Advances in Educational Research and Evaluation

Insider or outsider, who decides? An auto-ethnographic analysis of the continuum and ethics of insiderness within a professional PhD

2024-12-13T13:31:45+08:00

An insider researcher is closely connected to the research subject so needs to be aware of the possible assumed cultural understandings that would be more apparent to an outsider researcher. However, there are multiple levels of insiderness and participant perceptions are critical to the co-creation of researcher position. Through an auto-ethnographic discussion of a PhD (Professional) research project, it is clear that participants manipulate researcher insiderness to create zones of comfort from which to discuss sensitive issues. A PhD (Professional) looks to carry out research which can be applied to practical problems within the student's work environment. Researching within a workplace where some colleagues do not consent to being a participant but have an influence over the thought processes involved with the research leads to a conclusion that the insider continuum may apply to all researchers. The observations in this article were made in a research journal the researcher kept during data collection during for their PhD (Professional) in Education. This research was focused on the factors affecting teacher well-being. While insider research has been discussed extensively in the literature, it assumes the position of power to be in the hands of the researcher. This article reports on the different levels an insider researcher can assume during a PhD (Professional) research project which is not only depended on the position a researcher supposes but also how the participants perceive the researcher as a co-construction of insider positioning. The manipulations that participants undertake during and after interviews is analysed to show how this co-construction is created. These manipulations are important to both the participant and researcher, and is significant because the power exerted by participants is often ignored in current literature. Ignoring the participants use of power dehumanises them and is an injustice to those we are indebted to for our data.

Sustainablity in Higher Education: Strategies, Performance and Future Challenges

2024-11-27T14:41:35+08:00

Higher education institutions have the responsibility to lead the transformation of thinking through education, promoting a healthier, fairer, and more sustainable world, and playing a crucial role in the development of a sustainable society. The main challenge they face is to promote the principles of sustainability in society while adhering to their traditional missions, and at the same time becoming more sustainable organizations themselves. Over the past three decades, higher education institutions around the world have undertaken numerous sustainable development initiatives and have made significant progress. Sustainability in Higher Education: Strategies, Performance, and Future Challenges aims to provide guidance for higher education institutions in managing and leading sustainable transformation.

Advancing STEM education and research through preparing students with special interest in mathematics and science

2024-08-14T14:47:29+08:00

This paper reports on the teaching of integrated STEM disciplines at the officially best school for creative and talented students of the Russian Federation. The paper shares how the success of this integration and the advancement of STEM education and research within the school is due to historical, cultural, and national practices of fostering creativity and giftedness at the pre-college level. Signature pedagogy of using concrete problems as a motivation for the study of abstract ideas is discussed. The merit of using traditional skills in mathematics in the digital era is demonstrated in the integrated context of entrance examination to the school and the modern-day digital technology. Several examples of research-oriented projects completed by the students at the school are presented.

Sounding out Semantics: The Limits of Philosophy

2024-03-27T09:25:29+08:00

By advocating a “non-semantic” perspective of words as conditioned acoustic symbols rather than fixed representations, this book challenges the mainstream philosophy of language. It critiques the dualism and literalism that underpin linguistic theory, arguing that meaning emerges from usage, not semantics. In seven chapters, original frameworks aim to provide more accurate analyses of contextual human symbol use, which resolve enduring puzzles in the philosophy of language, mathematics, and epistemology. It is acknowledged in the book that discussing language using language itself is inherently difficult. This unified theory rejecting semantic assumptions could significantly transform the understanding of language acquisition, communication across cultures, and biases embedded in linguistic symbols if empirically validated. This seminal contribution provides valuable new insights into the emergence of meaning in human thought and communication by emphasizing conditioned usage and over-representation. In this review, we summarize the philosophy and significance of the book, and discuss its contribution to the field of study.

From a teacher education course to upper elementary classrooms and back: Revealing innate abilities of children to do teachers' mathematics

2024-02-06T17:30:48+08:00

One of the key ideas of the modern-day elementary mathematics teacher education deals with mediating learning by visual thinking to enable transition from seeing and acting on concrete objects to describing the visual and the physical through culturally accepted symbolic representations. This paper shares mathematical activities designed originally for teacher candidates and used with students in upper elementary classrooms at a school in Upstate New York with minority student enrollment 97%. Because successful use of conceptual thinking by young students does have positive impact on their future teachers, connection of work in the school to a master’s level elementary mathematics education course taught by the authors is discussed. It is shown how using a spreadsheet and Wolfram Alpha allows for the research-like extension of the activities to the secondary level of mathematics education.

Impact of investment in EdTech: Government and entrepreneurial partnership venture in education in North and West Africa

2023-11-27T13:51:25+08:00

The educational landscape in North and West Africa stands to gain significant advantages through collaborative government-entrepreneurial investments in Educational Technology (EdTech). The establishment of public-private partnerships plays a pivotal role in effectively infusing technology into education systems, thereby enhancing student accessibility, improving educational quality, and fostering better learning outcomes. Beyond its immediate impact on education, EdTech investments also hold the potential to stimulate economic growth. Moreover, these investments can nurture a pool of indigenous entrepreneurs armed with expertise in both business and information technology, thereby contributing to the expansion of the EdTech sector. This burgeoning sector, prevalent in emerging regions, becomes a magnet for foreign investments, effectively bolstering national economies and creating ripple effects across diverse industries. Such synergistic collaborations within the EdTech sphere underscore the political commitment of governments toward the advancement of education. This dedication resonates on a global scale, attracting the attention of international organizations and donor nations, as investing in education for sustainable development fosters not only improved socio-economic conditions but also favorable diplomatic relationships. This research investigates the impact of collaborative EdTech investments between governments and entrepreneurial entities on the education. By examining specific case studies within North and West Africa, namely Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, and Algeria, it becomes evident that technology-driven educational reforms can lead to profound improvements in accessibility, educational quality, economic growth, and even political alliances. Through a comprehensive exploration of the interplay between government initiatives and entrepreneurial endeavors, this review paper delves into the multifaceted outcomes of EdTech investments across these nations.

Language and social minds: The semantics and pragmatics of intersubjectivity

2023-11-13T09:55:43+08:00

This book provides a gradient model of intersubjectivity and social cognition in language. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis, the author proposes three levels of linguistic acts: those aimed at the speaker’s benefit alone, those expressing concern for an interlocutor, and those indicating concern for societal reactions. There is a continuum of egocentric to extended intersubjectivity, which includes co-actionality, immediate intersubjectivity, and collective constructions. The model is applied to study children’s mastery of intersubjective polysemy and verbal organization, and to determine “social mind” capabilities in autism spectrum disorders. While non-linguistic topics and further empirical validation are outside the scope, this innovative interdisciplinary approach meaningfully extends understanding of the intertwined nature of language, cognition, and social engagement.

The tower of teaching-learning interactions in online live classes: Considering the impact of class size

2023-05-31T09:40:18+08:00

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning has become an important and widely used form of education. Many studies have pointed out that interaction is key to online learning. The Interaction Hierarchy Theory categorizes interactions in remote teaching into three types: operational, informational, and conceptual. Operational interaction serves as the foundation for all types of interactions and refers to the interface interactions that learners engage in at the behavioral level through the use of media features and tools in online learning. However, should we simply encourage higher intensity operational interaction? Specifically, live teaching, as a form of remote teaching, has a higher sense of immediacy and synchronicity compared to asynchronous learning. Should we encourage and guide students to engage in more operational interaction during live teaching? How would it affect learners' informational and conceptual interactions? In this study, 137 students from 21 live classes were grouped according to class size and operational interaction intensity, and their levels of informational and conceptual interaction were explored. The results showed that the conceptual interaction intensity of learners in live teaching was higher than the informational interaction intensity, and operational interaction intensity and class size both had an impact on informational interaction, but a weaker impact on conceptual interaction. Operational interaction can affect conceptual interaction through informational interaction, especially through the mediation of student-resource informational interaction. The contribution of this study lies in verifying the establishment of the interaction hierarchy tower in the live teaching scene, that is, there are three different levels of interactive influence chains from operational interaction, informational interaction and conceptual interaction. Operational interaction and class size have a strong influence on information interaction directly and conceptual interaction indirectly. In online learning aiming at high-level interaction such as conceptual interaction, designers should not blindly promote operational interaction, but should pay attention to the promoting effect of operational interaction on informational interaction, and the operational interaction without effect on learners' informational interaction is invalid. In addition to enhancing operational interaction, controlling class size is also a way to facilitate informational interaction.

Advancing the concept of triangulation from social sciences research to mathematics education

2022-10-26T15:48:22+08:00

The paper suggests interpreting the term triangulation, commonly used in social science research, as multiple ways of solving a problem in the context of mathematics education. The availability of different technological tools provides new perspectives on problem solving as modeling from where ideas for problem posing stem. Using topics from geometry and trigonometry, triangulation is considered through lens of teacher education. Reflections by teacher candidates on activities which are shared and reviewed in the paper indicate future teachers’ readiness to implement the pedagogy of triangulated perspectives on problem solving and posing in their own mathematics classrooms.

The use of GoSoapBox for teaching and learning

2022-05-19T08:28:28+08:00

The complexity of relationships between teaching and learning practices is increasing as we rethink higher education in the age of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The availabilities and capabilities of ICT tools enable us to explore the process of teaching and learning in a more unconventional manner. This paper seeks to share an online ICT tool, GoSoapBox, that comprises three key pedagogical ideas in teaching and learning: student interaction (via Discussion), student engagement (via Quiz), and student evaluation (via Poll). While the emphasis is not on advocating the ICT product, the recognition of the affordances of this suggested tool is significant in ensuring the pedagogical ideas could be achieved. Apart from the fundamental benefits that GoSoapBox could offer, the paper also outlines innovative ideas that could advance the process of teaching and learning by adopting the proposed tool in the classroom, including the positive sharing from the academics who had used this tool before, as well as the limitations of the tool which need to be aware of when using it for academic purposes. The paper concludes that constant analysis of practices drives the improvement of teaching and learning processes, with the possibility of incorporating a suitable ICT tool to make this process more efficient and effective.