Introduction to Vol. 12 No.2 (2024)

Dear reader,

I am happy to announce that a new issue of Frontline Learning Research has now been published. It comprises five articles that introduce novel methods for designing for and investigating students’ learning, as well as the findings on learning, instruction and teacher-student interaction resulting from the use of these novel methods.

The article by Kusters and colleagues is a methodological contribution to measuring teacher agency from an ecological perspective. The authors have developed a real-life instrument consisting of 23 representative scenarios that capture the complex nature of teacher agency. These scenarios have been developed through a set of four studies, which include initial interviews with university lecturers, refinement in expert panels and a piloting of the data collection procedures. The authors envisage use of the scenarios in professional academic development programs as well as more informal professional development.

Hyyppä and colleagues investigate a future education course aimed at fostering students’ systems thinking about the future. The wider goal of the course was to aid students’ sensemaking and agency beliefs to counter future anxiety due to contemporary environmental crises. The course was provided in upper secondary education in Finland and centered on student visions for “my city of the future”. The authors analyzed students’ written future visions during four consecutive rounds of writing and revisions, focusing on the thematic spheres of society, nature, and technology. Results show that students developed deeper and more nuanced understandings of the interrelation of these thematic spheres and of the actions needed to achieve the envisioned futures.

Horlenko and colleagues have utilized a combination of student self-reports, teacher ratings, and mobile eye-tracking to investigate how teachers’ professional vision relates to students’ self-regulated learning behavior, specifically whether and how teachers’ distribution of attention correlates with students’ self-regulated learning behavior, as reported both by the students and by the teacher themselves. The results show only a slight correlation, where teachers mostly notice student help-seeking behavior and not their other cognitive and metacognitive regulatory behaviors. As these behaviors are more covert, they are difficult to observe. Further, teacher ratings of students’ self-regulated learning differed from student self-reports.

Like the previous article, the study by Ukkonen-Mikkola and colleagues also makes use of mobile eye-tracking, here as input for subsequent retrospective thinking aloud sessions and semi-structured interviews. The focus of the study was early childhood education and care (ECEC) teachers’ distribution of visual gaze during play and teacher-guided activities, and their subsequent reflections on and explanations of their gaze. The authors identify five categories present in teachers’ explanations of their gaze and the related pedagogical actions: protection; physical and emotional availability; teaching and learning; facilitation; and initiatives.

The final article in this issue is by Fortes and colleagues who introduce a novel approach to fostering productive argumentation in classrooms, with the aim of supporting conceptual learning, thinking and communicative skills. The approach centers on scaffolding virtuous-like behavior as an enabling condition for productive argumentation. The authors offer a framework of intellectual virtues to advance our understanding of how to design classrooms for productive argumentation. Further, they revisit three highly cited studies of classroom interventions to show how intellectual virtues were in fact a precondition for the productive argumentation established in these classroom interventions.

The full issue is found here.

Warm regards,

Prof. Dr. Nina Bonderup Dohn
Editor-in-Chief, Frontline Learning Research