape for young people that moves beyond concerns with e-safety to engage with the production and circulation of audiences and value. The paper draws on data from a methodological innovation project using multi-media and mixed methods to capture lived temporalities for children and young people. We present a model that captures a moral landscape shaped by emotional concerns about social media, the affordances of those media and affective discourses emerging from young people's use of the media

Big data, qualitative style:A breadth‑and‑depth method for working with large amounts of secondary qualitative data

Archival storage of data sets from qualitative studies presents opportunities for combining small-scale data sets for reuse/secondary analysis. In this paper, we outline our approach to combining multiple qualitative data sets and explain why working with a corpus of 'big qual' data is a worthwhile endeavour. We present a new approach that iteratively combines recursive surface thematic mapping and in-depth interpretive work. Our breadth-and-depth method involves a series of steps: 1) surveying archived data sets to create a new assemblage of data; 2) recursive surface thematic mapping in dialogue with 3) preliminary ‘test pit’ analysis, remapping and repetition of preliminary analysis; and 4) in-depth analysis of the type that is familiar to most qualitative researchers. In so doing, we show how qualitative researchers can conduct ‘big qual’ analysis while retaining the distinctive order of knowledge about social processes that is the hallmark of rigorous qualitative research, with its integrity of attention to nuanced context and detail

Low achieving mathematics students' attitudinal and achievement changes as a result of using an integrated learning system

This paper reports on a study to measure the effectiveness of an integrated learning system (ILS) in improving mathematics achievement for low achieving Year 5 to 9 students. The study found that statistically significant gains on the integrated learning system were not supported by scores on standardised mathematics achievement tests. It also found that although student attitudes to computers decreased (significantly for some items), the students still liked the integrated learning system and felt that it had helped them to learn

Opportunities to Talk Science in a High School Chemistry Classroom

The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of the discourse strategies employed by students and a chemistry teacher as they engaged in various activities in the classroom. More specifically, the paper examines how discourse supports or constrains opportunities to engage in experimentation and making sense of new experiences. Data, collected daily for four weeks in a high school chemistry classroom, included ethnographic fieldnotes, video-recordings. and interview transcripts. Discourse analysis was combined with other data to produce a rich description of the classroom. We show that various discourse strategies were employed by the teacher in order to maintain control of the discourse, which was consistent with both his and his students' expectations and aims. The study argues that an understanding of the micro-discourse strategies that contribute to issues of control of talk and activities by the teacher in the classroom has important implications for learning science

Evaluating a specific mentoring intervention for preservice\ud teachers of primary science

Using a two-group posttest only design, 60 final year preservice teachers (control group) and 12 final year preservice teachers (intervention group) from the same university were compared after a four-week professional experience program. The intervention group received a mentoring program for developing primary science teaching practices. The survey measured both the control group and intervention group perceptions of their mentoring in primary science across previously established mentoring factors (i.e., personal attributes, system requirements, pedagogical knowledge, modelling, and feedback). Results indicated that those in the intervention group perceived they had received more mentoring experiences on each of the five factors, and ANOVA results indicated that these differences were statistically significant for the first four of the five factors. It is argued that the specific mentoring intervention designed for developing specific aspects of primary science teaching has the potential to enhance the degree and quality of teaching experiences within a preservice teacher’s professional experiences

Growth of teacher knowledge: The promise of CSCL

To ensure that universities meet the needs of their learners more completely, teaching and learning strategies should be adopted to make educational provision more flexible. This study investigated how a lesson-planning task within the context of a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment facilitated the growth of teacher knowledge, specifically the subject-matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge about the teaching of ratios and fractions. This study used a CSCL environment called Knowledge Forum(r) with a cohort of preservice teachers collaborating in a lesson planning task. The social interaction within the computer-mediated community in this study contributed to the growth of teacher knowledge by providing a new social context for learning that prompted students to articulate their ideas and make ideas visible for peer inspection. Through peer-to-peer interactions like asking questions, requesting clarification, revising interpretations, or elaborating ideas, the students learnt both the limits and utility of different models to explain mathematical notions. These on-line social interactions supported knowledge integration by helping to broaden students' initial repertoire of instructional representations and mathematical constructs, demonstrating personal utility for particular ideas, and encouraging students to refine their understanding of mathematics