M.Ed. (Didactic Education) / All over the world History as a school subject is on the defensive. This phenomenon is usually attributed to a variety of causes. In general however, the reason for this crisis is seldom seen in the traditional approach and teaching of the subject. At university, the secondary and even the primary school the understanding of the past is the cornerstone for the study of History. Accordingly History has only by accident any real value for the child living in the present day society. potentially however, History is, due to man's historicity, one of the most fundamental ways of broadening his perspective. Unfortunately this basic fact is often neglected in the approach to and teaching of the subject. Educational principles are neglected and the content seems to be relatively meaningless to the pupils. There has been a general neglect of play or simulation games as a subject for research or study. Scientists, biologists, anthropologists and psychologists have studied play, but in most cases it has been concerned with animals. It is believed that in future the power of simulation as a learning tool will attain the consideration and support it should have. Only if History is restructured at all levels in accordance with sound educational principles and in an existentially relevant way, the subject will, at least in principle, regain the ground that has been lost.

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In the past the emphasis was given to intelligence as the 'sole major determining factor where academic success was concerned and Warburton (1969) wrote: The ignorance of educationists in the field of personality makes a striking contrast to their ability to estimate educational and intellectual capacity, imperfect as that may be. The understanding of children's personality and the teacher's ability to assess these traits is perhaps the most important topic in the whole field of education'. Where would we be today if we assumed that all children are of equal intelligence? We cannot therefore assume they are equally anxious, introverted and have the same persistence in the performing of a task, just as we cannot assume they have equal intellectual capabilities. " ... Any attempt to understand the complete causal chain associated with school attainment must include the effect of personality on the child's work in the school." (Eysenck , 1972). Intro. p. 1.

An analysis of the literature showed that there is very little agreement on when and how a computer program should branch a student through a CAI program. This, together with the fact that research in the field of arithmetic has shown that drill should follow effective teaching of concepts, led the author to investigate whether students working on arithmetic drill-and-practice would do better on a COMPUTER-PACED program or a SELF-PACED program. COMPUTER-PACED was defined to be where the computer program determined when the students should be branched to more or lass difficult questions. SELF-PACED was defined to be where the students determined when they were presented more or less difficult questions by pushing one of the two marked keys on the computer terminal. The evaluation was done by comparing the achievement of the COMPUTER-PACED and the SELF-PACED groups. For the length of the study the two groups of grade six students had a daily arithmetic lesson followed by a session at a computer terminal to work on arithmetic drill-and-practice programs. The results of the post-test (adjusted by using a pre-test as a covariate) showed that there was no significant difference between the two selection mechanisms. Further analysis showed that there was no significant difference between the males and females performance and that there was no significant interaction (sex X groups) effect. The results of the study indicate that when working with arithmetic drill-and-practice, students will do as well if the computer program controls when to branch as they would if the students control when to branch to a different level of difficulty. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

This was a naturalistic investigation of the nature of elementary science teaching practice. The main purpose of the study was to portray, through description and comparison of teacher appreciations, now four elementary teachers of science perceived their worlds of practice. This study was based on the assumption that persons construct their realities and that teachers, as practitioners, also make their worlds of practice. Following Vickers (1983) and Schon (1987), "appreciation" was therefore used as a construct for examining and depicting key features of the teachers' practice. Appreciations of the teachers became the basis for exploring the nature and significance of their collaborative teaching. Findings of this exploratory study indicate that each teacher had a coherent but distinct set of appreciations of practice which included perceptions of professional identity and of preferences for practice. These appreciations appeared to colour a teacher's "style" of practice and expectations of self and of pupils. While the distinctiveness of a teacher's appreciations suggested that each teacher had a unique style of practice, teachers with similar or differing appreciations of practice engaged in productive, collaborative relationships with colleagues. Based on their appreciations of practice, teachers in the study seemed to have three major areas of concern and these were related to their instructional services to pupils, unit design and professional self-renewal. It is being suggested in this investigation that teacher collaboration was a strategy used by these teachers to enable them to handle their concerns practicably and efficiently. The implications of these findings are presented in terms of contributions to the practice of teaching and to theory and research on teaching/ in particular studies of the "culture" of teaching. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Art educators perceive a state of disjuncture in the field when what is persistently practiced in elementary schools as art stands in opposition to basic tenets about the teaching and learning of art. Two reasons are given to explain this sense of disjuncture. First, art education orientations and research associated scholarship are posited to be less than successful in disclosing to teachers what is educationally relevant. Neither a child-centered nor a discipline-centered orientation seems to have considered the adjustive effort teachers make in translating intended purposes into classroom practice. Second, a school art orientation is perceived to be in opposition to art education ideals. Recent studies suggest that features of the classroom setting and the strategies teachers use to make them comprehensible may have an impact on the outcome of instruction in art. Guided by a theoretical stance developed from the literature on commonsense knowledge, I adopted a method of approach to investigate teachers' interpretive accounts of the teaching and learning of art. Observation and interview strategies were used. I discovered two guidelines teachers consulted, and I examined the context in which the guidelines and events mutually elaborate one another. 1. When properly programmed, an art task guides the synchronization of an aggregate of recognizable and approved action, and 2. The use of the art classificatory scheme of structured and experimental art activities in practice is contingent on maintaining this programmatic course of action. Teachers' accounts revealed four features useful in making their work recognizable and approved: pacing and phasing of action, physical conditions, thematic content, and effort. The features elaborated a proper programmatic effect and structured art activities over experimental ones as a way of achieving this effect. This kind of activity was described as school-like and successfully addresses the problem of how to regulate the efforts of an aggregate of children over a specified period of time with due respect for order. The prescription for a preformulated content and stylistic form of art determined acceptable effort. Ideally, experimental art activities were understood to heighten personal awareness by encouraging the child to be more of a task determiner. With less opportunity to rely on stock responses, because the relevance of idiosyncratic action had to be determined anew whenever this kind of activity was undertaken, teachers chose to set this kind of activity aside until conditions became ideal. The difficulty children had in deciding what was intended by the invitation to experiment was not recognized as significant. Choice of structured art activities appears to be attributed to two related factors: a taken-for-granted conception of the requirements for organizational control and an unresolved conception of experimental art activities in the context of this organizational structure. This in-school orientation does not seem to indicate a rejection of formally approved art education orientations, but rather an unquestioning acceptance of the practical necessity of organizational control acquired as a result of teaching experience. These demands determined what is possible in art. Basic tenets of art education intended to have educational consequences have been indefinitely set aside, unwittingly reducing children's involvement in art and teachers' responsibility to assist children in interacting with the discipline. Reified conventions such as freedom of expression and experimentation have made art education remote by creating a chasm between theory and practice, implying that art education can be dealt with at a theoretical level without consideration of how teachers handle everyday experience. Reasonable conclusions to be drawn from evidence provided in this study are that educators need an approach to art education that will not artificially produce the gap that structured art activities have come to fill. It would have to bridge the gap in a manner that recognizes art education orientations (theory) and what teachers do with them (practice) as aspects of the same thing. The present study is a first step toward reflective intervention in the taken-for-granted ways teachers and art educators think about what they do. If it is important for children to interact with the developed structure of the art education discipline, and if teachers are to take responsibility for ensuring that the art education experience takes place, then change would have to be urged by apprising teachers, art educators, and others of the state of disjuncture reported here, and how factors associated with it have come to complement and contradict the interchange between the goals of art education and the school as a workplace. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Art teachers have inherited unreconciled attitudes toward the teaching of drawing, which stem from an unresolved conflict between interventionists and non-interventionists. The resulting fragmentation of teaching practises is further confounded by consideration of the "crisis in confidence" period of drawing development that surfaces in grade four. In an effort to provide a clearer definition of the teacher's role in the drawing class, this study examined the practises of four exemplary art specialists^ Descriptive research techniques were employed in the observation of 27 drawing lessons, nine each at the grade two, four and six levels. Recorded dialogue was analyzed using Kakas' Peer Interaction Typology and Clements' Questioning Typology, and it was found that peers at all grades spoke most often about their own drawing experiences or artwork, and that teachers used mostly indirect questioning strategies when interacting with students. Data collected regarding initiators of interactions revealed that with increasing age came decreasing amounts of student initiated interaction, together with increasing amounts of teacher initiated interaction. It was also found that there was a paucity of peer interaction at the grade four level, and that in-process viewing of peers' artwork was an important component of the drawing lesson. Within a supportive environment, interaction generally ranged from neutral to positive. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

For many years mathematicians and mathematics educators have been stating that teachers of arithmetic need a greater knowledge in mathematics and methods of teaching mathematics. Many colleges have required more mathematics for their future elementary teachers. The belief is that an individual with a stronger mathematical background will better teach mathematics to his elementary students. The review of the literature as a whole does not agree. Few researchers have found significant relationships between teacher knowledge and teacher effectiveness. The review of the literature further indicates that most researchers did not measure teacher variables precisely. Also, most researchers neither partitioned nor measured directly student growth. They used standardized tests or administrative ratings to determine teacher effectiveness. Procedures Two instruments were constructed to measure teacher understanding and teacher attitude. The test of understanding was designed to measure the mathematical understandings as related to the arithmetic series and syllabus of the two school districts participating in this study. The attitude inventory was a forced choice inventory which measured the teacher's attitude toward contemporary mathematics as opposed to traditional mathematics. Each participating teacher also completed a questionnaire giving information about 12 other commonly reported variables. These were in the areas of quarter hours of college mathematics, quarter hours of new mathematics, quarter hours of mathematics methods, experience, and principal's ratings as he viewed the teachers. To determine teacher effectiveness, student tests were constructed to directly measure the material of the arithmetic series and syllabus of the two school districts participating in this study. Three tests were constructed for each grade level; an understanding test, a problem solving test, and a computation test. The pre-test post-test procedure was used to determine student growth. The population for this study was 61 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classes and their 61 teachers. The population was randomly selected from over 400 teachers in two Washington State school districts. The districts used the same arithmetic series and a similar syllabus, but are in different geographic locations. Results and Conclusions With the minor exception of a significant correlation between principal's rating and growth in computation, there were no significant relationships between any of the teacher variables, when taken individually or in groups, and student growth in any of the three areas—understanding, problem solving, and computation—when taken individually or in groups. In this study, every effort was made to eliminate the deficiencies of previous studies. Yet their results are, in general, confirmed. If mathematicians and mathematics educators are to persist in their opinion that the educational background of teachers is related to student gains, then it seems that different independent variables must be identified. It seems highly unlikely that success would reward any further exploration of those identified in this study, / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not the use of a programmed instruction booklet, as the basic instructional material, could be considered as more appropriate for limited learners than traditional teaching methods. An attempt was made to measure the success that limited learners have in attaining general science concepts through programmed instruction. The study collected evidence to show if there was any significant difference between normal learners and limited learners in academic science achievement (as measured by pre-test and post-test results), when taught using this methodology. The investigation provided evidence to support increased development and use of programmed materials for modified and regular science classrooms. To assess the achievement in general science concepts, an author-developed examination was implemented as a pre-test and later as a post-test following the experimental treatment. The mean scores in achievement were calculated for distinct groups thus enabling a comparison of gains in achievement. A non-equivalent control group with a fixed effects factorial design was used in the investigation. The fixed effects analysis of covariance, using the pre-test as the covariate, permitted the separate analysis of learning ability, methods of instruction and a two-way interaction between these variables. The analysis of covariance produced significant differences for the two main effects. In terms of learning ability normal learners achieved higher than limited learners and the difference was significant at the 0.05 level. For the methods of instruction, students using programmed instruction scored significantly higher than those students taught with the traditional approach. Since there was a significant difference for programmed instruction and no interaction between learning ability and instruction mode, it follows that programmed instruction was better for both groups of students. The results of the study are that both limited and normal learners were more successful, in terms of acquisition of science knowledge, with programmed instruction than with traditional teaching in terms of post-test mean achievement scores. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate