Educational Research Journal Research Articles

Translanguaging spaces and multilingual public writing in Zambia: tracing change in the linguistic landscape of Ndola on the Copperbelt

ABSTRACT Zambia is home to a complex set of language practices, which involve languages being used in different ways across social contexts. Historically written communication has typically been associated with English with African languages mainly associated with used spoken contexts. Recently, however, there has been a shift in this pattern with African languages being used more frequently in and across the linguistic landscape of Zambia in public writing [Banda, F., and H. Jimaima. 2017. “Linguistic Landscapes and the Sociolinguistics of Language Vitality in Multilingual Contexts of Zambia.” Multilingua 36 (5): 595–625; Simungala, G. 2020. “The Linguistic Landscape of the University of Zambia: A Social Semiotic Perspective.” Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Zambia; Simungala, G., and H. Jimaima. 2020. “Multilingual Realities of Language Contact at the University of Zambia.” Journal of African and Asian Studies, 1–14]. In this paper, we add to the growing body of work within linguistic landscape research that draws on a translanguaging perspective to understand the ways in which language is used as a resource for meaning making in the social world [Wei, Li. 2011. "Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain." Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1222–1235; Wei, Li. 2018. “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language.” Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 9–30; García, O., and T. Kleyn. 2016. Translanguaging with Multilingual Students: Learning from Classroom Moments. Routledge; MacSwan, J. 2017. “A Multilingual Perspective on Translanguaging.” American Educational Research Journal 54 (1): 167–201; Jaspers, J. 2018. “The Transformative Limits of Translanguaging.” Language & Communication 58: 1–10]. More specifically, we adopt the concept of translanguaging spaces [Wei, Li. 2011. "Moment Analysis and Translanguaging Space: Discursive Construction of Identities by Multilingual Chinese Youth in Britain." Journal of Pragmatics 43 (5): 1222–1235; Wei, Li. 2018. “Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language.” Applied Linguistics 39 (1): 9–30; Reilly, C. 2021. 3 Malawian Universities as Translanguaging Spaces. In English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging, 29–42. Multilingual Matters] to explore the ways in which language is used in billboards and advertising spaces and propose that important shifts in language uses are observable. We discuss the changing status and uses of local African languages and why this is important in understanding language use in post-colonial contexts such as Zambia.

EDITORIAL FROM THE SPECIAL-ISSUES CO-EDITOR OF SERJ

First published February 2020 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

EDITORIAL: BUILDING FUTURE GENERATIONS OF STATISTICIANS – WHO CARES?

First published February 2020 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR FOR REGULAR PAPERS

First published February 2020 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

Front Matter

First published February 2020 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

Pelatihan Penyusunan Jurnal Penelitian Pendidikan Bagi Guru Sekolah Dasar Kecamatan Punggur Lampung Tengah

The purpose of this training is to understand and know about what and how an Educational Research Journal is and understand the preparation of an Educational Research Journal for elementary school teachers in Kotagajah Subdistrict, Central Lampung. This training uses the lecture method, question and answer method and the method of giving examples. Sources of research data are teachers in elementary schools throughout Kotagajah district, Central Lampung, totaling 20 people. The result of this training was that it was able to produce 5 drafts of writing an Educational Research Journal which was followed up with presentation activities in order to get input from various parties and the teachers felt they had gained the knowledge, skills and or experience they really needed.

Leave only footprints: how children communicate a sense of ownership and belonging in an art gallery

ABSTRACT Despite rapid growth in young children visiting museums, and an increasing acknowledgement that these visits are important to children’s development as cultural citizens [Mudiappa and Kluczniok 2015. “Visits to Cultural Learning Places in the Early Childhood.” European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 23 (2): 200–212] there is still relatively little published research on children’s encounters with them [Hackett, Holmes, and Macrae 2020. Working with Young Children in Museums: Weaving Theory and Practice. London: Routledge]. Our practitioner-led ‘playgroup-in-residence’ explored how young children made sense of the museum in dialogue with the objects, spaces, and people within it. Working within an interpretivist framework, we collectedrich multimodal data and used grounded theory to identify significant patterns in children’s responses. One important theme was the way in which children made marks and left traces to both explore and communicate their emerging sense of belonging within the museum. Our findings have implications for understanding how young children enter into dialogue with environments outside the home. This work is important as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, during which children have spent long periods at home. It is vital that we support them to forge relationships with places and spaces within the wider community.

Work from Home: The impacts on university employee’s well-being and individual work performance

Work from Home: The impacts on university employee’s well-being and individual work performance

SATs, sets and allegations of bias: The allocation of 11‐year‐old students to mathematics sets in some English schools in 2015. A response to Connolly et al., 2019

AbstractThis is a methodological critique of research by the Best Practice in Grouping Students (BPGS) project claiming teacher bias in allocating students to first‐year secondary school mathematics teaching sets (British Educational Research Journal, 45(4), 873–879). The research assumes that bias could be shown by non‐random relationships between ‘misallocations’ to sets and memberships of gender, ethnic and/or socio‐economic subgroups. This paper questions the authors’ prescriptions for correct set placements and demonstrates two ways in which non‐random relationships between subgroup memberships and (alleged) misplacements could be generated despite all students with similar scores within a school being given the same chance of a set position deemed correct by the researchers. It suggests that the BPGS project results are largely artefacts of their evaluation approach. No claim is made herein that teacher bias plays no part in set allocation, merely that, if it does, the approach by Connolly et al. could not evidence it. A lesson from the critique is that, before drawing inferences from data aggregated from diverse clusters, it is wise for researchers to investigate the way the data are generated at source and patterned by aggregation.

Editorial and Front Matter

First published May 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

THE INFLUENCE OF VARIATION AND EXPECTATION ON THE DEVELOPING AWARENESS OF DISTRIBUTION

This study considers the evolving influence of variation and expectation on the development of school students’ appreciation of distribution as displayed in their construction of graphical representations of data sets. Three interview protocols are employed, presenting different contexts within which 109 students, ranging in age from 6 to 15 years, could display and interpret their understanding. Responses are analyzed within a hierarchical cognitive framework. It is hypothesized from the analysis that, contrary to the order in which expectation and variation are introduced in the school curriculum, the natural tendency for students is to acknowledge variation first and then expectation. First published May 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

MODELING THE GROWTH OF STUDENTS’ COVARIATIONAL REASONING DURING AN INTRODUCTORY STATISTICS COURSE

This study examined students’ development of reasoning about quantitative bivariate data during a one-semester university-level introductory statistics course. There were three research questions of interest: (1) What is the nature, or pattern of change in students’ development in reasoning throughout the course?; (2) Is the sequencing of quantitative bivariate data within the course associated with differences in the pattern of change in reasoning?; and (3) Are changes in reasoning about foundational concepts of distribution associated with differences in the pattern of change? Covariational and distributional reasoning were measured four times during the course, across four cohorts of students. A linear mixed-effects model was used to analyze the data, revealing some interesting trends and relationships regarding the development of covariational reasoning. First published May 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives

A FRAMEWORK FOR THINKING ABOUT INFORMAL STATISTICAL INFERENCE

Informal inferential reasoning has shown some promise in developing students’ deeper understanding of statistical processes. This paper presents a framework to think about three key principles of informal inference – generalizations ‘beyond the data,’ probabilistic language, and data as evidence. The authors use primary school classroom episodes and excerpts of interviews with the teachers to illustrate the framework and reiterate the importance of embedding statistical learning within the context of statistical inquiry. Implications for the teaching of more powerful statistical concepts at the primary school level are discussed. First published May 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

FACTORS INFLUENCING THE DEVELOPMENT OF MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS’ INTEREST IN STATISTICAL LITERACY

This paper reviews factors that contribute to the development of middle school students’ interest in statistical literacy and its motivational influence on learning. To date very little research has specifically examined the influence of positive affect such as interest on learning in the middle-school statistics context. Two bodies of associated research are available: interest research in a mathematics education context and attitudinal research in a tertiary statistics context. A content analysis of this literature suggests that interest development in middle school statistics will be the result of a complex interplay of classroom influences and individual factors such as: students’ knowledge of statistics, their enjoyment of statistics and their perceptions of competency in relation to the learning of statistics. First published May 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

AN EMPIRICAL CONSIDERATION OF A BALANCED AMALGAMATION OF LEARNING STRATEGIES IN GRADUATE INTRODUCTORY STATISTICS CLASSES

This study considers the effectiveness of a “balanced amalgamated” approach to teaching graduate level introductory statistics. Although some research stresses replacing traditional lectures with more active learning methods, the approach of this study is to combine effective lecturing with active learning and team projects. The results of this study indicate that such a balanced amalgamated approach to learning not only improves student cognition of course material, but student morale as well. An instructional approach that combines mini-lectures with in-class active-learnin activities appears to be a better approach than traditional lecturing alone for teaching graduate-level students. First published May 2009 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives

A 10-Year Systematic Review of Participant Diversity of Single-Case Studies Published in Two Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education Research Journals

The field of special education has made great strides in identifying interventions that work. These practices have been described as evidence-based because they were effective across numerous studies. However, scholars in the field are also acutely aware that not all evidence-based practices will be equally effective for all children. Because of this, we sought to gain a better understanding of just who participated in single-case research design studies published in two early childhood journals from 2011 through 2020. Demographics for 267 participants from 67 studies were coded and statistically compared with federal data. Results suggest an overrepresentation of male participants, an overrepresentation of Black children, an overrepresentation of children diagnosed with autism, and an underrepresentation of Hispanic/Latinx children.

Abstraction and embodiment: exploring the process of grasping a general

This paper reports from a case study which explores kindergarten children’s mathematical abstraction in a teaching–learning activity about reflection symmetry. From a dialectical perspective, abstraction is here conceived as a process, as a genuine part of human activity, where the learner establishes “a point of view from which the concrete can be seen as meaningfully related” (van Oers & Poland Mathematics Education Research Journal, 19(2), 10–22, 2007, p. 13–14). A cultural-historical semiotic perspective to embodiment is used to explore the characteristics of kindergarten children’s mathematical abstraction. In the selected segment, two 5-year-old boys explore the concept of reflection symmetry using a doll pram. In the activity, the two boys first point to concrete features of the sensory manifold, then one of the boys’ awareness gradually moves to the imagined and finally to grasping a general and establishing a new point of view. The findings illustrate the essential role of gestures, bodily actions, and rhythm, in conjunction with spoken words, in the two boys’ gradual process of grasping a general. The study advances our knowledge about the nature of mathematical abstraction and challenges the traditional view on abstraction as a sort of decontextualised higher order thinking. This study argues that abstraction is not a matter of going from the concrete to the abstract, rather it is an emergent and context-bound process, as a genuine part of children’s concrete embodied activities.

Music Education Research Citations: A Replication Study and Current Perspective

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to examine current trends regarding citation frequencies in music education research journals. Through a quasi-replication of the Hamann and Lucas (1998) journal eminence study, each reference in all articles of four nationally distributed publications (Journal of Research in Music Education, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, and Contributions to Music Education) over 6 years (2014–2019) were recorded, resulting in 18,401 total citations. Final tabulations recorded an increase in overall cited journals (576 to 1,451) and an increase in cited music journals (134 to 149). The 15 most cited journals in music education and adjacent research fields were ranked and grouped into three tiers. As scholarship and publication remain both essential and rewarding duties for music education scholars, the ability to inform their supervisors of the perceived eminence for their published work can be crucial evidence for tenure or promotion.

REFEREES: SPECIAL ISSUE: STATISTICS EDUCATION RESEARCH FROM A LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE

ARBITRO: EDIÇÃO ESPECIAL DA REVISTA DE PESQUISA EM EDUCAÇÃO ESTATÍSTICA (SERJ) Acknowledgment: We are grateful to the people who acted as referees for the Special Issue of the Statistics Education Research Journal.

Urban Mathematics Education Research

As Foucault’s ironic approach to history is to suggest that looking at our past can help us to change the future, I contend that connections make the best disruptions. To wit, I introduce citation networks to make connections between articles and citations as a way of disrupting assumptions about what has been and can be done in the name of mathematics education research. The purpose of this paper is to introduce citation networks, a novel method for identifying field connections, and a theory of spatiality that deploys the metaphors of bubbles and foams to imagine disruptions. After introducing the method and theory that guide this investigation, I introduce and describe the foams of the research published in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education and Educational Studies in Mathematics during the 2010s. In doing so, I show what topics of inquiry constitute the dominant research foci of our field, or at least of our field as it is published in these mainstream mathematics education journals. Later, I read these maps with a critical lens towards the foci to discern what is marginalized and excluded, namely the urban. This research builds on earlier work that names the ghettoization of urban mathematics education research and provides a critical interrogation of the ways that urban research is marked and marginalized within dominant mathematics education research journals. I conclude by situating the role of the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education as a place to blow bubbles, a place to reconfigure what we can see, say, think, and do in the name of (urban) mathematics education research.