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Full-Text Articles in Education

Reflective Thinking In Elementary Preservice Teacher Portfolios: Can It Be Measured And Taught?, Rebecca Pennington Dec 2011

Reflective Thinking In Elementary Preservice Teacher Portfolios: Can It Be Measured And Taught?, Rebecca Pennington

Journal of Educational Research and Practice

This study examined whether teacher portfolios can be validly and reliably assessed by investigating the effect of an instructional tool on increasing the level of reflective thinking in elementary preservice teachers’ portfolios. It also examined whether reflective thinking in preservice teachers’ electronic portfolios represented sufficient quality to make them useful in practice. The Rubric for Evaluating Portfolio Reflective Thinking instrument developed for this study demonstrated moderate levels of interrater reliability (r = .66) and sufficient content validity to be used to measure reflective thinking. Also, members of the treatment group scored significantly higher on five of the six portfolio domains …


Investigative Primary Science: A Problem-Based Learning Approach, Matthew B. Etherington Sep 2011

Investigative Primary Science: A Problem-Based Learning Approach, Matthew B. Etherington

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This study reports on the success of using a problem-based learning approach (PBL) as a pedagogical mode of learning open inquiry science within a traditional four-year undergraduate elementary teacher education program. In 2010, a problem-based learning approach to teaching primary science replaced the traditional content driven syllabus. During the 13 week semester, a cohort of 150 elementary pre-service teachers embarked on a Design and Make project to solve an individually chosen real world problem. Over one week, the pre-service teachers used a problem based mode of learning in conjunction with an open scientific inquiry to showcase individual working models (prototypes) …


Fostering Professional Learning Communities Beyond School Boundaries, Anne Scott, Philip Clarkson, Andrea Mcdonough May 2011

Fostering Professional Learning Communities Beyond School Boundaries, Anne Scott, Philip Clarkson, Andrea Mcdonough

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

During 2008-2009 while participating in a mathematics professional learning study, fifteen teachers, from seven different Australian primary schools, met as a group on five occasions to share their experiences and reflections on their teaching of mathematics. At each meeting, they discussed their goals, action plans and progress. To contextualise their experiences, each shared one or two 60-second snippets of digitally recorded video of their own classroom practice with the group. Audio-recordings of these five focus group meetings were analysed through a process of content analysis using a list of elements derived from the literature on professional learning communities. In essence, …


Depictions And Gaps: Portrayal Of U.S. Poverty In Realistic Fiction Children’S Picture Books, Jane E. Kelley, Janine J. Darragh Jan 2011

Depictions And Gaps: Portrayal Of U.S. Poverty In Realistic Fiction Children’S Picture Books, Jane E. Kelley, Janine J. Darragh

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts

Researchers conducted a critical multicultural analysis of 58 realistic fiction children’s picture books that portray people living in poverty and compared these depictions to recent statistics from the United States Census Bureau. The picture books were examined for the following qualities: main character, geographic locale and time era, focal poor character (gender, age, and race), who demonstrated action, and the type of action (individual, community, systemic) demonstrated. Results of the analysis showed that while in some areas the books accurately reflect the reality in the United States today, there are other areas in which poverty is misrepresented. For example, while …