The importance of an explicit, shared school vision for teacher commitment

This study investigated the relationship of different explicit school visions and the presence of a shared school vision among teachers with teachers’ personal commitment to their work. Multilevel analyses of four types of schools show that teachers in schools with an explicit school vision more strongly share the school vision and this shared vision is positively related to their affective and normative commitment. The practical implications of this are discussed.</p

The importance of an explicit, shared school vision for teacher commitment

This study investigated the relationship of different explicit school visions and the presence of a shared school vision among teachers with teachers’ personal commitment to their work. Multilevel analyses of four types of schools show that teachers in schools with an explicit school vision more strongly share the school vision and this shared vision is positively related to their affective and normative commitment. The practical implications of this are discussed.</p

The importance of an explicit, shared school vision for teacher commitment

This study investigated the relationship of different explicit school visions and the presence of a shared school vision among teachers with teachers’ personal commitment to their work. Multilevel analyses of four types of schools show that teachers in schools with an explicit school vision more strongly share the school vision and this shared vision is positively related to their affective and normative commitment. The practical implications of this are discussed.</p

The importance of an explicit, shared school vision for teacher commitment

This study investigated the relationship of different explicit school visions and the presence of a shared school vision among teachers with teachers’ personal commitment to their work. Multilevel analyses of four types of schools show that teachers in schools with an explicit school vision more strongly share the school vision and this shared vision is positively related to their affective and normative commitment. The practical implications of this are discussed.</p

Logical Reasoning in Formal and Everyday Reasoning Tasks

Logical reasoning is of great societal importance and, as stressed by the twenty-first century skills framework, also seen as a key aspect for the development of critical thinking. This study aims at exploring secondary school students’ logical reasoning strategies in formal reasoning and everyday reasoning tasks. With task-based interviews among 4 16- and 17-year-old pre-university students, we explored their reasoning strategies and the reasoning difficulties they encounter. In this article, we present results from linear ordering tasks, tasks with invalid syllogisms and a task with implicit reasoning in a newspaper article. The linear ordering tasks and the tasks with invalid syllogisms are presented formally (with symbols) and non-formally in ordinary language (without symbols). In tasks that were familiar to our students, they used rule-based reasoning strategies and provided correct answers although their initial interpretation differed. In tasks that were unfamiliar to our students, they almost always used informal interpretations and their answers were influenced by their own knowledge. When working on the newspaper article task, the students did not use strong formal schemes, which could have provided a clear overview. At the end of the article, we present a scheme showing which reasoning strategies are used by students in different types of tasks. This scheme might increase teachers’ awareness of the variety in reasoning strategies and can guide classroom discourse during courses on logical reasoning. We suggest that using suitable formalisations and visualisations might structure and improve students’ reasoning as well

Student Development in Logical Reasoning:Results of an Intervention Guiding Students Through Different Modes of Visual and Formal Representation

Due to growing interest in twenty-first-century skills, and critical thinking as a key element, logical reasoning is gaining increasing attention in mathematics curricula in secondary education. In this study, we report on an analysis of video recordings of student discussions in one class of seven students who were taught with a specially designed course in logical reasoning for non-science students (12th graders). During the course of 10 lessons, students worked on a diversity of logical reasoning tasks: both closed tasks where all premises were provided and everyday reasoning tasks with implicit premises. The structure of the course focused on linking different modes of representation (enactive, iconic, and symbolic), based on the model of concreteness fading (Fyfe et al., 2014). Results show that students easily link concrete situations to certain iconic referents, such as formal (letter) symbols, but need more practice for others, such as Venn and Euler diagrams. We also show that the link with the symbolic mode, i.e. an interpretation with more general and abstract models, is not that strong. This might be due to the limited time spent on further practice. However, in the transition from concrete to symbolic via the iconic mode, students may take a step back to a visual representation, which shows that working on such links is useful for all students. Overall, we conclude that the model of concreteness fading can support education in logical reasoning. One recommendation is to devote sufficient time to establishing links between different types of referents and representations

Teaching complex grammar in Dutch EFL classrooms. A study on the effectiveness of deductive, inductive, implicit and incidental instruction

This study investigates the effectiveness of four types of grammar instruction and the extent to which students' learning style affects the learning outcomes of these instruction types. Our focus is on a complex grammar structure, viz. English conditionals. A total of fourteen Dutch classes with senior secondary school students aged 15-17 and their ten teachers participated in the study. Teachers and their classes were randomly distributed among implicit, incidental, inductive and deductive treatment groups and a control group. A pretest-posttest design, including a grammaticality judgement test and a semi-free writing test, was used to study the effectiveness of the treatment groups for students with a learning style focused on either learning from active experimentation or from reflective observation. Results of a multilevel covariance analysis indicate that explicit-inductive instruction effectively raises students' performance concerning complex grammatical sentences and it does so more effectively than incidental instruction but no more than other forms of grammar instruction. Post hoc comparisons reveal that these outcomes hold for all students, irrespective of their learning style.</p

Development of a formative assessment instrument to determine students’ need for corrective actions in physics:Identifying students’ functional level of understanding

In physics education, most teachers provide students feedback on their problem solutions through grades on written tests. The practice of feedback after a summative test does not often meet the needs of many students to improve their problem solving. In this paper we report on the development of a formative assessment instrument to allow teachers to provide more meaningful action-oriented feedback on students’ performance on written tests.Our research and development approach comprised three phases.The first phase consisted of a literature guided cognitive analysis of effective problem-solving strategies in the physics domain. This analysis resulted in the identification of three crucial episodes in students’ problem-solving approaches during which students engage in specific cognitive activities. The second phase consisted of the design of an assessment instrument to monitor specific cognitive activities during the three crucial episodes when solving physics problems. This resulted in a rating scale with 11 levels to indicate students’ efficacy. The third phase consisted of research of the validity, reliability, and practicality of the instrument. Here we trained three teachers to trace students’ mistakes on different problems in the domain of kinematics and asked them to rate the mastery of 16 eleventh-grade pre-university students. In this phase we assessed the reliability and validity of this instrument by computing Krippendorff's alpha to indicate teachers’ inter-rater reliability. Practicality of the instrument was assessed by examining the variation in students’ level of mastery on problems of different complexity. Further research is needed to provide more detailed guidelines for how teachers can use the instrument in formative assessment (in contrast to summative assessment) to help students to develop correct solution methods and foster students’ metacognition about problem solving in related physics areas (i.e., knowledge transfer)