How school context and personal factors relate to teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM

Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is an emerging approach to improve students’ achievement and interest in STEM disciplines. However, the implementation of integrated STEM education depends strongly on teachers’ competence, which entails, among others, teachers’ attitudes. Nonetheless, not much is known about the factors that influence teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM. Therefore this paper uses a survey method to get insight into the relationship between three groups of variables and teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM: teacher background characteristics, personal attitudes and school context variables. The results of the multiple regression analyses reveal three variables that are positively linked with teachers’ attitudes: professional development, personal relevance of science and social context. Moreover two variables show a negative correlation: having more than 20 years of teaching experience and experience in mathematics. The results of this study provide valuable information about factors related to teachers’ attitudes toward teaching integrated STEM. Moreover, these results can be deployed by school administrators to guide them when implementing integrated STEM education in their school.     

Giving young people a well-rounded education: a study of the educational goals parents attach to the leisure activities of their children

Policymakers strongly stimulate young people’s participation in organised leisure activities because it is believed to provide young people with important ‘work’ skills and attitudes. Special attention is paid to the underrepresented working-class youth. To stimulate (especially working-class) parents to play an active ‘guiding’ role, policymakers often assume that they have to be made aware of the educational benefits of engagement in leisure activities. The empirical basis of this assumption is, however, thin. Therefore, this study examined the educational goals middle- and working-class parents attach to their adolescents’ leisure activities on the basis of 32 interviews conducted in a small city in Belgium. Although there were subtle socio-economic differences in some goals parents pursued through their children’s leisure activities (i.e. teaching skills and societal values and norms, belonging to a peer group, independent thinking and relaxation), these were not of a magnitude that they could contribute to our understanding of socio-economic differences in parents’ role and in turn, in young people’s leisure use. We argue that further research needs to focus on socio-economic differences in available resources from which parents construct particular strategies to shape their young people’s leisure spending.     

The impact of team characteristics on the supervisor’s attitude towards telework: a mixed-method study

Abstract

This study examines the impact of team characteristics on the supervisor’s attitude towards telework through a mixed-method approach. First, in the quantitative part, we test hypotheses drawing on disruption and dependency theory, using data of 205 supervisors from four Belgian organizations. The data confirm the hypothesized negative correlation between task interdependence and supervisors’ supportive attitude towards telework, as well as the moderating role of supervisor’s dependency on his or her team on this relation. We found no impact of team heterogeneity and lack of team effort and low performance. Second, we use qualitative data collected through 39 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with supervisors to gain a better understanding of supervisors’ reasoning behind their attitude towards telework. These data provide insight into how task interdependence, team heterogeneity and lack of team effort and low performance affect it. Our team-centred conceptualization of the antecedents of supervisors’ attitude towards telework enables to highlight the key role of structural aspects in shaping supervisors’ attitudes towards telework. This is particularly important for policy, as organizations are better placed to remediate aspects at the team level that contribute to supervisors’ negative attitude towards telework, rather than those at the inter-individual one.     

Revisiting the notion of cohesion in community sport: a qualitative study on the lived experiences of participants

Research has focused on the question if and how leisure can create social cohesion and can alleviate cultural segregation in divided community contexts. Community sport in particular is believed to create socio-cultural cohesiveness, as it aims at a sense of community, a task in which regular sports often seem to fail. However, the experiences of participants in relation to socio-cultural cohesiveness in community sport remain absent in the existing body of research. This article provides insights into those experiences, by drawing on a qualitative study in Flanders, Belgium. Based on the findings, we challenge the one-sided focus on socio-cultural cohesiveness to obtain a sense of community, as the perspectives of participants reveal that also political and economic dimensions of cohesion are relevant, next to socio-cultural dimensions. We argue that community cannot be reduced to socio-cultural cohesion, but should be understood from the intersection between cultural, economic and political dimensions of cohesion. Implications for practice, both in relation to community sport and the broader leisure field and further research are given.