Gender equity in science classrooms: are teachers providing the necessary adjustments to meet the needs of female students?
Boys and girls often exhibit different approaches to learning and have different learning styles. This research project examines high school science teachers' knowledge of these differences and their willingness to incorporate a variety of strategies into their teaching to help ensure the educational success of their female students. A survey was developed and mailed to the state schools for the Deaf across the country and to public schools in the Rochester, New York area. The survey, directed towards science teachers in high schools, asked specific questions regarding the manner in which information was delivered in the classroom, while also asking how willing the teachers were to making changes in their instructional delivery in order to enhance the learning opportunities for their female students. Results of this survey indicated that many of the teachers were aware of strategies that help to facilitate female students participation and learning in the classroom. Most teachers, who were unaware of the strategies and their impact on facilitating participation and learning, could see that the strategies were valuable tools and would incorporate them in to their lessons in the future. These factors considered, one might be encouraged that with increased knowledge of learning style differences and incorporation of new instructional techniques, girls might find greater success and confidence in the science classroom which would carry over to educational and career choices in the science field.
Online reflections about tinkering in early childhood: a socio-cultural analysis
Science education research predominantly shows that students improve their scientific understandings when they tinker (or pull apart) tools and simple household machines. In this study, the qualitative data collected took the form of online journal entries by final year, female, primary teacher trainees, who reflected upon their early childhood experiences of ‘tinkering’. Data analysis, from a socio-cultural perspective, shows that many of these fledgling teachers of technology face similar issues found for young
Problems of a centralised department in a decentralised mental hospital.
Abstract This paper deals with some of the issues and problems which arose in a state mental hospital, when in the course of becoming a more community-oriented facility, the hospital decentralized its clinical structure into geographically-based treatment units while retaining a centralized nursing department administration. The effects of unitization and a subsequent attempt to reoganize the nursing department on both the character of professional roles and the integration of parts of the hospital are discussed within the context of an open-systems conceptual model of hospital organization.