Search

Mentoring is widely believed to be beneficial to mentors and mentees in the teacher education context. However, mentoring as a tool for strengthening professional knowledge is not without barriers hindering its effectiveness. This paper explores common barriers in mentoring, drawing on studies conducted in Croatia, Ireland, and Scotland which have been re-analyzed for this paper. The two studies conducted in Scotland used a mixed-methods approach, the Croatian study was conducted using a quantitative approach, while the Irish research employed a qualitative strategy. Data from the four published studies were re-analyzed and integrated using a qualitative thematic approach with three groups of themes emerging as the most common barriers to mentoring in teacher education. These groups of themes are: interests, values and motives; power, status and position; and information and communication. The study explores these themes and concludes with the implications for stakeholders, including school management, universities, and student teachers.

The study presents results founded upon the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice scale validation and the relations between personality traits and motivation for teaching in Croatia. A sample of 374 first-year preservice teachers from three universities participated in the study. Confirmatory factor analysis of the items comprising the Croatian version of the FIT-Choice scale provided support for its construct validity following the omission of six items with low factor loadings. Personality dimensions of the five-factor model provided a set of theoretically meaningful relations with the specific motivational factors determining the choice of teaching profession. In line with previous studies, our results showed that personality traits better predicted intrinsic motivation compared to extrinsic motivation. Two interpersonal dimensions, extraversion and agreeableness, were significant predictors of intrinsic career value, but also of satisfaction with the choice of this profession. Extraversion also predicted ability, whereas agreeableness demonstrated positive relations with social utility value motivations for a teaching career. (Contains 3 tables and 2 notes.)

The Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) was used to gauge the relative effectiveness of three different methods of pedagogy, "Reading, Presenting, and Questioning" (RPQ), "Experimenting and Discussion" (ED), and "Traditional Methods" (TM), on increasing students' level of scientific thinking. The data of a one-semester-long senior high-school project indicate that, for the LCTSR: (a) the RPQ group (n = 91) achieved effect-sizes d = 0.30 and (b) the ED group (n = 85) attained effect-sizes d = 0.64. These methods have shown that the Piagetian and Vygotskian visions on learning and teaching can go hand in hand and as such achieve respectable results. To do so, it is important to challenge the students and thus encourage the shift towards higher levels of reasoning. This aim is facilitated through class management which recognizes the importance of collaborative learning. Carrying out Vygotsky's original intention to use teaching to promote cognitive development as well as subject concepts, this research has shown that it is better to have students experience cognitive conflict from directly observed experiments than by reflecting on reported experience from popularization papers or writings found on the internet. (Contains 4 tables and 1 note.)

In this research we asked the fourth year students (N = 50) of a technical faculty of the University of Split (Republic of Croatia) to solve a partially specified physics problem related to gravitational force. The task for the students was to decide whether the situation described in the problem is feasible or not. Nevertheless, the formulation of the problem is such that it does not give students any explicit advice regarding what to calculate or how to judge the feasibility of the given situation in the real world. The research was carried out using a structured written exam method. The worksheet was structured in order to assess explicitly a few elements of the students' problem-solving performance. Based on their results, the examinees were classified into four categories, depending on what they could or could not accomplish during problem solving. A majority of students were not able to solve the given physical problem completely. A selection of students' and professors' observations is also included. Our results show that traditionally formulated numerical exercises, which are mostly used in physics teaching, do not develop students' abilities in higher-order thinking (i.e. planning, decision making or result evaluation) to a desirable extent. We suggest that partially specified problems should be given to students, both in problem-solving sessions and exams, in order to prepare them for dealing with ill-structured tasks in real life. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

The article deals with the problem of frequent forest fires along the Croatian coast and on the islands, the mare tourism resorts of Croatia, and the methods that can be used to minimise human neglect as one of the main causes of those fires. Since 1997, Croatian government has invested in different public awareness campaigns in order to increase local population knowledge concerning safe fire behaviour in the open area as well as in the protection and reconstruction of the Mediterranean forests that are one of the important tourism resource of the region. These campaigns were primarily based on mass marketing, they were oriented to whole population and, unfortunately, have not resulted in expected change of behaviour of local population nor in decrease of the proportion of open-air tires caused by human neglect. That was the reason to introduce, for the first time in Croatia, the principles of community based social marketing and create and apply new educational methods in the forest fire prevention programme and, finally, to test the feasibility and the effectiveness of these methods in the pilot area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]