Language teacher practices predicting students’ reading self-efficacy: Jordanian students’ participation in PISA 2018

This study investigated the ability of language teachers’ practices to predict self-efficacy in reading among Jordanian students participating in PISA 2018. The study adopted the secondary analysis method by analyzing the responses of 8,963 15-year-old males and females in 313 schools who participated in PISA 2018. Statistically significant differences in students’ perceptions were found in teacher-directed instruction, teacher support for students, teacher motivating students to engage in reading, and enjoyable reading. Additionally, female students exhibited more reading self-efficacy than male students. There were statistically significant differences in students’ perceptions of controlling the classroom environment, and feedback in favor of males. The multiple linear regression analysis indicated that five factors explained a statistically significant proportion of the variance in self-efficacy in reading (14.7%). Enjoyment of reading was the factor that contributed the most with a percentage of 10.2%, followed by teacher enthusiasm with 3.6%. Keywords: reading self-efficacy; Jordanian students; PISA 2018

Self-Questioning Strategy Routine to Enhance Reading Comprehension Among Secondary Students

Reading comprehension expectations in content areas have increased for students during the past decade. Many secondary students, including students with learning disabilities, improve their reading proficiency of grade-level text when they receive explicit instruction. The authors propose a self-questioning strategy routine designed to enhance secondary students’ comprehension of expository text and to increase student engagement in content classes. The routine includes explicit, teacher-directed instruction and incorporates before-, during-, and after-reading activities using modeling and guided practice. A scenario of a secondary teacher implementing the proposed self-questioning strategy routine in a social studies course is presented.

Effective and Efficient Practices for Successful Inclusion in Public School Settings

Given the increasing diversity of students included in general education classrooms in public schools, the field must establish a clearer definition of what successful inclusion entails. This endeavor involves an analysis of best practices for inclusion, taking into account the knowledge and skillset required of teachers in their roles as instructional experts. With limited time and resources, teachers are challenged to maximize opportunities for individualized learning without creating the need for additional teacher-directed instruction. Teachers must therefore enact classroom practices in which students and their peers serve as mediating agents in their own learning. In addition, special and general education teachers must collaborate with one another, as well as with all members of the larger school community, in order to provide students with the least restrictive classroom placement along a continuum of options. All those involved must believe in, and advocate for, successful inclusion practices to support an increasingly diverse and accepting public sector.

Beginning High School Teachers’ Organization of Students for Learning and Methods for Teaching Mathematics

We observed eight beginning secondary mathematics teachers’ classrooms to investigate which they organized students for learning, uses of instructional methods, and how these may differ based on the level of course being taught. We found that beginning teachers frequently organize their students to learn collaboratively – either in small groups or as a whole class – coupled with an abundance of teacher directed instruction. Differences in organizations, teaching methods, and associated learning opportunities between course levels also exist. Implications for supporting practicing teachers and preparing prospective teachers to establish collaborative learning environments and utilize student centered teaching methods are discussed.

Povezanost šolske klime z zaznavanjem zadovoljstvaz življenjem slovenskih mladostnikovv raziskavi PISA 2018

Connectedness of the school climate and perceived life-satisfaction of the Slovene youth in PISA 2018 Life satisfaction depends, on the one hand, on the subjective characteristics of the individual and on the other hand on environmental factors. The school climate is strongly connected with the adolescents' everyday experience and self-evaluation, and teachers are important adults in this environment who can enhance their feelings and beliefs. We were interested in the main predictors of life satisfaction in the school environment. The multiple regression analysis was conducted on the PISA 2018. The analysis included 4810 15-year-olds. We included seven predictors in the model: a sense of belonging to the school, the frequency of peer violence, the disciplinary climate, the teacher's enthusiasm, the teacher's support, teacher-directed instruction and the teacher's feedback. The five-predictor model explains 12.1% of the total variance in life satisfaction and is statistically significant. Adolescents are more satisfied with their lives when they experience higher school belonging, when they perceive or experience less violence from peers, when they perceive or experience support from teachers during lessons, when they receive precise instructions for their work and when they receive formative feedback. Key words: school climate, life satisfaction, adolescents, PISA 2018

Navigating Increasing Levels of Relational Complexity: Perceptual, Analogical, and System Mappings

Relational thinking involves comparing abstract relationships between mental representations that vary in complexity; however, this complexity is rarely made explicit during everyday comparisons. This study explored how people naturally navigate relational complexity and interference using a novel relational match-to-sample (RMTS) task with both minimal and relationally directed instruction to observe changes in performance across three levels of relational complexity: perceptual, analogy, and system mappings. Individual working memory and relational abilities were examined to understand RMTS performance and susceptibility to interfering relational structures. Trials were presented without practice across four blocks, and participants received feedback after each attempt to guide learning. Experiment 1 instructed participants to select the target that best matched the sample, whereas Experiment 2 additionally directed participants' attention to same and different relations. Participants in Experiment 2 demonstrated improved performance when solving analogical mappings, suggesting that directing attention to relational characteristics affected behavior. Higher performing participants—those with above-chance performance on the final block of system mappings—solved more analogical RMTS problems and had greater visuospatial working memory, abstraction, verbal analogy, and scene analogy scores compared to lower performers. Lower performers were less dynamic in their performance across blocks and demonstrated negative relationships between analogy and system mapping accuracy, suggesting increased interference between these relational structures. Participant performance on RMTS problems did not change monotonically with relational complexity, suggesting that increases in relational complexity places nonlinear demands on working memory. We argue that competing relational information causes additional interference, especially in individuals with lower executive function abilities.

Do Student Ratings Provide Reliable and Valid Information about Teaching Quality at the School Level? Evaluating Measures of Science Teaching in PISA 2015

Large-scale educational surveys, including PISA, often collect student ratings to assess teaching quality. Because of the sampling design in PISA, student ratings must be aggregated at the school level instead of the classroom level. To what extent does school-level aggregation of student ratings yield reliable and valid measures of teaching quality? We investigate this question for six scales measuring classroom management, emotional support, inquiry-based instruction, teacher-directed instruction, adaptive instruction, and feedback provided by PISA 2015. The sample consisted of 503,146 students from 17,678 schools in 69 countries/regions. Multilevel CFA and SEM were conducted for each scale in each country/region to evaluate school-level reliability (Intraclass Correlations 1 and 2), factorial validity, and predictive validity. In most countries/regions, school-level reliability was found to be adequate for the Classroom Management scale, but only low to moderate for the other scales. Examination of factorial and predictive validity indicated that the Classroom Management, Emotional Support, Adaptive Instruction, and Teacher-directed Instruction scales capture meaningful differences in teaching quality between schools. Meanwhile, the Inquiry scale exhibited poor validity in almost all countries/regions. These findings suggest the possibility of using student ratings in PISA to investigate some aspects of school-level teaching quality in most countries/regions.