This study tested and integrated the effects of an inquiry-based didactic method for preschool science in a real practical classroom setting. Four preschool classrooms participated in the experiment (N = 57) and the children were 4–6 years old. In order to assess children’s attention for causal events and their understanding at the level of scientific reasoning skills, we designed a simple task in which a need for information gain was created. Compared to controls, children in the post-test showed significant learning gains in the development of the so-called control of variables strategy. Indeed, they executed more informative and less uninformative explorations during their spontaneous play. Furthermore, the importance of such programmes was discussed in the field of STEM education.

* Note: This paper was published as an inadvertent duplicate publication with an another journal.

In this article, the predictive power of five variables relevant for Linguo-intercultural sensitivity (flexibility) is examined. Communication aspect of intercultural interactions, specifically, the role of English as an international language are emphasized. Attitudes Towards English and Its Usage Scale (ATEUS) was applied to 194 students who attended to international colleges and schools in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The results suggest that almost all variables are mutually correlated. The findings also reveal Verbal expressiveness and Verbal abilities as statistically significant predictors of linguo-intercultural sensitivity. Other predictors (English competence and Emotional attitudes) do not significantly contribute to explaining Linguo-intercultural variance.

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of performance feedback (PF) provided to student teachers working with students with multiple disabilities and visual impairment (MDVI) on their teaching skills. The study group of the research was composed of 11 student teachers attending to the final year of the Teaching Students with Visual Impairments Program at a university in Ankara, Turkey. A quasi-experimental design, was used in the study. These student teachers recorded their classes for pretest and posttest and these video-recorded classes were thereafter watched by the observer, who completed semi-structured observation forms for each student teacher. The results of the analysis suggested a statistically significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the student teachers involved in the study before and after the performance feedback. The findings of the study were discussed in the light of the relevant literature and practical recommendations were included.

This article reports the results of a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of 7E learning cycle in science teaching. Totally 35 different effect sizes from 24 experimental studies, comprising 2918 students were included in the meta-analysis. The results confirmed that 7E learning cycle have a positive effect on students’ achievement. The overall effect size (Hedges’s g) value obtained from independent studies was calculated as 1.245 (% 95 CI, SE = .148) between confidence intervals 956 and 1.534 according to the random effects model. Among all effect sizes 32 had a positive effect whereas 3 of them had negative effect. A number of sub-group analyses (school level, type of publication, subject matter and duration) were conducted. The effect of 7E was not significant for school level, type of publication and duration. However, regarding the subject matter a significant difference was observed. The high effect size calculated in this meta-analysis implies that the 7E learning cycle is a useful strategy that should be included in science curriculums.

Nowadays, technology is developing in a geometrically progressive manner. Its usage in different social areas is an imperative, rather than a choice. As expected, digital devices are applicable in the educational context, as well. Hence, the scope of the present study is to examine attitudes toward mobile learning among English teachers. For this purpose, we conducted a survey with 159 teachers from both state and private schools as well as universities in Turkey. In general, our results showed that teachers have positive attitudes toward the usage of mobile devices in the ESL learning context. However, there is an almost equal number of teachers who use and who do not use mobile devices and other digital contents in their classrooms. In addition, and according to teachers, there were two main obstacles to using mobile devices in teaching processes – lack of training and students' attitudes. On the other hand, the lowest ranked obstacles were school administrations and pedagogical justification.

Although wealth of empirical researches have covered the impact of crucial, indispensable role reading skills play in the development of individuals’ mental faculties through the acquisition of knowledge in a particular language, scientific works on the assessment of the relationship(s) between pre-reading activities (consisting of games, puzzle solving, match making) and reading skills achievement remain depressingly scanty in Ghana. This study in the light of foregoing atmosphere explored how pre-reading activities facilitate pre-reading and reading skills among preschoolers with the use of randomized experimental control groups design which adopted pre and post-test of two classes, as well as observation guides to diagnose the problem of reading among the KG children in the two groups (control and treatment groups). The findings from these experimentations clearly portrayed the significant influence that pre-reading activities exert on the level of preschoolers reading skills achievements. Upon thorough analysis, and discussions predicated on the research outcome, it has been recommended that preschool educators incorporate levelappropriate pre-reading activities to enrich Preschool Education in Ghana.

Using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), patterns of parental involvement were examined in selected OECD countries. The findings showed that, irrespective of educational qualifications, parents were frequently involved in their children’s learning at the start of primary school and at age 15. Cross-national analyses showed that a high percentage of parents were frequently involved in various ways with their children’s learning, with some OECD countries showing parental involvement to be very common. Less instrumental, more subtle forms of parental involvement such as parent-child conversations about topical social issues emerged as the strongest predictor for continuing parental literacy support at age 15. These findings have important implications for understanding patterns and forms of parenting and for guiding family policy to consider cultural, economic and educational explanations about the nature of parental involvement in children’s education.

Children from southern and northern Brazil have a basic knowledge of plants, which they observe during their everyday life. Children ages between 3 to 10 years old (kindergarten & primary school), but the majority of them in the age group of 4-5 (total 145) were asked to draw what they think is a plant (total sample=332). Afterwards, a equal number of boys and girls randomly chosen were interviewed individually (mix ability) to list plants they said they knew and where they had seen them. Then they were asked to give exemplars of the local plants which they had seen. These data from the exploratory study show that pupils are in touch with their environment and recognize plants that are part of it. The everyday experiences of these children in school and out of school, at home and in leisure activities with family and friends, contribute to their knowledge about plants and such knowledge is complemented in the preschool and primary school classes by appropriate teaching. Educational implications of these findings are discussed.

Facilitating effective mathematics learning and higher mathematics achievement have long been recognized as a key to the scientific and technological advancement of the African continent. While the central role that language proficiency plays in mathematics teaching and learning has received an overwhelming research attention in the literature over the past two decades, this is not the case among African policy-makers and political leaders. Drawing mainly from our professional experiences as mathematics educators and from the international research literature, our primary intent in this paper is to answer this question: How does the learning of mathematics in English at the basic school level help or hinder students’ mathematical proficiency? To answer this question, the paper is organized as follows. The first part, the introduction, gives a brief overview of the language of learning and teaching in Africa. The second part describes the method and conceptual framework undergirding the research. In the third section, we have analyzed the effects of mathematics learning and teaching through English for basic students whose mother tongue is a Ghanaian language. The conclusion offers four recommendations for developing and improving the mathematics proficiency of students in basic schools.

The purpose of the research is to evaluate pre-service preschool teachers' knowledge about environment by analyzing their drawings about it. 70 first grade, 99 second grade, 56 third grade and 44 fourth grade, with a total of 269 students have been evaluated in this research. This qualitative research was made with social structuralism vision. The data used in this research were gathered by draw and tell conversation technique, where pre-service teachers were asked to draw the first thing when they think about environment and explain it. When analyzing the data, both qualitative and quantitative techniques were used. After analyzing collected data, it is seen that most used object in drawings are tree, human, house and sun, respectively. 4 themes and 12 sub-categories under these themes are detected by pre-service teachers' drawings. The most drawn theme by pre-service teachers is Theme 3: a place which affected/designed by third persons, while the least drawn is Theme 4: a place where humans, animals and plants lives together. 10 categories have seen after analyzing explanations of the drawing. Most explanation seen in the places that supports human life category. Independent variables of the research (sex and grade level) and themes and explanations of the drawings are statically and meaningfully related to each other. The most significant result of this research is that pre-service preschool teachers have human-centric system of thought about environment.

Because of war and civil war on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, education in ethnically divided country has become fragmented. Because of postwar divisions thirteen different ministries of education or similar bodies are responsible for education, resulting in inefficiency and low quality. To overcome differences, a committee of experts has prepared an outcome-based common core curriculum for science education from preschool to the upper secondary school level. Since the working group comprised representatives from all major entities, ethnic and religious groups, and school levels, as well as teachers from Biology, Chemistry, Geography and Physics, a positive outcome for the consolidation of science education can be expected.

Effective communication between faculty members and students is one of the concerns of the educational stakeholders at the Northern Border University, Saudi Arabia. This study investigates the relationship between teachers’ effective communication and students’ academic achievement at the Northern Border University. The survey questionnaire containing 26 items was administered on 100 students, 50 males and 50 females to ask about their perception towards the effective communication of the faculty members and their academic achievement at the Faculty of Education and Arts, Northern Border University in the City of Arar, Saudi Arabia. The results of the Descriptive statistics method showed that, almost more than half of the students agreed that, the friendly and understanding position maintained by their faculty members had helped them to highly achieve academically. The results of the independent sample T-test found no statistically significant differences between the students ‘academic achievement and their faculty members’ verbal communication across the respondents’ gender and year of study. The study recommended for the Northern Border Authority as well as the Saudi Government looking into other areas that might bring about the effective communication of the staff and the students’ academic achievement in the University.

This paper reports on research into the practice of learning rounds in Scotland. Learning rounds are a form of collaborative professional development for teachers based on the instructional rounds practice developed in the USA. In recent years learning rounds have gained high profile official support within education in Scotland. The research finds that what teachers in Scotland do when they say they are do-ing learning rounds varies widely from school to school and deviates significantly from the practice of instructional rounds. The implications of this for who is learning what in the practice of learning rounds is considered. The wider implications of the Scottish experience for the development of in-structional rounds practice in other countries is also considered as are the implications for promoting collaborative professional development practice more generally.

The changes and innovations in information and communication technologies influence the economic and social lives of the societies to a great degree. The countries accordingly take new decisions to benefit effectively from these technologies. The new media system scrolling traditional educational paradigms has also required changes in educational systems. Thanks to the new media-equipped education system in which equality of facility and opportunity parallel to world standards is provided and technologic improvement is individualized, a new generation student profile will emerge who has global competitive skill and individual conscious and awareness. The new generation student profile has to carry the skills of problem solving, using the language eloquently, creativity, critical thinking, life-long learning, media, technology and information literacy, social responsibility and teamwork. Notebooks, projectors and internet infrastructure are aimed to provide for the six hundred thousand classes of all the schools in preschools, primary-elementary and high schools to ensure equality of opportunity, amend the technology in schools and make it possible to use more effective use of CT media in teaching-learning process, which will address more senses. The studies on the issue are still continuing. This study is based on qualitative research methods and techniques in which scanning model is used. The actual case has been presented by doing examinations on FATIH project, Turkish education system, teaching strategies used, e-learning and management information systems and a study is executed on teaching strategies of FATIH project in the light of this information.

Majority of NOS studies comprise of determination or assessment studies conducted with ordinary students. In order to gain further understanding on variation in NOS understandings among the students, there should be different research attempts focusing on unconventional students such as academically advanced students. The purpose of this study is to determine epistemological understanding of Finnish academically advanced science students concerning aspects of NOS. The study was a case study (N=39) conducted with qualitative perspective. Questionnaires on the students’ attitude toward science and motivation toward science learning plus a form for the teacher’s ideas and VNOS-C, were used as diagnostic tools and data collection instruments. The study revealed that the majority of the students were found to be naïve in aspects such as “empirical basis of science”, “observation and inference”, “subjectivity of scientists”, “social and cultural embeddedness”, “creativity in science”, “theories and laws” and “tentativeness”.

Mobile phones are getting smarter and the usage through university students becoming more popular. University students using mobile phones for talking, for texting message, for Internet search, for listening music, watching videos, playing games, using social media etc... Mobile phones are not accessory any more, they are integrated like our clothes. There are studies examining the effects of using mobile phones frequently. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between mobile phone usage, satisfaction with life, academic achievement and metacognitive awareness. Metacognitive awareness inventory used to measure the awareness. Total GPA was used to measure the academic achievement and the mobile phone using time, the number of text messaging and callings are used for indicating the mobile phone usage. 250 total university students attended voluntarily to the study. The study carried out in private university in the southeast region of Turkey. The results indicated the usage of mobile phones are very frequent through university students. Many of the students are using mobile phones heavily. There was a positive relationship between mobile phone usage and academic achievement, also between mobile phone usage and metacognitive awareness.

Motivation is an inner force that activates and provides direction to our thought, feelings and actions. Two main characteristics of motivation are goal directed behavior and persistence. Motivated people persistently work for the goal until it is achieved. This paper explores the nature of motivation in the context of learning and seeks to relate it to self-efficacy, self- concept, confidence and self-esteem. Motivation is presented as a ‘second order’ variable be- ing very much dependent on attitudes as well as perceived goals, needs and value. Ways of assessing motivation are considered and the typical use of questionnaire approaches is criticized heavily. These can measure what a person perceives but the perceptions may or may not correspond to reality. Indeed, the entire mathematical basis of data handling with questionnaires is questioned. A typical questionnaire is then used with a large sample of 600 1st and 2nd year science intermediate students, drawn from the province of the Punjab in Pakistan and the data obtained examined statistically. Correlations between the responses patterns in all 30 Likert-type questions were examined using Kendall’s tau-b while Principal Components Analysis, using varimax rotation, looked at the questionnaire overall as well as sub-groups of questions. Correlation values were found to be very low, suggesting no factor structure and, indeed, the factor analysis showed that there is no factor structure with the questionnaire used with this large population. Chi-Square, as a ‘contingency test’, was applied to compare the distributions of responses, gender separated. Gender differences were found only in a minority of questions. It is argued that motivation is highly multi-variate and that no simple factor structure is to be expected. It is also argued that, with ordinal data, following no prescribed pattern of distribution, only non-parametric statistics are appropriate. The traditional approaches are statistically incorrect and, as a result, will often miss key insights.

This study examines the effect of project based learning on 8th grade students’ statistical literacy levels. A performance test was developed for this aim. Quasi-experimental research model was used in this article. In this context, the statistics were taught with traditional method in the control group and it was taught using project based learning in the intervention group. Statistics was given for four weeks according to pro ject based learning at intervention group. The performance test was applied to total 70 students as pre and post-test. Participants are from two different classes of a middle school in Trabzon. The data were analysed using Rasch measurement techniques. This measurement allowed both students’ performance and item difficulties to be measured using the same metric and placed on the same scale. All raw scores converted linear score in order to obtain equal interval scale. Acquired linear scores were compared. In the analysis of gained datum covariance analysis are used. According to gained results in pre-processing application there isn’t substantial difference between the achievements of intervention group and control group; but after processing between the achievements of intervention group and control group there is a substantial difference statistically in favor of intervention group. The results of the study revealed that the project based learning increased students’ statistical literacy levels in the intervention group.

This study aims to define Roma mothers’ views regarding their children’s education and their tendency towards crime. The study is based on an illustrative case study method. The participants of this study are mothers of Roma children between the ages of 4 and 6 who live in Konya, Turkey — more specifically in the Yenimahalle neighborhood in the town of Karatay and who do not attend any preschool programs. As a data collection tool, a questionnaire prepared by the researchers is employed, while in data analysis, descriptive analysis is used. The Roma mothers articulated that they want their children to have education and jobs; that they do not want their children to suffer in the same way they did; that the Roma culture prevents children’s education and therefore the mothers prefer to send their children to private schools, boarding schools or to schools far away from their neighborhoods by taking school buses; that they want their children to be judges, lawyers, nurses and teachers. The mothers stated that they meet the basic needs of their children; that they watch TV together and/or do housework together with their children. They also said that when their children commit a crime, they beat their children; they get angry with them and scold and/or complain to their fathers. They finally added that they can take measures for the children’s not committing a crime by talking to the children or by scolding them. Additionally, Roma mothers state that by taking the case to the fathers they can prevent their children from committing crimes.

Schools and teacher induction programs around the world routinely assess teaching best practice to inform accreditation, tenure/promotion, and professional development decisions. Routine assessment is also necessary to ensure that teachers entering the profession get the assistance they need to develop and succeed. We introduce the Item-Level Assessment of Teaching practice (I-LAST) as a flexible framework-based approach for quantitative evaluation of teaching best practice in the induction stages. We based the I-LAST on a novel framework for teaching best practice, and used Fuller’s scale as a framework for understanding the potential of the I-LAST in providing longitudinal measures for growth. Using the context of a year-long teacher induction program in the Midwestern United States, we collected data through an online survey from 46 teaching supervisors who were asked to evaluate their interns. We used the Rasch partial credit model as a criterion for construct validity, and measured dimensionality and reliability from both Rasch and classical frameworks. The I-LAST was found to be a unidimensional, valid, and reliable measure for teaching best practice. It demonstrated the ability to provide reliable scores for specific sub-dimensions of best practice, including those which manifest at various stages along Fuller’s scale. Potential uses of the I-LAST to advance understanding of the role of teacher induction programs in fostering productive growth in new teachers is discussed.