A Mixed Study on the Effectiveness of Verbal Praise in Primary School Class

Verbal praise is frequently used as motivation by teachers in class and truly effective verbal praise plays an important role in maintaining classroom order and stimulating positive student behavior. In this study, students from three classes of X Primary School of Jiangxi Province were interviewed and 328 verbal praise expressions collected. The subsequent empirical study on the effectiveness of verbal praise in four dimensions, namely content, spatiality, subjectivity and time, found that verbal praise generates both shallow and deep effects. The shallow effects act as a foundation for deep effects but do not necessarily result in deep effects. Other conditions are required to actualize a deep effect.

From Cloud to Classroom: Mathematics Teachers’ Planning and Enactment of Resources Accessed within Virtual Spaces

Background/Context Teachers face many different problems in teaching. Traditionally, research examines the complexity of teaching students and content by focusing on a teacher's physical space and influencing factors therein. While established conceptions of curricular enactment suggest that instructional materials shape both the intended and enacted curriculum, the materials themselves are traditionally conceived of as those that the district officially adopts (e.g., textbooks) or creates (e.g., curricular pacing guides). Yet, in 21st-century schools, a new era of information and technology presides. Facilitated by the cloud, teachers’ professional learning and interactions meld with a global network of colleagues, extending to community of practices online and curating instructional resources therein. In particular, the use of social media to broaden and deepen teachers’ access to instructional resources is a potentially transformative and yet disruptive phenomenon that has implications for classroom instruction. Narrowly focusing on districts’ official curriculum and its enactment by the teacher as an individual who is shaped by (but does not shape) her school landscape may not, in fact, fully reflect teacher professionalism today and account for teachers’ professional life in the social continuum from cloud to class. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Situated in the conceptualization of managing problems in teaching and curating online resources as informal learning for the intended and enacted curriculum, this article builds on and extends these lines of research to examine teachers’ leverage of social capital—social network among individuals and resources available to people within their social network—from the virtual space to solve the problems common to teaching. Through this empirical illustration of resource diffusion from cloud to class, and how the curation of resource is integrated with teachers’ curriculum planning as well as classroom practices, we present a unique way of understanding teachers’ management of teaching problems in 21st-century schooling. Research Design We collected various types of data from 67 early-career teachers in one Midwestern state, including interviews, observation, and survey. We drew primarily on the interview data to exemplify our conceptual model of curation to address the problems of teaching. The three curation processes we identified are: (1) self-directed curation, (2) incidental curation, and (3) socialized curation. We observed more empirical evidence on the self-directed curation process in our data and chose to select a single case to go into further detail about the enactment of online resource in the classroom using the observation data, in additional to the interview data. We analyzed the case by specifying the perceived problems of teaching in one teacher's preparation to teach and how the curated resources from Teachers Pay Teachers were adopted and adapted to manage each of the problems, and the teacher's rationale for the decisions she made during the planning. We noticed, in this case and in other data that we have across teachers, that teachers rarely, if ever, directly articulate the curation of online resource for preserving classroom order, among the four endemic problems identified in the literature. Last, we examined the enactment of the online resource by describing teachers’ instructional practices in relation to her perceived ways of managing the problems of teaching. We also examined the resulting student learning in the mathematics lesson we analyzed. The single case of one teacher serves as an empirical illustration of how teachers could curate resources from the cloud in their planning and enactment of curriculum. Conclusions/Recommendations At the core of this study, we see teachers taking up their agency and drawing on a particular type of social capital resource to manage their enduring problems of teaching. We identified the different paths that teachers’ social capital may travel and accrue, and we argue for the importance of the community of practice online in the facilitation of resource flow from the cloud to the classroom. Also, we used a mathematics teacher's planning and enactment of instructional resources attained from the cloud for a three-day lesson series as an example to demonstrate how perceptions of teaching problems and curations of materials can culminate in a teacher's actual practices and impact student learning in the classroom. Our work has several implications for the field. First, although the different problems in teaching are well documented, teachers tend to seek out social capital resources from the virtual spaces to address some, but not all, of their problems. Specifically, preserving classroom order has not been present in our analysis of teachers’ articulation of their perceived problems for curation. Future studies can add more understanding to the online resources used in relation to teachers’ modes of curation and the type of teaching problems they hope to address. Second, the process of accessing the instructional resources, as delineated in the three modes of curation, demonstrates the complexity of the social network and social capital accrual mechanism in the 21st century, through which teachers’ professional communities expand beyond the school walls. Third, our work presents the considerations and thought processes of teachers’ curation of instructional materials in virtual spaces and enactment of the tasks. The combination of social capital resources and classroom processes in this study provides the foundation for researchers with different perspectives to further investigate the emerging phenomenon of social media and education.

Pengaruh Kualitas Lingkungan dan Motivasi pada Kinerja Akademik Siswa SMA

Environment (external factors) and user attributes (internal factors) affect the user's response to the environment. This study aims to uncover how the quality of the environment in high school as an external factor and student motivation as an internal factor affects the academic performance of the students. The research was conducted with qualitative and quantitative approach. Data were collected by survey using an online questionnaire. From the regression analysis, it was found that the dimensions of external factors of "classroom order", "social interaction and supervision" and "air quality" further increased the effectiveness of student learning rather than internal dimensions of "resilience and capacity building". Meanwhile, the decrease in air quality, noise, and environmental pollution can cause student learning disruption. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the learning environment plays an important role in shaping the effectiveness of student learning.

Foreign Language Teaching in Over-Crowded Classes

The importance of English in Foreign Language learning has been widely accepted in recent years and the English language is now well established as an international language. There is a growing significance of foreign language in education. As English has been widely used internationally, many people are interested in English and prefer learning English. When it is considered in public schools, English teaching has become more intense in school curricula. There are many barriers in language teaching in from primary education to higher education. One of the most important barriers in foreign language teaching is crowded especially over crowded classes. In crowded classes, classroom management, getting results from language approaches becomes difficult. In addition to this, a small number of class hours per week is another barrier in language teaching. The purpose of this study is to examine this issue and to examine the question of how language teaching is handled in these crowded classes and what different activities are useful to apply. If the educators are unable to change the classroom order, what are the appropriate language activities and how to apply them.

Closing seminars and lectures: The work that lecturers and students do

Based on an analysis of naturally occurring interactions between lecturers and students, this article investigates how university lectures and seminars are brought to a close through the collaborative work of lecturers and students. The analysis focuses on, first, the resources that lecturers and students have to accomplish this (which include not just speech but also embodied conduct, as well as references to clock time and lesson phases); second, the active role that students play, who may engage in closing activities in ways that attempt to preserve the classroom order (e.g. by packing up silently while continuing to demonstrably listen) or in ways that are disruptive of it (e.g. by packing up noisily); and third, the occasional subversive role that students may adopt, who may attempt to initiate closings in order to cut the lecture or seminar short (e.g. by suggesting to the lecturer that he or she is going over time or by engaging in ‘premature’ closing activities).

Implementation and Research of a Real-Time Monitoring System for Computer Classroom

In this study, a system is designed using the local network in a computer classroom to monitor students’ learning situation and classroom order in a real-time manner. Teachers can use a network management program to monitor students’ use of computers. A questionnaire on the installation of computer classroom monitoring system is created after a post-test is administered to the experiment group. The result shows that 59.52% say that pay more attention to what teachers teach in the class.