1,720,954 research outputs found
An investigation of the assessments used to determine the content knowledge of Post-Graduate Certificate in Education pre-service teachers for FET Life Sciences teaching and their performance in those assessments: a case study
No full textA research report submitted to the Wits School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of EducationThis study investigated the content knowledge that is possessed by life sciences Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) students upon entrance into the PGCE course. All PGCE students are considered to have mastered the content of the subjects that they have chosen to train to teach during their previously completed academic degrees. At Wits School of Education (WSoE), the level of PGCE students’ content knowledge is assessed at the beginning of the PGCE course. However, students’ performance in these tests has never been documented and as a result the content knowledge of those who enrol into the PGCE Life Sciences course over the years is currently only known by those who teach them. This was the motivation for this case study in which I investigated the content knowledge possessed by the 2020 cohort of PGCE Life Sciences pre-service teachers (PSTs) at Wits School of Education with the aim of documenting it. The construct of content knowledge with a focus on substantive aspects (i.e. facts; concepts; theories; and history of science) and syntactic aspects (i.e., procedures pointing to the validity of different scientific facts and concepts; and different perspectives and controversies on specific topics) and Bloom’s taxonomy were used as the conceptual framework for the study. Data included the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) document to determine the content knowledge that should be taught at FET level; four objective tests that were used to assess the PGCE students’ content knowledge; students’ responses to each test; and a questionnaire which was given to the PSTs to get their confidence levels on their content knowledge. The results of this study showed that the content knowledge that should be taught at FET level and hence the content knowledge that pre-service teachers are expected to teach consists mainly of substantive content knowledge and syntactic content knowledge. The study also revealed that the objective tests that were given to the PSTs assessed only certain aspects of substantive and syntactic content knowledge namely: facts; concepts; history; practical investigations; calculations; and practical equipment but not others: specifically not theories; different perspectives and controversies on specific topics; and controversial topics within the subject. In addition, the tests only assessed the lowest cognitive level of remembering and not the other cognitive levels of understanding, application, analysis, evaluation and creation. The results show that PGCE students’ performance in these tests was very high and basing on this performance, one could conclude that PGCE students who participated in this study have high levels of life sciences content knowledge. However, considering that students’ performance at higher cognitive levels was not assessed and that majority of questions tested mostly knowledge of facts and concepts and very little on theories and syntactic aspects, this causes the findings above to be inconclusive and therefore their preparedness to teach once they have qualified cannot be ascertained. An interesting finding was that most of the questions that students answered correctly were on topics that they had covered in their first degree and those they got incorrect were on botany which most of the participants had not done. This may point to a possible gap in PGCE students’ content knowledge as their first degree is not necessarily aligned to the topics to be taught at FET level. The study therefore recommends that in order to effectively assess PGCE students’ content knowledge, the tests that are used to assess their content knowledge should include questions that assess all aspects of content knowledge and that cover all of the cognitive levels of Bloom’s taxonomyC
Investigating opportunities for integrating methodology when teaching a life science topic (meiosis) to fourth-year pre-service teachers: A case study
Get PDFA qualified teacher is expected to have the ability to integrate their knowledge of the subject/s that they teach (disciplinary component) and knowledge of how to teach those subjects (professional component) for effective teaching to occur. This integration however can be challenging for pre-service teachers (PSTs) as the two components are taught separately at teacher education institutions. The aim of this study was to determine the possibilities of integrating the teaching of the two components when training future science teachers by investigating opportunities available for teaching pedagogy/methodology during the teaching of a content course. This research, conducted at a South African university, was a qualitative case study that was done through teaching, recording and analysing video-recordings of lectures; conducting video stimulated recall interviews with a teacher educator and focus group interviews with fifteen pre-service teachers. Data analysis was deductive and inductive, and the Topic Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TSPCK) construct was used as a conceptual framework. The results showed that, while teaching content, the teacher educator was able to integrate some methodological aspects. Although not fully utilised, she also created many opportunities that could allow for teaching content as well as teaching about teaching. This helped PSTs to gain some PCK in a content course. The study concludes that teacher educators can integrate content and methodology when teaching content courses through modelling multiple teaching strategies which not only teaches the content to the PSTs but also shows them how to teach that content. The integration should however go beyond the visible routines of teaching to include explicit discussion of the pedagogical reasoning behind them
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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