Problems of Education in the 21st Century

189-190

Authors: Editorial Board

Cover page, Vol. 79, No. 2, 2021

192-193

Authors: Solange W. Locatelli

Teacher needs to reinvent himself or herself all the time, proposing activities in the classroom that enable students to build and reconstruct knowledge. Particularly in science, this knowledge is mediated through scientific models, often inaccessible to students’ understanding. For the comprehension of a chemical reaction, for example, the student is invited to imagine how the interactions between the particles would be, the atomic rearrangement, totally abstract thought and based on models, often expressed by visualizations, that need to be constantly constructed and reviewed by students. However, how to revise these abstract concepts? What strategies could be used? The answer to these questions is complex, but we would like to propose a reflection on the use of drawings, as a possibility, among so many existing ones.

207-219

Authors: Kamil Arif Kırkıç, Türkan Demir Balcı

The organizational commitment levels of preschool teachers are crucial to have an effective early childhood education. One of the most influential factors affecting organizational commitment is administrators' leadership style. This research explored the correlation between administrators' leadership styles and organizational commitment levels of preschool teachers. The correlational survey design was used as one of the quantitative research models in this study. Participants in the study were preschool teachers in Istanbul's Küçükçekmece district. The research was conducted during the 2017-2018 academic year. There are 237 teachers in the study sample. The 5-point Likert type Organizational Commitment Scale with 27 items and the Leadership Style Scale with 35 items were used to collect data. It was found that teachers generally identified with their organizations and internalized the organization’s values, while school administrators were perceived as using a transformational leadership style. The study found a statistically significant correlation between the leadership styles of administrators and the levels of organizational commitment of preschool teachers. In preschool institutions, teachers' institutional commitment is essential for the development of students. Therefore, administrators should be sensitive to their leadership styles to make the commitment levels of preschool teachers high. The research has limitations like being a local one, done in a relatively short time, and the participants were only teachers working in public schools.

229-240

Authors: Alzira Manuel, Domingos Buque, Rosário Quive

Education in all societies is one of the requisites for changes and development, particularly in the current context influenced by globalization and rapid changes in which knowledge and technology became essential tools for life. In this context, Mozambique has been and continues promoting education, including Classroom Teaching Adult Education and Distance Adult Education (DAE) to satisfy people’s learning needs and improve their capacities towards changes. DAE is considered a way to open opportunities of education for youth and adults who by different reasons cannot participate in classroom teaching. This study seeks to explore the perceptions of youth and adult students in DAE at Eduardo Mondlane University (EMU), about their learning process. The study applied qualitative approach, based on semi-structured interview administrated to twelve students from the 3rd and 4th years of the undergraduate program in Organization and Management of Education in Distance Education (DE) modality. The findings of this study point out that DAE is perceived as a relevant and useful modality of education, particularly for adult learners. However, the study identifies contextual challenges associated to individual and professional issues, pedagogical and organizational issues as well as gender division of labor within the families, impacting the student’s performance in DE in the selected higher education institution.

255-272

Authors: Patrick Ngulube

Supervisory practices are fundamental to the production of research in higher education, but these practices are undertheorized and poorly understood. Academia needs to understand and engage with supervisory pedagogies to reinforce their importance in knowledge production and the development of a knowledge society. Using content analysis of master’s and doctoral research outputs completed between 2010 and 2016, this case study investigated postgraduate supervision practices in education in South Africa, and their implication for knowledge sharing in context. The findings showed that supervision in education has remained rooted in the classic individualistic model, with team supervision not prevalent. The benefits of team supervision relative to the individualistic model are highlighted. Acknowledgement of the range of competencies of supervisors and the growth of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research signals the value of the team supervision model. In addition to improving research support, team supervision also creates communicative spaces and opportunities for knowledge sharing and the development of supervisors.

296-311

Authors: Scholastica Chizoma Ukwoma, Patrick Ngulube

Methodological trends are a key to the development of research in open and distance learning as a cognitive field. The purpose of this study was to review the methodological trends in the open and distance learning scholarly communication literature. It is important that research strategies are reviewed often to ensure the production of quality research output in a cognitive discipline. The study adopted qualitative content analysis to a sample of 1,393 articles published in five open and distance learning (ODL) journals from 2009 to 2018. The main findings of the study indicated that qualitative and quantitative methodologies were used more often than mixed methods research methodology, which was underrepresented. This implies that research in ODL relied heavily on positivist and interpretivist epistemologies, rather than pragmatist ones. Survey research approaches dominated in the research articles published in the ODL journals during the period under study. The main data analysis techniques were statistical and narrative techniques. Having ascertained that there is a gap in the use of mixed methods research in ODL, there is a need to set the future direction for open and distance learning research to focus on mixed methods research to minimise the weakness inherent in using only one method.

336

Authors: Editorial Board

End page, Vol. 79, No. 2, 2021