DEVELOPMENT OF TEXTBOOK FOR GRAMMATICAL MATERIAL BASED ON SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO IMPROVE WRITING SKILLS | تطوير الكتاب التعليمي في مادة التراكيب على أساس المدخل العلمي لترقية مهارة الكتابة

Teaching and learning process can not be separated from textbooks that play an important role as a reference for teachers and students. A good textbook must be representative of the curriculum that applies both the material and teaching methods so that learning objectives are achieved. Arabic textbooks in the 2013 curriculum use a scientific approach, but grammar material has not been explained in detail so that it affects students' competence to improve language skills. So the researcher developed a book for grammar material based on a scientific approach to improve writing skills. This study aims to develop books based on a scientific approach and determine the effectiveness of the books developed. The results obtained from this study are that the books developed have scored between 80-100% which means very good and can be used in learning without any improvement. While the effectiveness aspect obtained a significance value of around 10.93 which shows that the textbook for grammatical material based on scientific approach is effective to improving students’ writing skills.

How Does Pedagogical Flexibility in Curriculum Use Promote Mathematical Flexibility? An Exploratory Case Study

Flexibility has been increasingly valued in mathematics education to better prepare students for lives in the rapidly changing society of the future. Although there has been conjecture that teachers’ flexibility plays a substantial role in facilitating students’ mathematical flexibility, there has been little examination of how teachers can use a flexible curriculum to develop mathematical flexibility (MF) in authentic classroom environments. This paper elaborates the notion of flexible curriculum use, referred to as pedagogical flexibility (PF) in curriculum use, as the competence to expand pedagogical space and make alternative pedagogical decisions when planning and enacting a curriculum that differs from the routine practices provided in the intended and written curriculum. We develop a framework for PF in curriculum use to identify and characterize teachers’ curriculum use to promote MF. In an explorative case study with one middle school teacher, we analyzed what and how specific aspects of PF in curriculum use promote potential and actual MF in the learning of central tendency measures. Findings indicate that the teacher could expand his pedagogical space by carefully differentiating the pedagogical considerations of the curriculum and could find alternative approaches by making associative and reflective connections among them. This provides insight into how PF in curriculum use can promote students’ potential and actual MF.

EXAMINING CHEMISTRY TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR INTERACTION WITH CURRICULUM MATERIALS: A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH

On the basis of the model of the interactive relationship between teachers and curriculum materials, this research proposed the four dimensions of the interaction of chemistry teachers with curriculum materials: ‘routine use’, ‘scientific inquiry’, ‘STSE’ and ‘teacher learning’. An instrument with good validity and reliability was developed. Through a questionnaire survey of 208 junior high school chemistry teachers in three areas in Guangzhou, China, it was found that teachers thought they had a good interaction with curriculum materials, but the level of interaction is not very high. Teachers from different administrative areas were significantly different in the dimensions of ‘STSE’ and ‘teacher learning’; teachers with different years of teaching experience showed significant differences in the dimensions of ‘routine use’, ‘scientific inquiry’ and ‘STSE’. There was no interaction effect between the two variables of the areas and years of teaching. Designing educative curriculum materials and developing teacher training activities in terms of curriculum use are recommended to further improve teachers’ ability to use curriculum materials. Keywords: curriculum materials, curriculum use, chemistry teaching, survey research.