The importance of psychological need satisfaction in educational re-engagement.

Students attending alternative provision (AP) schools have typically disengaged with their education. They present with multiple problems and complex support needs which makes their re-engagement back into education challenging. This study examined educational re-engagement using the self-system model of motivational processes. Teacher (or other school staff) practices that facilitated and inhibited the students’ psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence were identified. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 students (aged 14–16 years) attending an AP school in England and data were triangulated using staff interviews and lesson observations. Interpretive phenomenological analysis was used to code the data. More staff practices were categorised as facilitating one of the three needs, and more students mentioned these positive behaviours, than the need-inhibiting practices. This fostered trusting, caring and respectful student-staff relationships, which ultimately led to educational re-engagement. It would be beneficial if such findings were incorporated into government statutory guidelines for AP establishments in order to increase awareness amongst those on the frontline. Moreover, findings support the current UK government policy to increase the number of AP schools, as they have the scope to focus on the supportive staff practices

Hard to reach and hard to teach: Supporting the self-regulation of learning in an alternative provision secondary school

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Since 2010, new types of state-funded schools have opened in England with a focus on providing alternative education provision. Very little is known about these schools, partly due to their novelty, and how they are attempting to re-engage those students who for various, and often complex, reasons have become disconnected from education. We scrutinised the approach used at one such school to examine what instructional practices were used, how they were adapted to the needs of the students and what factors enabled and obstructed (re)engagement. Data were collected over a month-long fieldwork visit and included semi-structured interviews with staff and students, and semi-structured classroom observations. Instructional approaches were used that supported the learning of students who were not experienced in, or had difficulty with, regulating their learning. These included breaking down tasks, providing lots of on-task prompts, encouragement, using frequent feedback and scaffolding, and offering quick support to students. This approach allowed students to re-engage with their learning and make progress towards important qualifications required for entry to the labour market and post-compulsory education and training

Telling tales: creating a space for practitioner education

This chapter will consider the importance of storytelling as a creative medium in teaching and learning about practice. Beginning with an overview of why stories matter, the chapter will consider some elements of storytelling and reasons why this might be a good way to learn about values. It also considers the re-emergence of stories as a teaching and learning tool when values are in the spotlight. Drawing on author experiences of being a discipline lead in the United Kingdom, working with multiple universities and working internationally on using stories in technology-enhanced learning, the chapter will briefly consider some of the ways in which the teaching and learning community creates spaces for stories to be told and heard. It will then consider one particular interdisciplinary programme case study as a way of exploring the work of stories and the importance of stories in promoting connections and interconnections which support and enable learning and sharing examples of the approach used to enable disparate groups to learn together

Fear appeals prior to a high-stakes examination can have a positive or negative impact on engagement depending on how the message is appraised

Previous studies have shown that teachers may use messages that focus on the importance of avoiding failure (fear appeals) prior to high-stakes examinations as a motivational tactic. The aim of this study was to examine whether fear appeals, and their appraisal as challenging or threatening, impacted on student engagement. Data were collected from 1373 students, clustered in 46 classes, and 81 teachers responsible for instruction in those classes, prior to a high-stakes mathematics secondary school exit examination. Data were analyzed in a multilevel structural equation model. The appraisal of fear appeals as challenging leads to greater student engagement and as threatening to lower student engagement. The impact of fear appeals on engagement was mediated by challenge and threat appraisals. The effectiveness of fear appeals as a motivational strategy depends on how they are interpreted by students

Personal self-regulation as a variable student (presage)

The self-regulation that people use in daily life has not traditionally been studied by educational psychologists. However, after Zimmerman showed the existence of common processes in different domains, experts have taken an interest in analyzing the self-regulating components common to different spheres (education, work, and health). This model considers personal self-regulation as a presage variable in the teaching-learning process. The Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ) designed by Brown, Miller and Lawendowski has been used most often in the research on personal self-regulation. Several studies have examined this instrument’s psychometric characteristics, leading to development of the Short Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SSRQ). This short version has been shown to be a plausible alternative to the long version, in a Spanish sample (Pichardo et al., in review). There is little research in the educational sphere that treats self-regulation as a presage variable; most cases have focused on the more restrictive variable of self-regulated learning. However, studies have shown the importance of including personal self-regulation, in its full sense, as a presage variable. We can infer that the interaction of personal self-regulation with other variables, whether personal (age, gender) or academic (learning approaches, coping strategies, academic selfregulation, regulatory teaching, resilience, etc.), constitutes an interesting, novel focus when analyzing the teaching-learning process at university. We have seen the value of this study, due to the importance of this variable and the dearth of research studies to date that treat educational variables and personal self-regulation

An empirical model of personal self-regulation and teaching regulatory, to predict the process and the product variables

Introduction. The present study examines how personal self-regulation and regulatory teaching relates to learning approaches, strategies for coping with stress, and self-regulated learning (as process variables of learning) and, finally, how it relates to performance and satisfaction with the teaching-learning process (as product variables). In this investigation, we built two different empirical models based on the presage-process-product paradigms to clarify potential effects of (1) personal self-regulation and (2) regulatory teaching with other cognitive-emotional variables. Method. A total of 1101 students participated in the study (University of Almería and competitive students). In terms of data collection, it is a survey investigation using self-reports (questionnaires and scales) and a cross-sectional strategy. The analyses made to meet the proposed objectives and test hypotheses were structural for develop structural models. Results. The results provide empirical evidence for two models, consistent and significant, integrating variables that are part and influence the teaching-learning process of this educational level (university and candidates). Discusion and conclusion. Findings confirming the importance of the interactive, integrative model of teaching-learning (DEDEPRO), which assumes that self-regulated learning should be connected to regulatory teaching. Variables incorporated into the models validated in this study consolidate the idea that both personal factors and teaching and learning factors should be taken into consideration, since we are dealing with a formal context of teaching-learning.