Educational Research Review最新文献

Mentoring has nowadays become a prevalent educational practice in higher education, as it allows for personalized learning trajectories and competence-based education. However, the effectiveness of mentoring programs is difficult to measure due to a lack of conceptual clarity about the mentoring concept and the broad variety of measurements used. Therefore, a systematic literature review was conducted to conceptualize mentoring by looking at the definitions, characteristics, and measurements. A total of 106 studies were reviewed and a summative content analysis was applied. The results of this study are three-fold. First, a synthesis and integration of existing definitions resulted in a newly developed, holistic definition of mentoring. Second, evidence-based characteristics of mentoring are discussed that give insights into how to design and implement mentoring programs. Third, an overview of existing mentoring measures is presented, and a subsequent in-depth analysis shows their alignment with the proposed conceptualization on mentoring.

Academic underachievement, the discrepancy between students' academic potential and performance, remains both an educational problem and a mystery after nearly a century of research. Of enduring interest has been identifying factors behind underachievement, one of which relates to students’ motivation and self-regulated learning. To explore the state of known research, we conducted a systematic and meta-analytic review of the past 80 years of empirical research comparing underachieving and non-underachieving students on various motivational and self-regulated learning correlates. Based on 1044 effect sizes from 125 studies (156 unique samples, N = 56,640 students), our overall meta-analytic findings suggested that underachieving students tend to have higher external locus of control (g = 0.30) and lower levels of competence beliefs (g = −0.48), autonomous motivation and task values (g = −0.48), self-regulated learning strategies (g = −0.59), and mastery goals (g = −0.39) relative to non-underachieving students. Differences in competence beliefs between underachieving and non-underachieving students were moderated by grade level and underachievement identification method. Implications for the theoretical bases for academic underachievement and the educational practices to reverse or prevent underachievement are discussed.

As students learn biology at different levels of education, their tenacious and inaccurate prior conceptions pose a challenge to conceptual change. Educators and researchers have developed a variety of interventions to address these misinterpretations and promote the achievement of current scientific understanding. Despite an ever-growing body of literature, no study has been conducted to date that examines the quality of interventions or their effectiveness in terms of conceptual change. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of intervention studies conducted in the field of biology in order to gain insight into this phenomenon. According to the results, evolution and photosynthesis are the most common topics investigated. Overall, the results of the meta-analysis indicate that conceptual change interventions result in large effects on conceptual understanding of biological topics when compared with traditional teaching, with refutational text being the most effective single type of intervention. However, the most effective interventions dealt with more simplified phenomena, such as the cardiovascular system of the human body. It was found that the effect sizes were strongly influenced by the number of participants in the samples, as well as publication bias. A striking number of the studies reported only superficial learning outcomes, such as knowledge enrichment rather than knowledge restructuring. It is possible to use the results of this study to inform instructional choices and to carry out further research.

The aim of this systematic scoping review was to provide an overview of the physical and sensory environment factors that are related to three to six-year-old children's social and emotional development in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings across different pedagogical contexts. A systematic literature search was conducted in PsycINFO, Medline and ERIC. 8378 studies were screened from 2000 to 2021. A total of 589 studies were screened at full text stage, and 20 studies were included. Eleven studies reported a physical environment factor, and one study reported a sensory environment factor that was related to children's positive social and emotional competence outcomes. Eight studies reported a physical environment factor, and three studies reported a sensory environment factor that was negatively related to a social and emotional competence outcome. Three studies reported on long-term developmental implications provided by the ECEC environment. The physical and sensory environment overlaps with the social context in which it is embedded to contribute to children's early education experiences. Future research is needed to define optimal environmental conditions and embed physical and sensory environment research in social and emotional development programs.

During the early stages of the teaching profession, pre-service and beginning teachers often participate in individual support activities intended to develop their teacher self-efficacy. These individual support activities (modeling, feedback on lesson plans or lessons, and reflection) are provided as part of an intervention by a mentor, cooperating teacher, instructor, or supervisor. We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate the effectiveness of these interventions and the individual support activities for pre-service and beginning teachers’ self-efficacy. We found a medium-sized overall effect of interventions on teacher self-efficacy based on 28 studies (49 effect sizes) in our meta-analysis. Providing feedback on lesson plans amplified the intervention effect (large effect). However, this moderator effect slightly missed the significance level of 0.05. The moderator effect of providing feedback on lesson plans was stable after controlling for mastery experiences and methodological moderator variables. Implications for future interventions regarding teacher self-efficacy for early career teachers are discussed.

Higher education institutions are increasingly taking responsibility for preparing students for the transition to work. Prior research on the nexus of higher education and careers has focused heavily on individuals' trajectories in the school-to-work transition. However, in reality, graduates are embedded in social networks when navigating the labour market. Due to theoretical ambiguity in current research, results on how social networks facilitate the transition of graduates from different socio-economic backgrounds are inconclusive. This systematic review aims to integrate the findings on the complex role of social networks in the transition through a comprehensive theoretical framework, building on a formalist (network structure), substantialist (network composition), and social capital (network resources) approach. Results show that higher education institutional networks, often overlooked, have significant power in connecting graduates to the labour market. Further, findings demonstrate that the characteristics of network actors and the resources they offer are determining factors in facilitating graduates’ transition process. Herein lies the danger of social exclusion mechanisms in the transition to work.

A growing body of research has suggested that mindset is one powerful predictor of students' academic achievement and that students are likely to hold self-beliefs about the malleability or stability of their academic abilities. In the domain of mathematics education, a belief in ‘math brain’ – as something you do or do not possess – is widely prevalent. Studies have shown that teachers and students are more likely to consider achievement in mathematics than achievement in other academic domains to be due to inborn ability. Most growth mindset-related research in schools is domain-general; however, given the prevalence of strong beliefs about the innateness of mathematical ability, possible idiosyncratic effects of mindset interventions in the mathematics domain may have been overlooked by research reviews and meta-analyses that do not examine domain-specific effects. The purpose of this paper is to compile and synthesise quantitative and qualitative research on interventions in mathematics classrooms that aim to change or foster teachers' and/or students' beliefs/mindset in primary and secondary schools and the reported impacts of these interventions (16 studies). The interventions in these studies were identified and sorted based on their targets (teacher-focused or student-focused), content (implicit theories of intelligence (ITI) intervention for general domains or in mathematics domain), and delivery mode (technology-based or in-contact). The results suggested most of the considered studies were quantitative and used student-focused interventions. Moreover, when ITI interventions were conducted specifically in the mathematics domain, positive results were reported, regardless of the intervention target or content or mode of delivery, whereas general ITI interventions yielded mixed results. Future studies should therefore consider the impacts of domain-specific effects and intervention targets when designing mindset interventions.

The transition from primary to secondary school is characterised by multiple substantial changes in children's physical, organisational, social, and pedagogical environments. Adjusting to these changes can be difficult, and problems doing so can have serious and wide-ranging long-term consequences. Currently it is not clear for educators, policy makers and researchers which programs and practices to prepare and support students are most efficacious, feasible to deliver, and suitable for different student populations. This review systematically identified and evaluated published experimental and quasi-experimental studies of school-based interventions to improve student social-emotional (i.e., peer-relationships, self-concept, mental health) and educational (i.e., school engagement, academic achievement) outcomes following primary-secondary transition. Searches were conducted across five bibliographic databases (ERIC, ERC, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Web of Science Core Collections), several program databases and research registers, in February 2022. A total of 26 studies met inclusion criteria. Overall, the review found most interventions had positive effects on at least one relevant transition adjustment outcome. However, there is a need for replication across different educational contexts, consistent measurement of outcomes, and use of more rigorous evaluation methods. The evidence presented in this review will inform decisions about the design or selection, implementation and further evaluation of primary-secondary transition interventions. In turn, this should lead to better social-emotional and educational outcomes for students, and may reduce some of the inequities exacerbated by a difficult transition to secondary school.

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is the world's largest international assessment of primary-aged students' reading comprehension. However, PIRLS has previously been found to be scarcely used for reading-related research. This systematic review aimed to investigate how PIRLS has been used as a tool for educational research and critique, utilising an existing catalogue and a further article search exploiting five digital databases. A total of 221 articles published in academic journals between January 2004 and May 2022 were analysed. Results show the changing engagement in PIRLS throughout the lifetime of the study and across different countries and research disciplines. We also discuss the findings and implications of PIRLS-related research in three of the most frequent topics of these articles; teacher characteristics and instruction practices as predictors of reading performance, socioeconomic predictors of reading performance, and critiques of the psychometric scaling approaches used in PIRLS. Avenues we believe to have untapped potential, particularly in the context of reading-related research, are also discussed.