This article responds to the dangers arising from baseline assessment in reception classes. It contrasts predictive testing which claims to ascertain each child's ability and potential with the processes of observation, documentation and discussion developed in Reggio Emilia. It explores the two very different understandings of children which they…

This article describes how communal aspects of faith find their way back into the lives of adolescents. The communal aspects of faith within individualized societies need more attention. It seems that with the current emphasis on individual faith, the intrinsic power of communal aspects of faith has been lost. This study shows that informal…

I investigated a reform based teachers' beliefs about the nature of mathematics, teaching mathematics, and learning mathematics, and the factors leading to their formation. I interviewed and observed a reform-based elementary mathematics teacher with 13 years' experience teaching first grade. She held a Platonist/problem solver view of…

Team teaching, where two teachers teach in the same classroom at the same time, while not a new concept, is increasingly being positioned and repositioned in research and policy literatures as central in advancing a range of valued educational goals. These goals include supporting inclusive learning for all students as well as supporting…

A proposed avenue for increasing students' vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension is instruction that promotes students' enthusiasm and attention to words, referred to as "word consciousness". This study seeks to investigate, at the utterance level, whether and how word consciousness talk is used in classrooms with young word…

In this article, the author elucidates the idea of bearing witness to teaching and teachers. The orientation derives from a philosophical and field-based inquiry pivoting around the questions What does it mean to be a person in the world today? and What does it mean to be a person in the role of teacher? From 2012 to 2014, the author interacted…

This article on hand discusses results of an ethnographic study which aims to perform a detailed description of practices of doing homework in a domestic environment. Based on the international state of research, first the question and the methodical approach will be explained, subsequently the role conflicts and stress ratios developed while…

In a time when story-acting practices have gained increasing focus, little is known about the relations between family story acting and a child's interactions with the ideal models represented in stories. Drawing upon a cultural-historical perspective of play and development, this study is aimed at discovering how a child is able to interact with…

The aim of this study was to investigate how finnish students explain factors that contribute to their achievement in classroom learning activities and whether these factors are related to support of self-regulated learning (SRL) in classroom. Over seven weeks, 24 primary school students were videotaped during their typical classroom activities in…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe children's lived experience of enjoyment during musical play. Data sources included class video from 15 weeks of a 24-week extracurricular music class for 4- to 7-year-olds taught by the researcher, parent-filmed video of child participant music-making in home settings during the same…

Visual expertise in medicine has been a subject of research since many decades. Interestingly, it has been investigated from two little related fields, namely the field that focused mainly on the visual search aspects whilst ignoring higher-level cognitive processes involved in medical expertise, and the field that mainly focused on these…

We consider an ordinal regression model with latent variables to investigate the effects of observable and latent explanatory variables on the ordinal responses of interest. Each latent variable is characterized by correlated observed variables through a confirmatory factor analysis model. We develop a Bayesian adaptive lasso procedure to conduct…

Learning to "become doctor" requires PhD candidates to undertake progressive public displays--material and social--of knowledge. Knowledge in doctoral pedagogy is primarily realised textually, with speaking and writing remaining as the primary assessment rubrics of progress and of the qualification. Participating textually begins, in a…

To understand how statistical and other types of reasoning are coordinated with actions to reduce uncertainty, we conducted a case study in vocational education that involved statistical hypothesis testing. We analyzed an intern's research project in a hospital laboratory in which reducing uncertainties was crucial to make a valid statistical…

This qualitative case study explores adolescents' responses to texts containing death and destruction, a seminal trope of the Gothic literary genre. Participants read both classic and popular culture texts featuring characters grappling with death in their seventh grade reading classroom. Observations, interviews, and documents were collected and…