Inputs for the incorporation of the UNESCO guidelines on ICT competency standards for teachers : the training of teachers of mathematics in Central America

Resumen tomado de la publicaci??n

Changes in Preservice Teachers’ Self-Efficacy: From Science Methods to Student Teaching

The purpose of this research was to assess preservice teachers self-efficacy at different stages of their educational career in an attempt to determine the extent to which self-efficacy beliefs may change over time. In addition, the critical incidents, which may contribute to changes in self-efficacy, were also investigated. The instrument used in the study was the Teaching Science as Inquiry (TSI) Instrument. The TSI Instrument was administered to 38 preservice elementary teachers to measure the self-efficacy beliefs of the teacher participants in regard to the teaching of science as inquiry. Based on the results and the associated data analysis, mean and median values demonstrate positive change for self-efficacy and outcome expectancy throughout the data collection period.

This Was Not on the Syllabus!: An Examination of First-Year Urban Teachers' Self-Efficacy

Many first-year teachers find it difficult to reach the needs of all their students in part, because they feel their college coursework left them ill-prepared for the complexity they face in the classroom. This is particularly true among urban teachers who often face crowded classrooms of diverse students with a wide range of instructional needs. This study is a comparative case study of two University of Connecticut graduates during their first year teaching in urban schools. Using mixed-methods, the study draws on interviews, questionnaires, and videotape data shared as a part of a monthly teacher study group of similar graduates. I also draw on group conversations in which teachers discussed their ability to reach the needs of all of their students as this was related to their preservice coursework. My findings suggest that many first-year teachers feel university coursework failed to help them. One teacher felt it did not help her at all, while the other felt it helped her but she still could not meet all of her students' needs. Many first-year, urban teachers do not feel confident in the classroom as a result of their preparation from coursework. With this lack in confidence, the teachers may be more likely to leave their urban position, and this may contribute to the high turnover of teachers in urban placements.

Self-training for motherhood,

Mode of access: Internet.

An outline of the general regulations and methods of teaching in the male national model schools, for the use of the teachers in training.

Cover title.

Means and ends : or, Self-training /

Added title-page: The school library. Juvenile series, 3.

Introductory education psychology, a book for teachers in training,

Mode of access: Internet.

A guide for teachers of training classes /

Mode of access: Internet.

Self-training from labeled features for sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis concerns about automatically identifying sentiment or opinion expressed in a given piece of text. Most prior work either use prior lexical knowledge defined as sentiment polarity of words or view the task as a text classification problem and rely on labeled corpora to train a sentiment classifier. While lexicon-based approaches do not adapt well to different domains, corpus-based approaches require expensive manual annotation effort. In this paper, we propose a novel framework where an initial classifier is learned by incorporating prior information extracted from an existing sentiment lexicon with preferences on expectations of sentiment labels of those lexicon words being expressed using generalized expectation criteria. Documents classified with high confidence are then used as pseudo-labeled examples for automatical domain-specific feature acquisition. The word-class distributions of such self-learned features are estimated from the pseudo-labeled examples and are used to train another classifier by constraining the model's predictions on unlabeled instances. Experiments on both the movie-review data and the multi-domain sentiment dataset show that our approach attains comparable or better performance than existing weakly-supervised sentiment classification methods despite using no labeled documents.

Do teacher stereotypes about school tracks function as expectations at the collective level and do they relate to the perception of obstacles in the classroom and to teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs?

The effects of individual teacher expectations have been the subject of intensive research. Results indicate that teachers use their expectations to adapt their interactions with their students to some degree (as summarized in a review by Jussim & Harber, 2005). This can in turn lead to expectancy-confirming student developments. While there are studies on the Pygmalion effect on individual students, there is only little research on teacher judgements of whole classes and schools. Our study aims to extend the perspective of teacher judgements at the collective level to stereotypes within the context of school tracking. The content and structure of teachers’ school track stereotypes are investigated as well as the question of whether these stereotypical judgements are related to teachers’ perception of obstacles to their teaching and their teaching self-efficacy beliefs. Cross-sectional data on 341 teachers at two different school types from the Panel Study at the Research School „Education and Capabilities“ in North Rhine-Westphalia (PARS) (see Bos et al., 2016) were used for two purposes: First, the structure of teachers’ stereotypes was identified via an exploratory factor analysis. Second, in follow-up regression analyses, the stereotype dimensions extracted were used to predict teachers’ perceptions of obstacles to their classroom work and their individual and collective teacher self-efficacy beliefs. Results showed that – after controlling for the average cognitive abilities and the average cultural capital of the students – teacher stereotypes were indeed related to perceived obstacles concerning their classroom work and their self-efficacy beliefs. After a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the present research, the article closes with a short proposal of a future research framework for collective Pygmalion effects. (DIPF/Orig.)

A constituição e o funcionamento de uma comunidade de prática de professores em educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável

Os conceitos de desenvolvimento sustentável e de educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável estão ainda em evolução o que torna pertinente, hoje, a tentativa de uma clarificação conceptual e sua posterior operacionalização. Além de promover a definição e uso correto dos termos, compete também ao ensino criar e desenvolver as competências necessárias para a sua operacionalidade. Esta investigação pretende contribuir para a autoformação de professores, nomeadamente de professores de Física e Química, em educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável. Pretende que os professores, e aqueles que beneficiam da sua ação, possam ser cidadãos críticos e responsáveis, numa sociedade local e simultaneamente global, que vive num tempo concreto mas, cada vez mais, consciente das repercussões futuras das suas ações e decisões. Tendo por base este objetivo criou-se uma comunidade de prática virtual constituída por professores de Física e Química de Portugal e de países africanos de língua oficial portuguesa. A formação em educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável constituiu o domínio da comunidade de prática. A água foi o tema motivador e aglutinador, pois sendo essencial à vida, torna-se no contexto educativo, e concretamente em educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável, num desafio ético, simultaneamente social, económico, ambiental e político. A prática reflexiva constituiu uma ferramenta fundamental da atividade da comunidade. Da análise da prática desta comunidade, que constituiu o objeto desta investigação, verificámos que os diferentes contextos geográficos, educacionais, culturais e de desenvolvimento dos professores proporcionaram uma participação diversificada na comunidade de prática. Esta participação permitiu, aos membros da referida comunidade, a criação e/ou o desenvolvimento das competências requeridas em educação para o desenvolvimento sustentável. Apesar da pertinência do tema confrontámo-nos com a falta de projetos de investigação semelhantes ao desta investigação, o que constituiu um maior desafio à sua realização.