Investigating practitioner self-efficacy in an era of mathematical reform

The purpose of this study is to explore teacher self-efficacy at a time of radical mathematical reform. Project Maths – the new initiative which was rolled out nationwide in 2010 differs from previous attempts at innovation in that it targets a much closer connection between curriculum and pedagogy. Gone are the days of well-rehearsed routines where the role of the mathematician was essentially that of demonstrator. Teaching for understanding is now the main ‘official’ pedagogical focus, with emphasis on the practitioner playing the part of mediator between subject-matter and student. Mathematical instruction is not merely concerned with the transmission of knowledge and skills which is a particular pedagogical position to take. It is also an emotional practice (Hargreaves, 1998) that colours and expresses the feelings and actions of practitioners. While emotion plays a key role in teachers’ commitment to curricular reform, it is also shaped by the social and cultural contexts of mathematical change, alongside with the attitudes and beliefs of the mathematical teaching community. Inspired by Bandura’s theory of learning (1986), this investigation aims to shed light on the complex interplay between so-called mastery and vicarious experiences, social persuasion and physiological states. Vygotsky’s view of learning (1978) as a socio-cultural process is also drawn upon, as it provides a useful structure against which teacher self-efficacy and professional development can be examined. Finally, Hiebert’s theory (1986) is used to examine mathematics teaching self-efficacy and mathematics self-efficacy.

The potential contributions of concept maps for learning website to assessment for learning practices

The purpose of this paper is to examine the promising contributions of the Concept Maps for Learning (CMfL) website to assessment for learning practices. The CMfL website generates concept maps from relatedness degree of concepts pairs through the Pathfinder Scaling Algorithm. This website also confirms the established principles of effective assessment for learning, for it is capable of automatically assessing students' higher order knowledge, simultaneously identifying strengths and weaknesses, immediately providing useful feedback and being user-friendly. According to the default assessment plan, students first create concept maps on a particular subject and then they are given individualized visual feedback followed by associated instructional material (e.g., videos, website links, examples, problems, etc.) based on a comparison of their concept map and a subject matter expert's map. After studying the feedback and instructional material, teachers can monitor their students' progress by having them create revised concept maps. Therefore, we claim that the CMfL website may reduce the workload of teachers as well as provide immediate and delayed feedback on the weaknesses of students in different forms such as graphical and multimedia. For the following study, we will examine whether these promising contributions to assessment for learning are valid in a variety of subjects.

Redes de conversação como possibilidade de formação do professor tutor virtual na mediação pedagógica da educação profissional a distância

A educação a distância apoiada pelos meios de comunicação digital ampliou as possibilidades de interação, flexibilizando o processo de mediação pedagógica no tempo e no espaço. Nessa perspectiva, a educação profissional democratizou seu acesso, na qual os conhecimentos de nível técnico são customizados em um Ambiente Virtual de Aprendizagem (AVA) para serem mediados a distância. Esta tese, apresentada na forma de artigos, problematiza o processo de mediação pedagógica realizado pelo professor tutor virtual na Rede e-Tec Brasil do Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia Sul-rio-grandense (IFSul) Campus Visconde da Graça (CAVG). Nesse modelo de ensino, o professor tutor virtual é contratado para atuar, pelo período de dois anos, em todas as disciplinas curriculares de um curso técnico. Se, por um lado, isso permite-lhe conhecer a realidade de seus alunos; por outro, exige-lhe um esforço pedagógico de apropriação e mediação dos conteúdos específicos nas diversas disciplinas que integram os currículos de cada curso. A pesquisa buscou conhecer como o professor tutor virtual apropria-se dos conhecimentos específicos nos cursos técnicos para mediá-los pedagogicamente com os alunos. Apresentamos, como hipótese explicativa neste estudo, que é na convivência com o professor pesquisador que o professor tutor virtual encontra a possibilidade de se apropriar dos conhecimentos curriculares para poder mediá-los pedagogicamente com os alunos. Para sustentar teoricamente nossas proposições na experiência vivida, estabelecemos uma rede de conversação com os autores Humberto Maturana, Pierre Lévy, Lee Shulman e Maurice Tardif, por meio dos conceitos: cultura em redes de conversação; inteligência coletiva; conhecimento pedagógico do conteúdo; e formação profissional docente. Como procedimento metodológico, encontramos na técnica do Discurso do Sujeito Coletivo (DSC), de Lefèvre e Lefèvre, uma estratégia de abordagem qualitativa para analisar as recorrências encontradas nos discursos dos professores tutores virtuais. O estudo aponta que uma rede de conversação recursiva entre o professor pesquisador e o professor tutor virtual possibilita a apropriação de conhecimentos técnicos e específicos necessários ao processo de mediação pedagógica com os estudantes. Essa convivência, no caminho da constituição de um coletivo inteligente, favorece o trabalho colaborativo no ambiente da tutoria, contribuindo para profissionalizar o processo de mediação pedagógica na educação profissional a distância do IFSul CAVG. Supported by digital media, distance learning has increased the possibilities of interaction, easing the process of pedagogical mediation in time and space. From this perspective, the access to professional education has been democratized: technical knowledge is customized in a Learning Managing System and later delivered by means of mediated distance education courses. Structured in a sequence of articles, this dissertation addresses the problem of the pedagogical mediation process performed by on-line tutor teachers at Rede e-Tec Brasil of the Instituto Federal Sul- rio-grandense (IF-Sul), Campus Visconde da Graça (CAVG). This model of education establishes that on-line tutor teachers are hired to work with all the curriculum courses of a technical program for two years. If, on the hand, it allows these teachers to know the reality of their students well, on the other hand it demands them a pedagogical effort of appropriation and mediation of the specific contents guiding the various courses that comprise the curriculum of each program. This research aimed to find out how on-line tutor teachers appropriate expertise from technical programs to mediate it with their students in a pedagogical way. The explanatory hypothesis given is that by working together and sharing experience with the teacher/researcher, on-line tutor teachers will be able to appropriate of curricular knowledge and pedagogically mediate it with their students afterwards. To support our theoretical propositions, a network of conversation was established with authors like Humberto Maturana, Pierre Lévy, Lee Shulman, and Maurice Tardif through the concepts of culture in networks of conversation, collective intelligence, pedagogical content knowledge, and teacher training. As a methodological procedure, the technique of the Collective Subject Discourse (CSD), by Lefèvre and Lefèvre, was found to offer a strategy of qualitative approach to analyze the recurrences seen in the speech of on-line tutor teachers. The study shows that a recursive network of conversation between the teacher/researcher and the on-line tutor teacher enables the appropriation of specific and technical knowledge required for the process of pedagogical mediation with students. The experience of sharing a consensual professional relationship, in which one respects and accepts the other as a way of establishing a collective intelligence, encourages collaborative work in the tutoring environment, helping professionalize the process of pedagogical mediation in distance professional education at IFSul CAVG.

Collection-Level Subject Access in Aggregations of Digital Collections: Metadata Application and Use

Problems in subject access to information organization systems have been under investigation for a long time. Focusing on item-level information discovery and access, researchers have identified a range of subject access problems, including quality and application of metadata, as well as the complexity of user knowledge required for successful subject exploration. While aggregations of digital collections built in the United States and abroad generate collection-level metadata of various levels of granularity and richness, no research has yet focused on the role of collection-level metadata in user interaction with these aggregations. This dissertation research sought to bridge this gap by answering the question “How does collection-level metadata mediate scholarly subject access to aggregated digital collections?” This goal was achieved using three research methods: • in-depth comparative content analysis of collection-level metadata in three large-scale aggregations of cultural heritage digital collections: Opening History, American Memory, and The European Library • transaction log analysis of user interactions, with Opening History, and • interview and observation data on academic historians interacting with two aggregations: Opening History and American Memory. It was found that subject-based resource discovery is significantly influenced by collection-level metadata richness. The richness includes such components as: 1) describing collection’s subject matter with mutually-complementary values in different metadata fields, and 2) a variety of collection properties/characteristics encoded in the free-text Description field, including types and genres of objects in a digital collection, as well as topical, geographic and temporal coverage are the most consistently represented collection characteristics in free-text Description fields. Analysis of user interactions with aggregations of digital collections yields a number of interesting findings. Item-level user interactions were found to occur more often than collection-level interactions. Collection browse is initiated more often than search, while subject browse (topical and geographic) is used most often. Majority of collection search queries fall within FRBR Group 3 categories: object, concept, and place. Significantly more object, concept, and corporate body searches and less individual person, event and class of persons searches were observed in collection searches than in item searches. While collection search is most often satisfied by Description and/or Subjects collection metadata fields, it would not retrieve a significant proportion of collection records without controlled-vocabulary subject metadata (Temporal Coverage, Geographic Coverage, Subjects, and Objects), and free-text metadata (the Description field). Observation data shows that collection metadata records in Opening History and American Memory aggregations are often viewed. Transaction log data show a high level of engagement with collection metadata records in Opening History, with the total page views for collections more than 4 times greater than item page views. Scholars observed viewing collection records valued descriptive information on provenance, collection size, types of objects, subjects, geographic coverage, and temporal coverage information. They also considered the structured display of collection metadata in Opening History more useful than the alternative approach taken by other aggregations, such as American Memory, which displays only the free-text Description field to the end-user. The results extend the understanding of the value of collection-level subject metadata, particularly free-text metadata, for the scholarly users of aggregations of digital collections. The analysis of the collection metadata created by three large-scale aggregations provides a better understanding of collection-level metadata application patterns and suggests best practices. This dissertation is also the first empirical research contribution to test the FRBR model as a conceptual and analytic framework for studying collection-level subject access.

Professor de dupla habilitação: (des)continuidades entre o 1º e 2ºciclos do ensino básico

Relatório de estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Educação de Paula Frassinetti para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ensino do 1.º e 2.º Ciclo do Ensino Básico

Enhancing student learning with case-based teaching and audience response systems in an interdisciplinary Food Science course

A growing body of research in higher education suggests that teachers should move away from traditional lecturing towards more active and student-focus education approaches. Several classroom techniques are available to engage students and achieve more effective teaching and better learning experiences. The purpose of this paper is to share an example of how two of them – case-based teaching, and the use of response technologies – were implemented into a graduate-level food science course. The paper focuses in particular on teaching sensory science and sensometrics, including several concrete examples used during the course, and discussing in each case some of the observed outcomes. Overall, it was observed that the particular initiatives were effective in engaging student participation and promoting a more active way of learning. Case-base teaching provided students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge and their analytical skills to complex, real-life scenarios relevant to the subject matter. The use of audience response systems further facilitated class discussion, and was extremely well received by the students, providing a more enjoyable classroom experience.

Os saberes nas aulas de educação física escolar : uma visão a partir da escola publica

Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Faculdade de Educação Física

O corpo e seus textos : o estetico, o politico e o pedagogico na dança

Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Faculdade de Educação Física

Learning in higher education: strategies to overcome challenges faced by adult students - lessons drawn from two studies in portugal

Int’l J. of Information and Communication Technology Education, 3(2), 1-14, April-June 2007

As expressões musical e dramática na prática educativa em contexto de Jardim-de-Infância e 1º ciclo do Ensino Básico

Mestrado, Educação Pré-Escolar e Ensino do 1º Ciclo do Ensino Básico, 12 de Dezembro de 2011, Universidade dos Açores (Relatório de Estágio).

Learning in higher education: strategies to overcome challenges faced by adult students – lessons drawn from two case studies in Portugal

This paper appears in International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education edited by Lawrence A. Tomei (Ed.) Copyright 2007, IGI Global, www.igi-global.com. Posted by permission of the publisher. URL:http://www.idea-group.com/journals/details.asp?id=4287.

Ai de mim!

Dissertação submetida à Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Teatro, especialização em Encenação.

Perspetivas interdisciplinares na planificação didática de Línguas e Culturas Estrangeiras

O presente Relatório Final de Estágio concretiza-se num trabalho de reflexão crítica sobre as práticas realizadas como professora estagiária de Inglês e de Espanhol no âmbito das Unidades Curriculares de Prática Educativa I, II e III, do Curso de Mestrado em Ensino de Inglês e Francês ou Espanhol, da Escola Superior de Educação, do Instituto Politécnico do Porto. A problemática que se apresenta decorre da perspetiva de que o ensino e aprendizagem de uma língua estrangeira baseados na articulação entre disciplinas do currículo contribui para uma aprendizagem holística, desenvolvendo competências que permitem um entendimento geral e global dos fenómenos humanos proporcionando aos alunos a compreensão do saber escolar como um todo articulável, contribuindo para uma leitura lógica e completa da realidade. A sua concretização na sala de aula impõe que o professor planifique atividades e opte por estratégias de ensino e de aprendizagem diversificadas, onde convergem finalidades, conceitos e metodologias de diversas disciplinas do currículo. Assim, este trabalho descreve a planificação de práticas de ensino e aprendizagem de Inglês e Espanhol em articulação com os conteúdos e os objetivos da disciplina de Estudo do Meio no Primeiro Ciclo. A planificação de práticas de Inglês no Segundo Ciclo foi realizada em articulação com a disciplina de História e Geografia de Portugal, com base na metodologia de projeto. As opções adotadas na planificação didática são consideradas estratégicas para uma aprendizagem significativa. Palavras-chave: perspetiva interdisciplinar do ensino; planificação didática de línguas estrangeiras; compreensão integrada do saber escolar; aprendizagem por projeto

O professor como construtor do currículo: integração da tecnologia em atividades de aprendizagem de matemática

O desenvolvimento profissional dos professores de matemática, por meio de progra¬mas nacionais e formações contínuas, deve proporcionar experiências que envolvam investigação, pensamento, planeamento, prática e reflexão. No caso da tecnologia, não nos devemos focar nas ferramentas em si, mas no modo como são usadas pelos docentes em contexto de sala de aula. Existem taxonomias de atividades de apren¬dizagem baseadas no conteúdo assentes na ideia do professor como construtor do currículo, que, para integrar com sucesso a tecnologia educativa nas aulas, desenvolve o conhecimento pedagógico e tecnológico do conteúdo (TPACK), e apresenta-se a de matemática. Desse modo, reflete-se, por meio de vários estudos nacionais e internacionais, que as tecnologias deverão ser usadas pelos professores de acordo com objetivos, conteúdos e pedagogias específicas para terem um efeito positivo na aprendizagem dos alunos sobre as atividades baseadas no conteúdo que melhor se enquadram com essas tecnologias.

The art and learning patterns of knowing in nursing

Objective To identify the perception of the students about the use of art as a pedagogical strategy in learning the patterns of knowing in nursing; to identify the dimensions of each pattern valued in the analysis of pieces of art. Method Descriptive mixed study. Data collection used a questionnaire applied to 31 nursing students. Results In the analysis of the students’ discourse, it was explicit that empirical knowledge includes scientific knowledge, tradition and nature of care. The aesthetic knowledge implies expressiveness, subjectivity and sensitivity. Self-knowledge, experience, reflective attitude and relationships with others are the subcategories of personal knowledge and the moral and ethics support ethical knowledge. Conclusion It is possible to learn patterns of knowledge through art, especially the aesthetic, ethical and personal. It is necessary to investigate further pedagogical strategies that contribute to the learning patterns of nursing knowledge.