Abstracts - Earli

"Engagement in teaching" may be one contribution in this respect. The paper will present anddiscuss some preliminary findings from exploratory in-depth interviews with professors andlecturers from different faculties at the University of Oslo, who were selected on the criterion thatthey had been reported to elicit engagement in their students. Transcripts of interviews weresubmitted to qualitative analysis. 433 quotations were first marked with 255 different key words,and then condensed into 18 keywords representing 232 quotations, which could be distributed intofour broad categories. The analysis showed that for all the teachers, engagement was related to allfour factors: the teachers personality, the subject matter, the mediation of subject matter, and theteachers’ relation to others. The relative importance of each factor, however, could vary from oneteacher to another. The study indicates that engagement in teaching involves more than lucidimparting of content matter, and that it can probably be achieved in a variety of ways. Animportant implication may be to develop awareness of this variation among university teachers.What is the use of cooperation with science for teachers? On the relevance of cooperation betweenschool and university in an implementation research projectPetra Herzmann, Saarland University, GermanyAndrea Sparka, Saarland University, GermanyStudies on implementation research stress the relevance of cooperation between science andpractice as a network of people with different expertise (Gräsel & Parchmann, 2004).Collaboration between school and university is expected to support a reflexive and critical view ofthe participants’ own practice. Also, integration of different forms of knowledge might beencouraged by interaction with educational science institutes (Erickson, Minnes Brandes, Mitchell& Mitchell, 2005). In our project on the promotion of reading literacy (Herzmann, Sparka, &Gräsel, in press), we have conceptualized a further training for teachers that is supposed to be anoffer for cooperation with university. Based on the evaluation of six training sessions by means ofa questionnaire (n=120) and interviews with the involved teachers (n=22), we analyse howteachers describe their own role in the research project and how they describe the cooperation withuniversity. The ambivalent anticipations had different origins. Our aim was to reconstruct threeforms of types that allow us to explore how transfer between theory and practice takes place: the"receptive type", the "pretended expert type" and the "reflexive type". Furthermore, we testedreading literacy of secondary school students (n=663) and thus evaluated, if teachers who belongto the "reflexive type" support the students’ reading achievement in a particular way. Performanceanalyses showed that teacher type and willingness to cooperate as well as concrete interventions inthe classroom predicted reading achievements.Teachers’ understanding of learning and teaching practiceManuel Pintor, Autonomous University of Madrid, SpainCarmen Vizcarro, Autonomous University of Madrid, SpainIn this paper a research is reported in which we tried to grasp teachers’ understanding of the natureof knowledge and how learning takes place. With this end, semistructured interviews wereconducted with teachers in which they were asked how they viewed their own learning as well asthat of their students. The interviews included questions about core educational concepts such asthe nature of knowledge and its acquisition (learning), transfer, motivation and the tasks whichhelp learning to occur (teaching). We were interested in finding out what teachers’ theories are, inwhich way they relate to classical theories of learning and what is their relationship to teachingpractice. Fifty four teachers (male and female, secondary and university, working in differentdisciplines) were interviewed and the content was analyzed following a process based on grounded– 350 –