Journal of Educational Practice and Research

Effects of Different Forms of Concept-Map Representation

Chin-Yuan Lai, Sheng-Mei Chen, & Cheng-Chih Wu

Representation is important for problem solving. This study examined the effects of different forms of concept maps on nursing students’ performances of conceptualizing psychiatric patients’ problems. A quasi-experimental research design was adopted to investigate the effects. The participants were two classes of fourth-year students who were enrolled in a psychiatric nursing course in a nursing college. One class with 48 students served as the experimental group, and used web-based concepts map to represent patients’ problem. The other class with 50 students served as the control group, and used the traditional hierarchical concept mapping method. The results indicated that the concept maps drawn by the experimental group showed more nursing problem, supporting evidence, and relationships between nursing problems than those drawn by the control group. The web-based concept maps helped expand students’ thinking and promoted their causality reasoning. Different concept-map representation tools affected the process of students’ problem solving. The experimental learning activities promoted students’ understanding of concepts and ways of psychiatric patients’ care taking. To understand the effects of other types of concept maps, future research may guide students in using different forms of concept maps throughout the stages of nursing process.

An Empirical Study of University Students’ Attitude Toward

Hsiao-Chien Lee & Pei-Ling Wang

English as a lingua franca (ELF) for international communication has become a heated issue for discussions among educators of English in recent years. As scholars find it essential for teachers to encourage their students to acquire the ability of using English in real-life conversations, they also wonder about the necessity of requiring students to speak in an accent approximate to that of native speakers of English. With the purpose of encouraging non-English majors at technological universities to speak English and directing English majors’ attention to things other than the so-called ‘standard norms of English accent,’ this study involved 85 freshmen from two technological universities at southern Taiwan. The researchers ask the following questions: What are the students’ attitudes toward native speaker norms of English? After a semester of teaching interventions, do the students’ attitudes change? Do the students’ majors affect their attitudes? Do the students’ genders affect their attitudes? The teaching interventions included providing students with teaching materials covering varieties of spoken English and assisting students to prepare three threeminute group conversation video clips. The results gained from both quantitative and qualitative methods indicate that the students appreciated the accent of the native speakers most. However, after the interventions, the students could appreciate other accents as well. Moreover, the students did not find it so important to speak like a native speaker, and their self-evaluation of English speaking ability and confidence in speaking English with others were significantly boosted after the implementation of the project.

Making Sense of Aborignial Educare-Givers’ Identities

Su-Chen Chang

This study attempts to explore the sense-making process of aboriginal educare-givers’ identities through narrative inquiry. The materials for analysis include interactivenarrative field texts, narrative- interview field texts researcher’s journals, and interviews’ transcripts. The findings are as follows: The aboriginal identity is fluid. The ethnic identity and educare-giver identity develop in two parallel lines. And self-narrative is the pathway to seek their culture, and promote aboriginal educare-givers’ identities. Further, this study has deconstructed the author’s own identity as “teacher and researcher”, suggesting professors in teacher preparation programs to: see students through different lenses in terms of their ethnicity, transgress between teaching and researching, and practice narrative analysis in the eyes of an educare-giver. Finally, suggestions are offered for teacher education programs as well as individual aboriginal educare-givers seeking and balancing between different identities.

The Elementary School Teachers’ Successful Guidance Strategies for Intervening Children’s Bullying Behaviors

Su-Fen Tu

The purpose of this study was to explore the guidance strategies adopted by elementary homeroom teachers for their interventions on children’s bullying behaviors. Adopted a multiple case study approach, 11 homeroom teachers participated voluntarily through school counselors’ recommendation where semi-structured interviews were conducted. Their average age was 40.14 years old (SD=7.60) and they averaged 15.45 years (SD=6.80) of teaching experience. All participants had previous experience in successfully helping children who had bullying behaviors toward classmates. The results indicated three categories of successful guidance strategies: individual guidance, class management, and systems’ collaboration. Regarding individual guidance, the teachers were able (1) to understand in depth about the factors involved in bullying; (2) to set clear interpersonal boundaries with the bullies; (3) to recognize and reinforce the children’s personal strengths; (4) to face the children’s provoking behaviors with calm manners; (5) to adopt win-win strategies in disciplining. Regarding class management, the teachers were able (1) to set clear safety rules and execute them consistently, (2) to encourage altruistic and empathetic behaviors and to facilitate positive behaviors in class. Regarding the systems’ collaboration, the teachers cooperated mainly with the parents and resources at schools. Teachers’ guidance strategies and models in helping bullies, as well as the impacts of Chinese culture on the teachers’ guidance strategies are discussed. 。

The Development of Professional Empowerment Program for Principals by Interorganizational Collaboration and Action Research

Peiying Chen & Tzu-Bin Lin

As an action research approach through interorganizational collaboration, this study aims to develop an effective professional learning program for enhancing principals’ leadership. There are three phases in this research: program design, implementation, and feedback and reflection. With a comprehensive literature review and focus group interviews, key competences of leadership were identified. The program contents were designed through interorganizational collaboration between academics, local officers, experienced principals, and NGO practitioners. The program contains self-awareness and team building in the dark, leading for the future, curriculum and instructional leadership, systems thinking, Understanding by Design, framework and practice, and World Café dialogue. In Phase II, a four-day workshop program has been held twice in the summer of 2012. Learning feedback was posted on Facebook as informal formative evaluation during the implementation phase. In phase III, opinions and feedbacks from learners, external observers, and curriculum designers were collected to assess the effectiveness of the program. The challenges and revision ideas were proposed at the end of the paper. Through the cycle of “design-act-feedback-revision” of action research with interorganizational collaboration, the present professional development program for principals can be refined and better empower school leaders with new ways of situated learning, collaboration, and reflective thinking. Although this program has been implemented for a few times in the past two years, this paper only explained and discussed the merits and effects of the workshops implemented in the summer of 2012.

Features of Finnish Teacher Education System and Its Implications for Teacher Education in Taiwan

Li-Yun Wang & Ming-Jing Hsu

Finnish education is praised for its high quality and commitment to equality and its teacher education is considered as one of the driving forces for its educational success. Through a comprehensive literature review and document analysis, the authors examined Finnish teacher education system, the recruitment of teacher students, its teacher education program, and teaching practice. In addition, the researchers visited Helsinki and Turku and interviewed 12 researchers and practitioners to investigate the features and rationales behind Finnish teacher education. Strong professionalism, its emphasis on intelligent accountability, career-oriented rather than job-oriented perspective towards teaching are the main features characterizing Finnish teacher education. On the contrary, Taiwan’s teacher education system emphasizes diversification, marketization, and vocational training. Implications of the differences are discussed.

Reframing Children’s Learning:Capturing the Practice of Articulation Done by Truku Children in a Visual Narrative Program

Huei-Hsuan Lin

Grounded in a three-semester visual program in which a college team collaborated with Truku elementary students using photographs to explore their lives, this paper focuses on the ways that indigenous students constructed their learning experiences. The present study uses the concept of articulation to describe the process through which children connected their lives with their families and communities with the visual project taking place at school: As this visual project was aimed to infiltrate into the fabrics of children’s everyday lives, those who succeeded to negotiate with their guardians to gain full control over their after-school lives were able to incorporate the activities of photo-taking into their free time and engage in friendship-making activities. Additionally, students were raised to be involved in farming activities in which they learned by participating physically rather than listening to verbal explanations. Thus, this way of learning had been inscribed onto their bodies, moving between and sutured the worlds of school learning and community’s manual laboring. Lastly, this study found that students exuberated “groupness” as they negotiated their way with each other establishing their positions in the web of peer relations. Groupness embodied an articulated quality indicating the way that students were related to each other at school was inseparable from their relations after school. Educators need to be attuned to the dynamics of the groupness as it has been somewhat stable, yet open to change, and certainly impacted how students performed in various learning spaces, such as in the case of the visual program.