Billie Eilam

Students’ planning in the process of self-regulated learning

Abstract This study sought to identify ninth grade students’ self-regulated learning (SRL) behaviors, enacted while engaged in a specially designed, long-term, group science inquiry task in an authentic classroom setting. To self-regulate planning and time management, students used yearly and daily planning reports. A high and medium achieving groups’ discourse and behavior were observed and videorecorded; qualitative analysis yielded several categories. Despite the unique learning context, results demonstrated many composites reported in the literature for general SRL models. Students evidenced SRL skill categories including the ability to set goals, plan activities, consider alternatives, monitor and reflect, perceive diverse cues from various sources, readjust plans to improve progress rates, and demonstrate accountability. High achieving students generally exhibited more SRL skills (were better planners and managers of time) than did average achieving students.

To Disagree, We Must Also Agree: How Intersubjectivity Structures and Perpetuates Discourse in a Mathematics Classroom.

Learning in a socially mediated context like a classroom places emphasis on the ability of learners to communicate their ideas to others, and for members of a class to achieve shared meaning or intersubjectivity (IS). We take a participatory view of IS, where both consensual agreement and disagreement are regarded as aspects of a common set of processes that mediate collective activity. Interlocutors need not demonstrate convergence toward a common idea or solution to exhibit IS and, indeed, they appear to need a shared understanding to express substantive disagreement through divergent views. Multilevel, multimodal analyses of videotape of a middle school mathematics classroom, including speech, gestures, drawing, and object use, reveal a discourse that is organized into recurrent sequences of event triads. The dynamics toward and away from convergent ideas appears to be instrumental in fostering sustained and engaging discourse and influencing the representations that students propose during problem solving. Participants frequently exhibited IS, but, as allowed for in the participatory view, the interactions did not seem to convert many students from their initial interpretations. Instead, disagreements and a desire to establish common understanding appeared to lead participants to express their divergent views in more refined and accessible ways. Advancement of our understanding of the role that IS serves in socially mediated learning has the potential to inform both educational theory and emerging areas in embodied cognition and cognitive neuroscience that addresses imitation and empathy, and thus help to bridge research between brain function and social cognition.

Learning to Teach: Enhancing Pre-Service Teachers' Awareness of the Complexity of Teaching-Learning Processes

Why is it so challenging to provide pre‐service teachers with adequate competence to cope with the complexity of the classroom context? Three key difficulties are frequently reported as reducing the effectiveness of teacher education programs: the construction of an integrated body of knowledge about teaching, the application of theories to practice, and the development of a cognitive lens for analyzing teaching–learning processes. To deal with these problems, we designed one semester‐long intervention course for pre‐service teachers, based on an Internet site, including video‐recorded authentic classroom literature teaching situations, transcripts of these lessons, interviews with school teachers and various experts in the field, and diverse tasks. The pre‐service teachers analyzed the episodes in depth, performed the required tasks, and participated in group and whole‐class discussions. The data comprised pre‐ and post‐analyses of an episode and mid‐semester tasks, carried out by the pre‐service teachers. We describe the context and the course procedure and discuss them in light of relevant pedagogies. A fine‐grain analysis of the data revealed the pre‐service teachers’ learning processes as they unfolded along the course: growing awareness of the complexity of classroom teaching, ability to base the analysis of the episodes on theories, and the initial construction of a cognitive lens to view classroom processes holistically. This was manifested in a shift from using lay theories to relating to academic theories, from the application of few concepts and theories while interpreting situations to the application of many relevant ones, from reporting discrete items and activities to reports based on a holistic, situated view, and from descriptions composed of non‐cognitive, behavior‐related statements to descriptions based on a cognitive view of classroom occurrences. The study has important implications for teacher education.

External Visual Representations in Science Learning: The Case of Relations among System Components.

How do external visual representations (e.g., graph, diagram) promote or constrain students’ ability to identify system components and their interrelations, to reinforce a systemic view through the application of the STS approach? University students (N = 150) received information cards describing cellphones’ communication system and its subsystem components. One group (n = 82) received a display of cards presenting this information in rich and diverse visual representations and a few text cards. Another group (n = 68) received a single representation display, of text only. Using these card sets, students were asked to identify the cellular systems’ components and relations, and to construct new interrelations. Findings showed that, mostly, multimedia enabled better identification and construction of relations of higher component diversity, accuracy, description, and novelty, using a larger number of information cards than did the textual display. Generally, findings suggested that components’ saliency and distinctiveness in the visual display afforded a better systemic view. However, curriculum designers and teachers should be aware of cases in which rich multimedia constrained performance.

Teacher education for classroom management in Israel: structures and orientations

In our paper, we examine how classroom management is taught in teacher education in Israel. Three questions are addressed: (1) What is the structure of programs for classroom management (site, timing, duration, number of courses, mandatory/optional)? (2) How is classroom management conceived (technical/pedagogical, individual/systemic)? (3) Does the preparation in classroom management relate to issues of cultural and ethnic diversity? Almost all teacher education programs offer at least one course on classroom navigation and management. However most of these courses are elective rather than mandatory. Classroom management is mainly treated as a technical/behavioural issue. Cultural issues, which are of major importance in the heterogeneous Israeli classrooms, are not on the agenda in most of these courses.

Possible Constraints of Visualization in Biology: Challenges in Learning with Multiple Representations

To demonstrate the various constraints related to visual representations in biology learning and instruction, this chapter discusses the outcomes of four empirical studies carried out in Israel on the uses of static visualization in biology as well as data from classroom observations of Israeli elementary and junior high school biology students and teachers and from textbooks. I review the challenges involved in using illustrative or decorative representations, models, representations of processes, referents of different size and temporal scales, representations on the classroom board, and the danger of erroneously transferring knowledge about representations to visualizations with supposedly similar features. The chapter may promote teachers’ and policy makers’ critical awareness of visual representations, which if not appropriately designed and implemented will create student difficulties and misconceptions. It should also contribute toward the development of relevant learning materials and the resolution of some of these teaching challenges.

Revisiting curriculum inquiry: the role of visual representations

How do visual representations (VRs) in curriculum materials influence theoretical curriculum frameworks? Suggesting that VRs’ integration into curriculum materials affords a different lens for perceiving and understanding the curriculum domain, this study draws on a curricular perspective in relation to multi‐representations in texts rather than the predominant cognitive, art, communication, or media perspectives. It examines VRs’ impact on the meaning of the text and on central curriculum theories and concepts, highlighting VRs’ important, but overlooked, role in curriculum deliberations. For examining VRs as linked to the text and to curriculum frameworks, the part–whole relationship approach was used on three levels. It is suggested that VRs’ versatility speaks simultaneously to all of the curriculum commonplaces, thus possibly serving as a unifying factor during processes of curriculum deliberation.

The Significance of Visual Representations in the Teaching of Science

The natural world is highly dynamic and complex. Scientists aspire to understand this complex world through observations, investigations and inferences. For this purpose, scientists isolate specific phenomena for studying and examine its features through its simplified models and visual representations (VRs). The constructed scientific knowledge is then communicated to the science community through various modalities like, text and image. Socializing students into the world of science therefore, requires educators among other goals, to teach students all about models and representations, to expose students to these representations diversity and characteristics, to use them for promoting the understanding of phenomena and to develop students’ ability to think with representations as scientist do. Teachers’ task though, is not an easy one, because scientific phenomena and its representations are difficult to grasp; they are highly complex, comprising many components, micro and macro levels with explicit or implicit interactions within and among them, they are concrete or abstract, or are dynamic or static entities. In addition, to develop students’ representational competencies teachers themselves have to be fluent, proficient and efficient in these representations use, develop pedagogical-visual-content-knowledge for teaching with visual representations, be aware of the difficulties inherent to the use of representations or their generation, or be able to identify student-related difficulties, those hindering their learning. Because visual representations are widely used to support science teaching, meta representational competence should be developed. However, this need remains an untreated goal, and researchers report students difficulties to learn with visual representations. The chapter discusses the difficulties involved in teaching and how visual representations may this goal.

Teachers’ interpretations of texts-image juxtapositions in textbooks: From the concrete to the abstract

The paper examined expert literature teachers’ coping with a novel textbook, integrating literature with visual arts, which is a particular interdisciplinary case of text-image relations in textbooks. Examination was performed within the framework of teachers’ responses to curricular changes and of theory regarding strategies of interdisciplinary instruction. Data regarding teachers’ coping was collected via video recorded deep interviews and analysed qualitatively using the phenomenological approach. Findings revealed four phases of a recurring pattern of performance: (a) retrieving prior knowledge about texts, (b) cycles of processing and refinement (comprising comparing-identifying-matching, making meaning of elements in contexts, eliciting themes and deeply examining artworks’ devices), (c) mindful evaluation of the juxtaposition, and (d) pedagogical reasoning. Four potential roles of the textbook visual artworks, for promoting literature learning, were inferred. The study shed some light on the involvement of teacher cognition and culture of teaching in the reading, evaluating, and adapting of novel curricula. A deeper understanding of the factors involved in the introduction of novel materials, examined from a cognitive perspective, may inform teachers’ professional development and curriculum developers as well as promote implementations of curricular reforms.

Curriculum Use in the Classroom

Curriculum use is conceptualized as the interaction of three stakeholders – teachers, learners, and society – with curriculum materials. The article analyzes each stakeholders mode/s of curriculum use based on relevant literature. Intensity of engagement from low to high with curriculum is conceived on a continuum. After presenting the uses of each stakeholder, we present an integrative, comprehensive model for analyzing curriculum use, accounting for the nature of users and intensity of engagement with curriculum materials. This model may be used in studies of curriculum implementation and in the process of introducing teachers to the curriculum domain.