JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL INNOVATIONS
Year:2018 | Volume:17 | Issue:67 |Papers Count:13

The teachers are the main part of the teaching-learning process, so we can extract valuable information from their life experiences. The main purpose of this study was phenomenological understanding of elementary school teachers' life experience from verbal communications. This quantitative research was done by phenomenology method. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Accordingly, 18 elementary school teachers were selected based on the inclusion criteria of the research. Interviews were analyzed based on Colaizzi method and the thematic analysis. After extracting the subjects and their categorization, three main themes, i. e., the impact on learning, student's behavior and student's communication and 12 sub-themes were identified. Investigating the elementary school teachers' life experiences showed that verbal communications could develop the psychological aspects of the students and improve their academic achievement. So, it is possible to use teachers' experiences for students' educational and behavioral problem solving and for effective communication with parents and educators.

Students' academic engagement is considered as an important predictor of academic outcomes. Hence, it is necessary to pay attention to the factors influential on it. The present study was carried out to longitudinally investigate some variables, effective on students' academic engagement. So, 391 students (49. 4% females and 50. 6% males) were selected from high schools in the city of Tehran, based on the random cluster sampling method. The participants completed measures of self-compassion (Neff, 2003), adolescents' basic psychological needs (Tian et. al, 2013), social safeness (Gilbert et. al, 2009), and student engagement (Viega, 2016) at two time points, with 4 weeks interval. Cross-lagged panel structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. The results showed that self-compassion has direct and positive effect on student engagement over time. Furthermore, self-compassion via basic psychological needs and social safeness indirectly and positively affected the students' academic engagement. These findings provided empirical support for better understanding of mediating mechanisms of the relationship between self-compassion and the students' academic engagement. Implications and future research directions would be discussed.

The aim of this study was to investigate the barriers of implementation of the new internship program at Farhangian University. It was an applied research and its method was descriptive-survey. In the qualitative section of the study, the barriers to implementation of the internship program were extracted through analyzing the documents and in the quantitative part of the study, the faculty members' views on the barriers were studied, using a survey. The statistical population of the qualitative section included the working-report of the internship groups of campuses of Farhangian University throughout the country, since the first period of the internship program implementation. The statistical population of quantitative section also included the faculty members of Farhangian University (N=2057). About 326 people were selected as the research sample. The research tools were documents and the researcher-made questionnaire. In the qualitative section, the managerial, structural, financial, planning, human and communicative barriers, alongside the theoretical approaches of the internship course, and also the monitoring and appraisal of program were identified. In the quantitative section, it was revealed that all the extracted barriers prevent the successful implementation of the new internship program. Findings showed that the barriers of monitoring and appraisal of program with mean 4/02 and financial ones with mean 3/92 were the most influential barriers of the new internship programs' implementation. Also, a significant difference was observed in the area of barriers of implementing new internship program based on the teaching experience. The research results open up new windows for fundamental attention to the students' internships and create the desired changes in the review of the new internship program. The ministry of education and Farhangian University's Planning for removing the detected barriers in the present research can result in the successful implementation of the new internship program.

This study aimed to investigate the factors affecting the academic achievement of students at both school and student levels. Therefore, 600 high school students from 20 schools completed student efficacy scale of Jinks and Morgan's (1999) and personal achievement goal orientation and school goal structure scales of Midgley et al. (2000). Also, the school teachers answered teacher's sense of efficacy scale developed by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (2004). The results of multilevel analysis revealed that at the student level, there is a positive and significant relationship between academic self-efficacy, mastery goal orientation, performance-approach goal orientation, amount of study time and academic achievement. This relationship was negative and significant for the performance-avoidance goal orientation. Girls were found to have higher academic achievement as compared to boys. At the school level, school type and mastery goal structure had a positive and significant relationship with students’ academic achievement. No significant relationship was found among performance-approach, performance-avoidance goal structure, teacher’ s collective self-efficacy and academic achievement of students. The level-1 predictors accounted for 49% of the student-level variance and the level-2 predictors accounted for 79% of the school-level variance.

Despite the importance of phonological awareness in learning reading in the early stages of literacy, studies have shown that some students after the end of elementary education, and even some literate adults have poor phonological skills, that affects their reading. This study was a mixed methods one. The aim was to compare the adolescents' performance in syllabic, intra-syllabic and phonemic sub-tests and their relationship with reading comprehension. The qualitative part includes the review of theories and literature about phonological awareness and its relationship with reading comprehension, design of phonological awareness and reading comprehension tests, and examining their content validity. The quantitative part includes the implementation of the researcher-made tests on a sample of 30 students and calculating the reliability of tests (phonological awareness test (0. 76) and reading comprehension test (0. 80)). Then, the tests were distributed among a sample of 50 students from the 10th grade students of Lahijan. The results were analyzed using non-parametric Friedman and Wilcoxon tests and Spearman correlation test. The results showed that there is a significant difference between the performance of students at different levels of phonological awareness, as the best performance is related to the syllabic and the weakest is related to the intra-syllabic level. The results of Spearman correlation test showed that there is a high correlation between phonological awareness and reading comprehension (0. 77). The results of this study can help educational programmers to design appropriate content to enhance the phonological awareness skills of students after elementary education.

The Van Hiele is a learning model that offers different types of thinking which students experience, when faced with geometric shapes. It includes the stage of visual encounter with the geometric shape, to the formal perception of geometrical proof. Misunderstandings can cause confusion and failure of students to solve problems. Sometimes, because of the interrelated nature of mathematical concepts, misunderstandings cause problems in the future learning of students. The purpose of this study was to identify the misconceptions of 8th grade students in geometrical skills and its related subjects. It also intends to use Van Hiele's theory to improve geometrical skills of the students. The statistical population of this study included 8th grade male students, at junior high schools, in the first district of Sanandaj educational department in the academic year of 1395-96. The sample consisted of 318 students who were selected by random cluster sampling method. Regarding its purpose, this study was applied, and in terms of its implementation, it was descriptive and a kind of field study as well. The measuring scale of this study consisted of written tests. Cronbach alpha coefficient was 0/896. The result of this research showed that most students had many various errors in geometry and its related subjects. The mean score of students in the experimental group was lower than that of the control group in terms of the misconception. There was a significant difference between students’ performance at the control and experimental groups at Van Hiele's thinking level. This difference was in favor of the experimental group students. There was also significant difference at 0/05 level between students at both groups in geometrical skills and this difference was in favor of the experimental group, as well.

The purpose of this study was to develop a structural model of students' academic engagement based on the achievement and self-regulation goals with the mediating role of academic motivation. In a descriptive-correlational study, 473 female students from the second-cycle secondary schools in the city of Ilam were selected, using a random stratified sampling method. They responded to a self-report questionnaire including the Zerang academic engagement questionnaire, Elliot and McGregor (2001) achievement goals Inventory, Valerand, Peltier, Blys et al (1992) Educational Motivation Scale and Self-Regulatory Questionnaire (MSLQ). The results of the structural equation analysis showed that mastery-approach and performance-approach achievement goals have a significant indirect effect on academic engagement by mediating internal and external motivation. The self-regulation variable also had a significant indirect effect on the academic engagement by mediating internal and external motivation. Also, self-regulation had a direct positive and significant effect on the academic motivation; the achievement goals of mastery-approach and performance-approach had a direct effect on internal and external motivation, and the internal and external motivation had a direct effect on the academic engagement. According to the results of this study, identification of variables associated with the academic engagement can help educators to organize the educational programs and environments that leads to the selection of the desired achievement goals, the development of the students' self-regulation skills and motivation and, consequently, increasing their academic engagement and improving the educational outcomes.