EARLI 2015 : 16th Biennial conference

Description

Out-of-school activities —which are taking place during school hours, but outside the school context— often do not meet criteria of high-quality pedagogical content knowledge. By inspecting the real-time interaction during day-to-day practice, the expressed part of pedagogical content knowledge (EPCK) can be observed. These short-term interactions self-organize over time into particular stable system states: attractor states, e.g., a typical form of EPCK. Our questions are first “How do the teaching and learning types stabilize into EPCK attractor states”, and second “Which attractor state dominates in out-of-school activities?” This study concerned nine out-of-school activities of pupils of upper classes of primary schools: visit to a museum, Children’s University, science center, and a mobile science classroom (a truck called the Salt Express). A multivariate coding scheme is used. A principal factor analysis of the time series of all the variables reduced the number of dimensions. The cluster analyses dived the time-series into a sequence of EPCK states. We found in six of the nine out-of-school activities a recurrent attractor state with high quality EPCK characterized as “open teaching focused on conceptual understanding, and/or non-content”, and its size was medium large. In five of the nine out-of-school activities a large size non-EPCK emerged. Relevance of this study is that it provides insight in EPCK and its emergence, and guidelines for improving out-of-school activities.

Period	29-Aug-2015
Event title	EARLI 2015 : 16th Biennial conference : Towards a reflective society: synergies between learning, teaching and research
Event type	Conference
Location	Limassol, CyprusShow on map