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 purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of gender and knowledge on scientific creativity among form three biology students (third year in secondary school cycle) in Nakuru district in Kenya. The cross- sectional survey research was employed. A sample of eight schools with a total of 363 students was selected from the population using stratified sampling technique. Two instruments, namely, Biology Achievement Test (BAT) and Biology Scientific Creativity Test (BSCT) were used to collect data. The psychological definitions of creativity tested are sensitivity, recognition, flexibility and planning. The mapping of these psychological definitions of creativity onto scientific meanings is explained using the model that guided construction of items in BSCT. Data analysis was done using quantitative methods. The findings of this study indicate that the form three biology students who participated in the study had a low level of scientific creativity. Secondly, the level of scientific creativity is knowledge and gender dependent. The findings may help teachers and other stake holders in education in inculcating creativity skills amongst science students.

Motivation to learn foreign languages is a significant determinant of successful language acquisition. The subject has been widely researched in the past, and since the early 1990s a great deal of empirical research related to the classroom environment has been proposed to expand theory into everyday classroom practice. I present an empirical, longitudinal (3-year) study to explore the relationship between and changes in foreign language learning motivation, learning motivation and self-concept in the 5th, 6th and 8th forms of elementary school. The same tests (Kozéki-Entwistle’s Learning Motivation Questionnaire, the Tenessee SelfConcept Scale, and Clément, Dörnyei and Noels’ Foreign Language Learning Motivation questionnaire) were administered three times, so I was able to compare the results and draw conclusions about developmental tendencies. A strong correlation was found between motivational and self-esteem scores, and between learning and foreign language learning motivation subscales. It is necessary to highlight the importance of the Moral, Family and Social Self, which draws our attention to the family values and beliefs students are equipped with, when they enter the school. The significant decrease in motivation and self-esteem in the period under investigation focuses our attention on problems of adolescence, and challanges language teachers to establish a highly motivating classroom practice.

The major purpose of this study was to explore the social studies teachers’ perceptions and understandings of citizenship education in primary schools in Botswana. The study adopted a post colonial lens by using the notions of the pedagogy of imperialism and contrapuntal criticism to interrogate the teachers’ perceptions of citizenship education. The study was qualitative in nature and employed the naturalistic inquiry paradigm. Qualitative methods were used to collect data. Data were analyzed using grounded theory through the constant comparative technique. The findings of the study revealed that social studies teachers perceived teaching about Botswana as citizenship education. The paradox lies in the teachers’ view that knowledge about Botswana’s cultures, histories and politics constitutes citizenship education. Therefore, the study recommends that citizenship education be re-imagined to take into account both the local and global trends on citizenship education. Furthermore, teachers have to be cognizant of the politics of mainstream academic knowledge and work towards knowledge construction devoid of imperialist ideologies.

Creativity is regarded as one of the cornerstones for economic and social progress in every society. There are two possible ways to get creative people to work for an enterprise or community. The first is by attracting creative employees by good working conditions – a solution for those who can afford such an approach. For communities that are not so rich, the only solution is to foster creativity by education and by helping small and medium enterprises to create products based on creative ideas and innovations. In Slovenia, proposals for nourishing creativity and innovations emerge from the government thus forgetting that creativity does not start at University or on the first day of employment. To increase creativity, immediate action should be taken throughout the educational system, recognizing that society needs not only creative artists but scientists, economists and engineers as well. Through the analysis of the legislation, syllabi and textbooks, it can be recognized that they do not promote or even allow creativity in science education; even more, they can be regarded as creativity killers. In such a way key documents and teaching resources are placing creative science teachers in the position of guerrillas in a battle against prevailing teaching methods influenced by highstakes external exams or measurable outcomes. To improve science creativity, the legislation should be changed to give creativity appropriate value, and teachers must be educated to use methods that increase creativity in students, with the aim of producing open minds that will be able to work in a creative way.

All over the world, countries are paying close attention to how teachers are recruited, selected, and prepared for the nation’s schools. Increasingly, teachers are expected to teach all students to high standards at the same time that they play a major role in meeting rising expectations regarding social equity. Preparing teachers for these challenges is among the most pressing and complex tasks in teacher education. In response to these and other challenges, some initial teacher education programs now include among their major goals preparing teachers to teach for social justice, work toward equity and access for all students, and/or challenge inequities in existing educational systems and policies. This article focuses on three initial teacher education programs—one each in the United States, New Zealand, and Ireland. Although these programs differ from one another in many ways, they also share some goals related to teaching for social justice and equity. The article examines longitudinal survey data regarding teacher candidates’ scores on the “Learning to Teach for Social Justice-Beliefs” scale, which was designed to measure candidates’ endorsement of beliefs consistent with the concept of teaching for social justice. For each of the three research sites, the article analyzes: (a) demographic and teacher quality contexts, (b) initial teacher education program goals related to social justice/social equity, and (c) the results of surveys administered to teacher candidates at entry to and exit from the programs. The article concludes with discussion of learning to teach for social justice as a cross-cultural concept.

The purpose of the study is to develop a valid and reliable scale to measure the teachers’ levels of student-centered education practices. The Exploratory Factor Analysis sample included a total of 426 teachers and the Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the scale was conducted on a total of 160 teachers working in the province of Duzce during the spring term of 2014-2015 education year. Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed to test the construct validity of the scale and the model was tested through the Confirmatory Factor Analysis. For the reliability, Cronbach’s Alpha internal coefficient was calculated and item analysis was performed based on the corrected item total correlation. The final form of the scale included 32 items and one dimension. These 32 items explained 40.04% of the total variance. The results of the item total correlation analysis indicated that none of the item was below 0.30 and the lowest item correlation coefficient was 0.51. Cronbach’s Alpha was found to be 0.95 for the internal consistency of the scale. The reliability and validity results for the Student-Centered Education Scale suggest that this scale is a reliable and valid tool to measure the levels of student-centered educational practices among teachers.

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.

This article deals with the problem of student dropout during the first year in a higher education institution. To date, no model on a budget has been developed and tested to prevent dropout among Engineering Students. This case study was conducted among first-year students taking evening classes in two practical engineering colleges in Israel. There are three dimensions of the dropout reduction model: social support, institutional support and personal commitment. The results of the intervention had a positive effect on all three dimensions.

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.

The study investigated differences in students’ reported overall test anxiety before, during, or after test taking among two school-levels and gender. Differences among three test anxiety components (thoughts, off-task behaviors, and autonomic reactions) were also examined. Participants were 725 primary (349 females, 376 males) and 375 middle (180 females, 195 males) school students from a metropolitan city in Turkey. Turkish students’ reported overall test anxiety declined from primary to middle school, with females showing higher test anxiety throughout school years. Whereas students rated thoughts high, autonomic reactions were rated low; followed by off-task behaviors. Female and male students did not differ in thoughts and autonomic reactions. School-level differences were found in off-task behaviors and autonomic reactions. The pattern of Turkish students’ overall test anxiety derived as a combination of thoughts, off-task behaviors, and autonomic reactions was discussed, and educational implications were offered.

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.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of creative drama as a teaching method on academic achievement and retention in social studies, students’ attitude towards social studies of 4th grade. The research is designed according to quasi-experimental model. The research was conducted with 4th year students in a public school in Adana in Turkey. There are 42 students in experimental group and 39 in control group. Creative drama activities were used to develop social studies achievement and attitude of students as a treatment for the experimental group. The treatment consisted of 15 hours, 40 minutes sessions that equal a class hour in school and 3 hours a week. Control groups had been taught by classroom teachers as the way they do traditionally. Data collection tools are “Attitude Towards Social Studies Scale” developed  by Gencel “Achievement Test” developed by the researchers.  Data were processed by using covariance analysis. Findings indicated that creative drama method has a significant effect on social studies achievement and students’ attitude towards social studies but not a significant effect on retention of social studies knowledge.

In the rapidly developing age of technology, the contribution of using multimedia-supported instructional materials in the field of teaching technologies to science education has been increasing steadily. The purpose of this research is to compare the multimedia learning instructional materials prepared according to the 7E learning model and the students' academic success and the effect on the reminiscence of the learned knowledge in the science course described using traditional methods and models. In this research, a quadruple pattern of solomon was used as a semi-experimental design. As a data collection tool, the Matter's Change Unit Success Test was used. The research was conducted in fall semester of 2014-2015 academic year and on 92 fifth grade students. Experimental groups were given instructional materials prepared according to 7E model with multimedia support and control groups were taught with traditional method. There was no statistically significant difference in the pre-test scores of the experimental-1 and control-1 groups according to the independent t-test results in the applied success test but there was a statistically significant difference in favor of the experimental groups according to the post-test and retention test scores. According to the analyzed results; There is a statistically significant difference between the post-test and retention test scores of the experimental groups. There is also a statistically significant difference between the post-test and retention test scores of the control groups. But this difference is in favor of experimental groups. According to the results of the study, it can be said that the learning material prepared according to the multimedia supported 7E model influences the academic achievement positively and the learned information is more memorable.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of blog activities on elementary students’ environmental literacy in science class. The relationships between students’ environmental literacy levels, their parents’ interest in environmental activities and the frequency of outdoor activities they do have also been also examined. Pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design has been utilized. The participants of the study are 80 seventh-grade elementary school students. The data have been gathered through “Environmental Literacy Scale”. After that, the instructor has created a blog to share some movies, animations and reflective questions for all the students. The students could follow and engage in all the sharing. The activities have lasted for eight weeks. Descriptive statistics, t-test and regression analysis have been tested via the data. The results have indicated that there is a significant difference between pre and post test scores regarding the students’ “environmental knowledge”, “attitude towards environment” and “being responsible for environment”. Furthermore; positive but weak relationship has been detected between students’ environmental literacy levels and parents’ interests in environmental activities. On the other hand, there is a moderate, positive correlation between students’ interest in environmental problems and involving in outdoor activities with parents(r=0.423, p=0.001). Overall, students’ involvements in blog activities and doing outdoor activities with parents have been found to be effective in acquiring environmental literacy.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate pre-service history teachers’ perceived self-efficacy and the effect of pedagogical formation training on this perception. The study is based on a one-group pretest-posttest research design, which is a type of pre-experimental design. For the purpose of the study, in the first week of the formation training, the “Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale” developed by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy and adapted to Turkish by Capa, Cakiroglu and Sarikaya was administered as a pre-test to a group of 178 pre-service history teachers who underwent pedagogical formation training in 2016-2017 academic year in two different universities in Turkey. The same scale was administered again as a post-test at the end of the 28-week training. The study has found out that the pedagogical formation training did not make a significant difference in pre-service history teachers’ perceived self-efficacy except for the classroom management subscale, in which the self-efficacy scores of pre-service history teachers decreased after the pedagogical formation training.

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.

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.

This study explored in a sample of 560 high level education students their judgment formation to perceived self-efficacy to solve mathematical tasks. Students had to read 36 experimental vignettes describing educative scenarios to learn mathematics. Each scenario presented four manipulated pieces of information (learning modality, task difficulty, task relevance, and structure). After reading each scenario students were required to provide judgments regarding their believed self-efficacy to solve mathematical tasks described in the vignette by using a scale. Results showed that in regard to how students perceived their self-efficacy they could be grouped in two clusters (high and moderate). Most relevant factors to their judgment formation were task difficulty, task relevance and structure. Here, both groups used the same cognitive algebra mechanism to integrate factor information. Here, students valuated academic performance and feedback (e.g. difficulty and relevance) as most relevant even when they are conscious that learning is a primordial target. These and other results are discussed in the paper.

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.