1,720,987 research outputs found
State of the art: teacher effectiveness and professional learning
Get PDFOne of the key findings from decades of educational effectiveness research is the importance of the classroom level as a predictor of pupil outcomes. In this review, we therefore look at synthesising our best evidence from research on effective teaching, and its corollary, teacher development. In the 1st section, we will look at key findings from 35 years of research on effective teaching using a process-product research that has led to the identification of a range of behaviours which are positively related to student achievement. A key limitation of this research, however, is its focus on basic skills in English and maths. Therefore, in the 2nd section we review research on “new learning” and teaching for metacognitive and thinking skills. While in these 2 sections we have discussed key findings from research on teaching, including emerging knowledge on metacognition, it is important to continue to take into account ongoing developments in theories of learning. In the 3rd section of this paper, we develop the argument that a major contributing factor to this situation is that “state-of-the-art” understandings about processes and conditions that promote student learning are typically not used to construct appropriate learning environments for their teacher
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
Is sustainability of schooling improvement an article of faith, or can it be deliberately crafted?
No full textSustainability of reform has been characterised in various ways in the literature, but most often as some sort of endurance test for educators. School leaders and teachers are left to weather the “tempests” of reduced funding, shifting priorities, and constant turnover of teachers and leaders (Wood, 2007). The review of research literature exposes sustainability as a problematic notion, since a plethora of ideas about school-based and system conditions has been reported and very few studies connect these conditions to ongoing achievement of student outcomes (Timperley, Wilson, Barrar & Fung, 2007). Rarely have researchers regarded sustainability in terms of how one project melds into the next initiative in a school. For the most part, schools have to beat their own path towards a nebulous destination, and they do.
This research reframes sustainability as two interdependent and dynamic continua that form the conceptual framework, namely, coherence of effective instructional practices and co- and self-regulated inquiry. The purpose was to investigate the significance of these dimensions in two interconnected studies using a mixed methods case study approach. Study 1 examined 16 schools, tracking students’ literacy achievement and participants’ actions in the two years following their participation in a national literacy programme in New Zealand. Ten of the thirteen schools that presented their data maintained or improved their gains in student achievement. Study 2 investigated four of these schools in more depth over 2006–08, their selection contingent on their having varied combinations of the framework dimensions and distinctively different mediating and outcome variables.
Analysis of findings from both studies suggested that participants’ perspectives of sustainability were limited to a single domain and to maintenance of newly developed practices, rather than being focused on an improvement paradigm. Inquiry as a model for schooling improvement was not fully embedded in these schools. However, when evidence-based practices were more systematically applied, this condition appeared to be a sufficient threshold to support sustained outcomes for new cohorts of students. Engaging with persistent issues of underachievement and establishing coherence of instructional practices were more strongly evidenced in those schools that improved on their achievement gains over time
Academic target setting : Formative use of achievement data
No full textImproving student achievement is an ongoing challenge for schools with a great deal of data collected to ascertain improvement trends. In this thesis, possibilities for using this
achievement data to improve outcomes for students, through establishing academic
achievement targets was explored. Longitudinal achievement data were collected about students, over time and analysed for patterns and trends. This information was then used to formulate individual academic achievement targets for students in Year 9 and Year 11. All
the academic targets for the students incorporated an element of challenge and were intended to lift individual student performance but were not designed to be predictive. The targets (specifying standards, credits and levels of achievement) were then shared with students as part of an academic counselling programme. The study also explored classroom
teachers’ experiences of the target setting process in the subject areas of English and
mathematics.
The results indicated statistically significant higher achievement outcomes for
students with academic targets compared to those without such targets. The students involved in the intervention were 1.9 times more likely to gain the Level 1 National Certificate of Educational Achievement, than those students not in the intervention, when controlling for prior achievement, ethnicity and gender variables. In addition, being part of the intervention allowed those students who entered the school with a significantly lower intake score (as measured by the Middle Years Information System (MidYIS)) to be more
successful in gaining the Level 1 Certificate, than students in previous years. The quality of
achievement in Year 11 was also improved as measured by a grade point score in the subjects of English and mathematics. The study demonstrated the benefits of the systematic use of longitudinal achievement data as a basis for establishing achievement targets for students.
The teachers reported that discussing the targets with students helped improve
relationships between themselves and the students. However, the provision of targets did not change teaching practices and in some cases created an element of tension when teachers’ expectations of students conflicted with the targets established through the models
explained in the early parts of the study
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
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