1,720,959 research outputs found
Teacher professional development in action research in the secondary physics classroom: evaluation and impact
No full textThe widespread concern among industrialised countries about the scarcity of physicists is linked to shortages in predicted workforce requirements and strategic global positioning of national economies. Reports from around the world describe a similar story about the declining interest in physics. The pressing need to increase young people’s engagement with physics and encourage them to pursue the subject beyond compulsory schooling, led the UK national Network of Science Learning Centres to develop and implement the Action Research for Physics (ARP) programme for physics teachers across England. The programme consisted of three face-to-face professional development training days for teachers, interspersed with two rounds of action research carried out by teachers at their own schools. This paper focuses on how the ARP programme impacted on the participating teachers. Sixty seven secondary physics teachers across the ten Science Learning Centres completed a pre- and post-programme questionnaire and took part in focus group meetings at each centre. Thirty eight senior managers who had authorised the teachers’ participation in the professional development also completed a post-programme questionnaire. The vast majority of teachers and senior managers viewed the ARP programme as a resounding success for the teachers themselves, their students, their departments and their schools, and they intended to continue with this action research approach to physics teaching as a means of improving classroom practice. Teachers included more discussion and thinking time in their lessons and increased their use of specific effective physics teaching strategies. The ARP approach of providing physics teachers with research-informed guidance, while allowing them to develop their own action research intervention within their own school context over a period of time, thus demonstrated increased confidence, motivation and enthusiasm towards teaching physics and making physics relevant to students’ everyday live
Evaluating the national “Action Research for Physics” programme - follow up of impact on post-16 physics uptake
No full text
Improving physics teaching through action research: the impact of a nationwide professional development programme
No full textThis article presents an independent evaluation of the Action Research for Physics (ARP) programme, a nationwide professional development programme which trains teachers to use action research to increase student interest in physicsand encourage them to take post-compulsory physics. The impact of the programme was explored from the perspective of the teacher participants, the programme tutors and the teachers’ senior managers who authorise attendance on professional development training courses. Although teachers and senior managers viewed ARP as an unmitigated success in improving classroom practice, the evaluation raises some other important implications for teaching physics and the professional development of physics teachers. Relatively few teachers have experience of action research, and there is a need for further training in thisarea. The study also highlights the key role of senior managers in giving physics teachers access to appropriate professional development and opportunities to carry out suitable activities in the classroom
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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