This paper explored the myriad problems associated with undergraduate research supervision in social studies and religious education using one of the primary Colleges of Education near Gaborone, the capital city of Botswana as a case study. The study applied qualitative research involving interviews and focus group interviews to solicit information from eight college lecturers and ten final year students doing research in Religious Education and Social Studies. The respondents were purposively selected on the basis that they would provide rich data on the supervision of research projects. Additional information was generated through document and content analysis. The findings revealed that supervisors and student teachers at undergraduate level experience a large array of problems related to research capacity. The students, for example lacked presentation skills which has resulted in failure to present original work. There is also evidence of a relatively inadequate supervisory skills by college lecturers in terms of executing their supervision duties. The study concludes by calling for both supervisors and their supervisees to consider undergraduate research as a two-way process which requires expertise and adequate skills.

Due to Finnish pupils’ achievements in international comparisons, also Finnish teacher training has been widely acknowledged. Today’s educational policies aim at making teacher training more effective in Finland. However, in order to realize this in practice, not only reforms in educational policy or institutions are enough. More attention should be paid on student teachers’ study processes as a whole. In this article, we introduce an illustration of the factors that comprise student teachers’ study processes at universities. Based on the illustration, we will discuss what makes a good study process as the teacher’s academic degree and how teacher educators can make students’ progress on their study paths motivating and fruitful. We argue that teacher educators should be more thoughtful and willing to genuinely help and confront students as individuals: teacher educators should act as mentors who further students’ engagement in studying.

The study investigated the present position of literacy, information and communication technology (ICT} in Prisons by examining the perception of inmates .The study adopted a descriptive survey using structured questionnaire and observation guides on a randomly and purposively drawn sample of 664 inmates out of a population of 47,628 inmates nationally. Frequency counts and percentage were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that in the 21 prisons studied in 12 Nigerian states, the literacy level was low; that inmates were inadequately rehabilitated and that the presence of information and communication technology was lacking. The findings have important implication for literacy development, information and communication technology programmes in Prisons for empowering inmates and reducing recidivism. This paper points to the need to retrace, redirect, restructure and refocus their services and activities on literacy, rehabilitation, information and communication technology so as to empower the inmates.

This paper explores the challenges faced by teachers and educators in the online classroom, especially in light of existing learner differences among students stemming from intelligence, socioeconomic status (SES), culture, gender, among other factors. The author examines the characteristics of the online classroom and looks at learner differences as significant factors impacting teacher responsibilities in the online setting. Several challenges common to facilitated online learning (FOL) and independent online learning (IOL) in the online classroom are examined and brought into perspective as the author applies social science theories such as self-efficacy, multiple intelligences theory, social distance theory and comparative homogeneity, pedagogy and classroom management theories in analyzing and addressing these challenges. The author makes several recommendations for online teachers and educators to address the problems and challenges that are present in the online classroom and then explores the implications for teaching and learning. Finally, the author espouses a need for research into the major issue under discussion.

The contribution of special needs assistants (SNA) is becoming increasingly important in inclusive and special classrooms. However, the profession itself has remained unexplored. The purpose of this article is to describe special needs assistants’ perceptions on their education, professional competence, the content and significance of their work within the school system of Finland, and the further development of their role and content of their work. 171 special needs assistants from the province of Lapland participated in the research. This research was a mixed methods research where the data was collected in 2010 through a semi-structured questionnaire that consisted both quantitative and qualitative elements and was, therefore, analyzed both by using qualitative and quantitative analyzing methods. The results highlighted the diversity, challenges and development needs of special needs assistants’ work. Special needs assistants are strength and can work as a support for teachers, students, and parents.

This paper describes the procedure of developing an instructional tool, ‘concept mapping’ and its effectiveness in making the material meaningful to the students. In Pakistan, the traditional way of teaching science subjects at all levels at school relies heavily on memorization. The up-to-date data obtained from qualitative and quantitative research strongly supports the value of concept mapping as an instructional tool both for cognitive and affective gains. This study seeks to contribute to this development by considering how the insights of Ausubel can be converted into an effective and efficient instructional method. It was found that concept maps help improving achievement of the students and make learning more meaningful so that retrieval is possible.

This study is a departure from discussions on why community college students do not transfer in large numbers, but instead, provides an analysis of Latino students from community college who have successfully transferred to Tier 1 universities. The conceptual framework included student engagement theory (Kuh, 2003), the support for student autonomy (Koestner et al., 2015), and the importance of students studying to mastery (Sarwat & Irshad, 2012).  These theories were applied to the central research question, ‘What strategies do Latino students from a community college use to create a successful transition from community college to Tier 1 colleges and universities?’ The researcher generated six themes on how Latino students experienced successful transfer: institutional support, student transfer experiences, strategies to adapt, financial support, studying to mastery, and family support as major factors for academic success.   These findings would be significant to student development specialists in community colleges.  Further, such findings can be used to support Latino community college students as they sought transfer to four-year colleges and universities.

Acquiring the reading skills and using this skill effectively throughout life is possible by a qualified education hence qualified teachers. Therefore; teachers and candidate teachers are suggested to be; acquired the reading skills, focused on information and learning, trained well as individuals having knowledge of their fields and pedagogics. By the context; the aim of the study is suggested as examining the reading habits, interests, tendencies of the students studying at the Faculty of Education and analyzing the underlying reason behind their preferences. The descriptive phenomenology method; one of the qualitative research methods is used in the study. The studying group within the research is occurred by the 10 students from 5 different fields of Education Faculty, who read books constantly. The data acquired is collected by semi-structured interview questions and content analysis method is benefited to analyze the data. According to the results of the study; 140 discourses are observed to be expressed within the 6 themes, due to the reading habits, interests and tendencies of the students studying at the Faculty of Education. The mentioned themes herein, are formed as the following: “book type interested”, “content interested”, “topic interested”, “acquiring the reading habits”, “criteria for preferring books”, “the effect of social environment to prefer books”. While the most expressed theme is revealed as “criteria for preferring books”, the least one is about the reading habits, within the research.

Effective school administrators and teachers are those who provide the least restrictive learning environments for all students. The main goal of this study was to analyze the effects of inclusive science education on the general education population of middle school students’ scientific conceptual understandings. The study was designed as a quasi-experimental model and conducted in a middle school in a large urban school district in Midwestern US. Approximately 4% of students in the school were receiving special education services. The participants in the study were selected through non-random selection. The participants of this study included 20 students without disabilities in each classroom with a total number of 120 students from a total of six different middle school classrooms. The study included two classrooms (one inclusive and one non-inclusive) for each grade level (6, 7, and 8). The conceptual change of students without disabilities was measured using the Density Assessment, which included 20 multiple choice questions. SPSS program was used for data analyses. Paired samples t-test and a multivariate group analysis test were conducted to investigate significant differences on students’ conceptual understandings. The findings showed that the effect of inclusive education was significant and positive on the conceptual understanding of students without disabilities in inclusive science classrooms.

This study presented a secondary analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) dataset. The paper explored the differences between fourth grade reading scores by examining (1) how often the fourth graders discuss their school work at home with family and (2) how often the fourth graders discuss what they were reading with friends. The results by NAEP Data Explorer indicate that the average scale score (M=214, SD=36) of students who report “never or hardly ever” talking about studies at home was significantly (p <0.001) lower than all other groups. The results of how often they talked to their friends about what they were reading were mixed: Students reporting talk with friends once or twice a month (M=228, SD=35) had significantly (p<0.001) higher average scale scores than those in the never or hardly ever and almost every day groups and slightly lower than those talking once or twice a week.

Analysis of principles knowledge representation in information systems led to the necessity of improving the structuring knowledge. It is caused by the development of software component and new possibilities of information technologies. The article combines methodological aspects of structuring knowledge and effective usage of information resources which are designed for the scientific and methodological study of practical recommendations in Digital learning implementation. It is shown at the paper that one of the most important problems, which face the processing of knowledge or construction systems, is knowledge representation. The main idea of the paper is increasing the efficiency at the university learning process on the basis of a possible applications and rational structuring knowledge. The proposed concept of using information resources of Digital Learning is based on the idea of using the principles of abstraction, encapsulation, modularity, hierarchy, typing, concurrency preservation and implementation in such stages of this process as algorithmic support of knowledge structuring and structured transfer of knowledge to students. The topic of the article is unique as we try to see Digital learning in multidisciplinary aspects: education, mathematics, statistics. The article combines a theoretical approach to structuring knowledge that is based on the integrated usage of fuzzy semantic network, theory of predicates, Boolean functions, theory of complexity of network structures and practical aspects and ways of construction Digital Learning Systems at the University.

The educative project MelArete proposes an interpretation of ethical education: a form of Education to Virtue Ethics in the light of the philosophy of care. Starting from the ontological assumption that care is prime in life and without it the human being cannot flourish in his/her humanity, the project is based on an interpretation of the pedagogy of care. Since the practice of care reveals to have an ethical core and that core is made of ways of being-with-the-others, the pedagogical theory of MelArete states that in order to develop a project that is in relationship with the core of life we must educate to care. Therefore, educating to care means educating to virtues. On this basis MelArete proposes activities with the aim to guide children’s attention to the concepts of care and virtues.  MelArete has its many references in Plato and Aristotle; besides it assumes the distinction of Ricoeur between ethics and morality. In Plato/Socrates (Alcibiades I) ethics is an educational action that allows the others to thrive in their own existential capabilities; moreover, in Aristotle’s (Nicomachean Ethics) ethics searches for eudaimonia, a good quality of life. In our educational project with children, the educative methods are the following: conversations (promoting intersubjective thought), narratives (reading and writing stories about virtues), vignettes and games (stimulating ethical thinking through a playful language) and the “diary of virtues” (promoting a reflecting culture of virtues in everyday life). In this paper we present the theoretical background of the project and a summary of the pedagogical approach and application which we are testing in our research.

This qualitative study was designed to introduce STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) activities to pre-service science teachers and identify their views about STEM materials. In this context, a competition was organized with 42 pre-service science teachers (13 male- 29 female) who took Instructional Technologies and Material Development course in Elementary Science Education Department in Siirt University. The competition consisted of 5 categories: balloon powered car, mousetrap car, water rocket, spaghetti bridge 1 (durability) and spaghetti bridge 2 (visuality). Structured interview form developed by researchers was used as data collection instrument. The results were analyzed with the conventional content analysis. Results indicated that participants (especially females) are more willing to use STEM materials in their future teaching life. Participants mostly believe that STEM materials facilitate learning, enhance retention and increase self-confidence. However, there are also pre-service science teachers who believe that preparation of STEM materials is difficult, takes too much time and not appropriate to students’ levels.

Advanced technology helps educational institutes to improve student learning performance and outcomes. In this study, our aim is to measure and assess student engagement and collaborative learning in engineering classes when using online technology in solving physics problems. The interactive response system used in this study is a collaborative learning tool that allows teachers to monitor their students’ response and progress in real time. Our results indicated that students have highly positive attitude toward using the interactive response system as a tool in education in order to improve collaborative learning and student engagement in classes. Consequently, student-learning performance has been improved considerably, and technology was successfully incorporated in engineering classes.

This study aims to examine the effect of feedback strategies on understanding and applying the concept of National ideology to students who have different achievement motivation, on learning Citizenship Education in vocational high schools. This research uses quasi experiment research design (Quasi Experiment). The subjects of this study were 133 vocational high school students. The research instrument used the achievement motivation questionnaires and test appraisal tools of understanding and application of the concept. Research data were analyzed using MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance) method with 2x2factorial. The results reveal three findings, namely: (1) there are differences in posttest score of understanding and application of concepts between groups of direct and indirect feedback strategies; (2) there is difference of posttest score of understanding and application of concept between high and low achievement motivation group: (3) interaction between feedback strategy with achievement motivation does not influence simultaneously to understanding and application of concept.

Empirical directions to innovate e-assessments and to support the theoretical development of e-learning are discussed by presenting a new learning assessment system based on cognitive technology. Specifically, this system encompassing trained neural nets that can discriminate between students who successfully integrated new knowledge course content from students who did not successfully integrate this new knowledge (either because they tried short-term retention or did not acquire new knowledge). This neural network discrimination capacity is based on the idea that once a student has integrated new knowledge into long-term memory, this knowledge will be detected by computer-implemented semantic priming studies (before and after a course) containing schemata-related words from course content (which are obtained using a natural semantic network technique). The research results demonstrate the possibility of innovating e-assessments by implementing mutually constrained responsive and constructive cognitive techniques to evaluate online knowledge acquisition.

The state of mathematical thinking is considered to have an effect on the formation of anxiety regarding teaching mathematics. It is hypothesized that with the formation of mathematical thinking, the anxiety in teachers regarding teaching mathematics will be reduced. Since mathematical thinking is a skill acquired starting from the early years of education, the anxiety in form teachers in primary school regarding teaching mathematics is important. Within this context, the objective of this study is to investigate the effect of mathematical thinking states of form teachers on their anxieties regarding mathematics teaching. The sample group comprises 194 form teachers working in state schools of Bagcilar district, Istanbul province in the spring term of 2015-2016 academic year. As data collection tools, mathematical thinking scale and anxiety scale for the mathematics teaching anxiety of form teachers were used. To test the predictive power of mathematical thinking regarding the mathematics teaching anxiety, Multiple Linear Regression Analysis was used. It was found that the form teachers had high mathematical thinking scores and had low anxiety scores. A low degree, negative and significant correlation was found between the mathematical thinking and anxiety of form teachers regarding mathematics teaching. Moreover, it was found that mathematical thinking had an effect on the anxiety in form teachers regarding mathematics teaching.

Mathematics educators have reported on many issues regarding students’ mathematical education, particularly students who received mathematics education at different departments such as engineering, science or primary school, including their difficulties with mathematical concepts, their understanding of and preferences for mathematical concepts. This study aimed to investigate the opinions of primary-school teacher education students in terms of their perceptions of difficulty level of the mathematics courses, change in their achievement, if there is any, and interest in mathematics after completing these courses, and factors affecting their achievement and interest level in these courses. Being qualitative in nature, this study was a case study. The data were analyzed using the content analysis and descriptive methods. According to the results, most students stated that they faced mathematics course content with unexpected level of difficulty. After taking basic mathematics courses, the percentage of students with decreased level of interest and achievement in mathematics was found higher than the students who experienced an increase in their interest and achievement. Students underlined such significant factors for the change of their interest and achievement in mathematics as prior knowledge, lecturer(s), and content coverage. Finally, most of the students viewed mathematics courses as a beneficiary tool for their professional development.

Anxiety that students experience during test taking negatively influences their academic achievement. Understanding how students perceive tests and how they feel during test taking could help in taking effective preventive measures. Hence, the current study focused on assessing children’s perceptions of tests using content analysis. The sample consisted of 1143 participants (566 females and 570 males) attending 3rd (n = 320), 4th (n = 420), 5th (n = 197), and 6th (n = 206) grade classes in three public schools in Istanbul, Turkey. The findings indicated that three main domains emerged from the data. The domains and the categories under each domain were as follows: evaluation (grades, success vs. failure, learning and development, and intelligence), emotions (excitement, fear and anxiety, happiness, curiosity, mixed feelings, and disappointment), and experiential process (answering questions, studying, difficulty, thinking, having fun, cheating vs. honesty, and silence). Understanding students’ experiences with testing early on in their education will give researchers and practitioners the chance to plan effective applications for treatment and prevention, which would influence students’ future achievement and experiences. The study findings could also help teachers and school counselors plan more effective teaching and counseling programs that take into account students’ anxiety levels during tests.

The aim of this research is to determine the thoughts of the teachers about the concepts of "Smart Board", "Computer", "Internet" and "Social Media" from the Instructional technologies of the secondary school teachers with different branches through metaphors. In the research, a qualitative research model was used to identify teachers' thoughts in metaphor analysis from various branches about the use of instructional technologies in the national field. Within the scope of the qualitative research model, the phenomenology design was used. In order to find out what kind of thoughts teachers have about teaching materials from the participants "Smart Board / Computer / Internet / Social Media is like / similar to…..; Because ..." they were asked to complete their covenants. As a result of the research, 25 valid metaphors belonging to the concepts of smart board, computer, social media and 27 of internet concept were obtained from secondary school teachers. The most book (f = 4) metaphor for smart board concept, brain and memory (f = 2) metaphors for computer concept, most air (f = 3) and medicine, ocean, water (f = 2) metaphors for internet concept and the drug and virus (f = 2) metaphors related to the concept of social media. The metaphors of the concept of smart board are classified into 5 conceptual categories with common characteristics related to each other, 6 categories with common features related to computer and internet concepts, and 7 conceptual categories with social media concept related to each other. In the research, it was reached that the secondary school teachers expressed positive opinions about the concept of smart board and computer, partially negative about the concept of the internet but more negative opinions about the concept of social media.