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Are textbooks facilitators or barriers for teachers' teaching and instructional change? An investigation of secondary mathematics teachers in Shanghai, China.

ABSTRACT: In this paper we report on a survey study of teachers' perceptions of how mathematics textbooks, including broadly student books, teacher manuals, and exercise books, facilitate or hinder teachers' teaching in Shanghai educational settings. For the study we established a conceptual framework about teachers' teaching, partly drawing on Shulman's model of pedagogical reasoning and action of teachers. The data were collected from a stratified random sample of 133 mathematics teachers in 13 secondary schools through a questionnaire, and follow-up interviews with 24 of them. The results revealed the following: the textbooks were highly regarded and used by the Shanghai mathematics teachers as facilitators rather than barriers for their teaching and instructional change, and the facilitation was most evident in the process of transformation and comprehension, and least evident in evaluation in teachers' pedagogical reasoning and action; compared with student books and exercise books, teacher manuals played a larger facilitating role in teachers' teaching; and finally, compared with teacher characteristics, school characteristics had a greater influence on the extent to which textbooks played a role of facilitation or hindrance for teachers' instructional practice. Implications and suggestions are given at the end of the paper.

Supplementary information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11858-021-01306-6.

SUBMITTER: Fan L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8435135 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Are textbooks facilitators or barriers for teachers' teaching and instructional change? An investigation of secondary mathematics teachers in Shanghai, China.

Fan Lianghuo L Cheng Jing J Xie Sicheng S Luo Jietong J Wang Yisu Y Sun Yuxiang Y

ZDM : the international journal on mathematics education 20210911 6

In this paper we report on a survey study of teachers' perceptions of how mathematics textbooks, including broadly student books, teacher manuals, and exercise books, facilitate or hinder teachers' teaching in Shanghai educational settings. For the study we established a conceptual framework about teachers' teaching, partly drawing on Shulman's model of pedagogical reasoning and action of teachers. The data were collected from a stratified random sample of 133 mathematics teachers in 13 secondar ...[more]

PMID: 34539927

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Project description:Examining the nature of teachers' emotions and how they are managed and regulated in the act of teaching is crucial to assess the quality of teachers' instruction. Despite the essential role emotions play in teachers' lives and instruction, research on teachers' emotions has not paid much attention on teachers' emotions in the context of daily teaching. This paper explored elementary teachers' emotions while preparing for teaching and during teaching mathematics, reasons that underlie these emotions, and the relationship between their emotions and the quality of their mathematics instruction. Participants were seven elementary teachers working in the U.S. who participated in Holistic Individualized Coaching (HIC) professional development that consisted of five cycles of coaching over an year. For each coaching cycle, pre-coaching conversation and post-coaching conversation data were collected regarding emotions teachers felt in anticipation of teaching and during teaching retrospectively. In order to compare teachers' emotions with instructional quality, coaching sessions were video recorded and analyzed to determine the quality of instruction. Findings of this study showed that teachers reported six categories of emotions (positive, negative, neutral, blended-positive, blended-negative, and mixed), described emotions often in non-typical ways (e.g., "not nervous", "anxious but in a positive way"), and experienced mixed emotions (co-occcurence of positive and negative emotions) as the most dominant emotion. Teachers also had more positive emotions anticipating teaching than actually teaching the lesson. The reason teachers felt mixed emotions reflected the complex and context-specific nature of teaching, a phenonemenon not currently described in the teacher emotion literature. There were no clear relationships between emotional experiences and instructional quality. This study allowed participants to freely describe their authentic, complex, overlapping, and ambiguous emotions in the context of active teaching, which contributes opening up the possibilities of diversifying teacher emotion research and shows the significance and usefulness of understanding teachers' emotions related to active instruction.

Project description:Presents problem/focus of studyThe Covid-19 outbreak has had a staggering impact on the global economy, public health and safety, trade and education. In Malaysia, the government implemented the Movement Control Order (MCO) as a preventive measure against Covid-19. In education, the learning process has been transferred to online teaching. However, pandemic pedagogy is making learning into completely online either synchronous or asynchronous. Therefore, the current research aims to determine the secondary school teachers' psychological status, competencies in e-teaching and teachers work motivation as well as determine the relationship between secondary school teachers' psychological status and competencies in e-teaching during the Covid-19 outbreak.Design/methodology/approachCurrent research is a descriptive-correlational quantitative survey to determine teachers' psychological status, e-teaching competencies and working motivation during Movement Control Order (MCO) to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. The study sample consists of 595 secondary school teachers selected via convenient sampling. Quantitative data are collected from an online survey through the questionnaires with demographic, psychological status (stress, anxiety and depression), e-teaching competencies (teaching, monitoring and evaluation) and teaching motivation developed by the researchers were distributed during the MCO period. SPSS 25 is applied, Statistical measures such as Cronbach's alpha, means, percentage and standard deviation were employed to analyze the data to obtain the value of the school teachers' psychological status, e-teaching competencies and teaching motivation. Consequently, a Pearson correlation table was created to show the analysis of the school teachers' psychological status and competencies in e-teaching.FindingsThis finding indicated that the teachers' psychological factors in stress, anxiety and depressed are moderate, the teachers' competencies in e-teaching is moderate as well as teachers' working motivations is also the moderate level. However, the highest mean value was found among the variables, this is revealed that despite the challenges during the Covid-19 outbreak, teachers showed positive and strong motivation in conducting e-teaching. Additionally, the result showed a negative relationship between psychological status and e-teaching competencies (-0.286, p < 0.01), as well as reported a negative relationship between dimension of psychological status and competencies in e-teaching.Limitation & recommendationsThis study has its limitations. This study is included only Selangor teachers and given that the information obtained from the study was gather from secondary schools, the generalizability might be limited. future research may consider expanding the scope from secondary schools to primary schools' teachers and then to university lecturers. Perhaps the scope is expanding, so more information could be obtaining and help researchers understand the teachers' competencies in e-teaching, psychological status and work motivation.

Dataset Information

Are textbooks facilitators or barriers for teachers' teaching and instructional change? An investigation of secondary mathematics teachers in Shanghai, China.

Supplementary information

Publications

Are textbooks facilitators or barriers for teachers' teaching and instructional change? An investigation of secondary mathematics teachers in Shanghai, China.

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