In Search of Professional Dispositions that Yield Cultural Relevance in Primary Grade Pedagogy: A Cautionary Tale of One Kindergarten Teacher

Primary grade teachers are challenged to establish firm learning foundations for all children, yet for many teachers cultural diversity makes this a complex pedagogical challenge. It is widely assumed that the success with which teachers meet this challenge is reflected in their dispositions toward diversity, and ultimately toward culturally relevant pedagogy as a professional orientation. This article describes a multi-year study of cultural relevance in early mathematics teaching. Using the case of one kindergarten teacher who exhibited positive dispositions toward cultural relevance, the authors examine factors that seemed to work against its adoption in her pedagogy

Parties in Northern Ireland reach out beyond their core base under stable conditions but retreat to their ethnic constituencies in times of uncertainty

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with parties from Northern Ireland, Cera Murtagh and Allison McCulloch examine the extent to which dominant parties in Northern Ireland reach beyond their core ethnic constituencies, how they do that, and why. Their findings suggest that under favourable conditions, flexible power-sharing can create space for incremental moves by ethnic parties to reach out to constituencies beyond their core, gradually moving the system towards more inclusive representation

A Framework to Support Teacher Noticing of Students\u27 Mathematical Thinking in Technology-mediated Environments

The practice of teacher noticing students\u27 mathematical thinking often includes three interrelated components: attending to students\u27 strategies, interpreting students\u27 understandings, and deciding how to respond on the basis of students\u27 understanding. This practice gains complexity in technology mediated environments (i.e., using technology-enhanced math tasks) because it requires attending to and interpreting students\u27 engagement with technology. Current frameworks implicitly assume the practice includes noticing the ways students use tools (including technology tools) in their work, but do not explicitly highlight the role of the tool. While research has shown that using these frameworks supports preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSTs) developing noticing practices, it has also shown that PSTs largely overlook students\u27 technology engagement when they are working on technology enhanced tasks (Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 2010; 41(2):169–202). In this article, we describe our adaptation of Jacobs et al.\u27s framework for teacher noticing student mathematical thinking to include a focus on making students\u27 technology-tool engagement explicit when noticing in technology-mediated environments, the Noticing in Technology-Mediated Environments (NITE) framework. We describe the theoretical foundations of the framework, provide a video case example, and then illustrate how the framework can be used by mathematics teacher educators to support PSTs\u27 noticing when students are working in technology-mediated environment

Preservice mathematics teachers’ professional noticing of students’ mathematical thinking with technology

The purpose of this study is to examine the ways in which preservice secondary mathematics teachers (PSMT) professionally notice middle school students’ mathematical thinking on a technology enhanced mathematical task. The middle school students’ work was captured as a videocase for PSMTs to examine. Findings show that every PSMT included a discussion of the middle school students’ interaction with the technology in their noticing prompts, demonstrating that PSMTs recognized that the middle school students’ mathematical understanding was tied to their interactions with the technology. Additionally, results from PSMTs’ justifications for their predictions of middle school students’ responses to the task, incorporated the middle school students language and described how the middle school students would interact with the technology

IDEAL-D: a rational framework for evaluating and regulating the use of medical devices

High profile device failures have highlighted the inadequacies of current regulation. Art Sedrakyan and colleagues call for a move to a graduated model of approval and suggest a framework to achieve this goa

Designing Approximations of Practice: The Case of Teacher Noticing

As a core practice, teacher noticing of students\u27 mathematical thinking is foundational to other teaching practices. Yet, this practice is difficult for preservice teachers (PSTs), particularly the component of interpreting students\u27 thinking (e.g., Teuscher et al., 2017). We report on a study of our design of a specific approximation of teacher noticing task with the overarching goal of conceptualizing how to design approximations of practice that support PSTs\u27 learning to notice student thinking in technology-mediated environments with a specific focus on interpreting students\u27 mathematical thinking. Drawing on Grossman et al.\u27s (2009) Framework for Teaching Practice (i.e., pedagogies of practice), we provided decomposed opportunities for PSTs to engage with the practice of teacher noticing. We analyzed how our design choices led to different evidence of the PSTs\u27 interpretations through professional development design study methods. Findings indicate that the PSTs frequently interpret what students understood. Yet, they were more challenged by interpreting what students did not yet understand. Furthermore, we found that providing lesson goals and asking the PSTs to respond to a prompt of deciding how to respond had the potential to elicit PSTs\u27 interpretations of what the students did not yet understand. The study highlights the interplay between task design, prompt wording, and PSTs\u27 interpretations, which emphasizes the complexity of developing teacher noticing

Lithium in the aragonite skeletons of massive Porites corals: A new tool to reconstruct tropical sea surface temperatures

Previous studies have demonstrated the potential for the Li content of coral aragonite to record information about environmental conditions, but no detailed study of tropical corals exists. Here we present the Li and Mg to Ca ratios at a bimonthly to monthly resolution over 25 years in two modern Porites corals, the genus most often used for paleoclimate reconstructions in the tropical Indo-Pacific. A strong relationship exists between coral Li/Ca and locally measured SST, indicating that coral Li/Ca can be used to reconstruct tropical SST variations. However, Li/Ca ratios of the skeleton deposited during 1979-1980 do not track local SST well and are anomalously high in places. The Mg/Ca ratios of this interval are also anomalously high, and we suggest Li/Ca can be used to reconstruct tropical SST only when Mg/Ca data are used to carefully screen for relatively rare biological effects. Mg/Li or Li/Mg ratios provide little advantage over Li/Ca ratios, except that the slope of the Li/Mg temperature relationship is more similar between the two corals. The Mg/Li temperature relationship for the coral that experienced a large temperature range is similar to that found for cold water corals and aragonitic benthic foraminifera in previous studies. The comparison with data from other biogenic aragonites suggests the relationship between Li/Mg and water temperature can be described by a single exponential relationship. Despite this hint at an overarching control, it is clear that biological processes strongly influence coral Li/Ca, and more calibration work is required before widely applying the prox