Teachers' changes when addressing the challenges in unexpected migration to online mathematics teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: a case study in Shanghai.

In the research reported in this paper we investigated teachers' changes when adopting and adapting to emergency online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, from the perspective of the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (IMPG). By adapting complementary accounts methodology to research into teachers' changes when addressing the unexpected migration to online teaching, an integrated data set, including online teaching videos, teacher daily reflections, and teacher interviews from two purposefully selected teachers over two weeks of online teaching, was collected and analyzed qualitatively. Both teachers encountered different difficulties and thus had different knowledge changes displayed in different change routes. For the experienced teacher, students' mistakes in homework and her online teaching practice triggered her knowledge changes. For the young teacher, the online video lessons, relevant resources on the Internet and students' performance were her primary sources that triggered the changes of her knowledge for teaching. These differences between the experienced teacher and young teacher provide evidence of the complexity of teacher's professional growth, which is related to a variety of external and internal factors. This study demonstrates how the IMPG model helps uncover teachers' changes in such an unprecedented virtual-teaching environment. Finally, the implications of this study for teacher professional development in general are discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11858-022-01378-y.

Visual perceptual abilities of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children.

This paper reports an investigation of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children's general visual perceptual abilities. The Developmental Test of Visual Perception was administered to 41 native Chinese-speaking children of mean age 5 yr. 4 mo. in Hong Kong and 35 English-speaking children of mean age 5 yr. 2 mo. in Melbourne. Of interest were the two interrelated components of visual perceptual abilities, namely, motor-reduced visual perceptual and visual-motor integration perceptual abilities, which require either verbal or motoric responses in completing visual tasks. Chinese-speaking children significantly outperformed the English-speaking children on general visual perceptual abilities. When comparing the results of each of the two different components, the Chinese-speaking students' performance on visual-motor integration was far better than that of their counterparts (ES = 2.70), while the two groups of students performed similarly on motor-reduced visual perceptual abilities. Cultural factors such as written language format may be contributing to the enhanced performance of Chinese-speaking children's visual-motor integration abilities, but there may be validity questions in the Chinese version.

Motor-reduced visual perceptual abilities and visual-motor integration abilities of Chinese learning children.

This study investigated the relationship between motor-reduced visual perceptual abilities and visual-motor integration abilities of Chinese learning children by employing the Developmental Test of Visual Perception (Hammill, Pearson, & Voress, 1993), in which both abilities are measured in a single test. A total of 72 native Chinese learners of age 5 participated in this study. The findings indicated that the Chinese learners scored much higher in the visual-motor integration tasks than in motor-reduced visual perceptual tasks. The results support the theory of autonomous systems of motor-reduced visual perception and visual-motor integration and query current beliefs about the prior development of the former to the latter for the Chinese learners. To account for the Chinese participants' superior performance in visual-motor integration tasks over motor-reduced visual perceptual tasks, the visual-spatial properties of Chinese characters, general handwriting theories, the motor control theory and the psychogeometric theory of Chinese character-writing are referred to. The significance of the findings is then discussed.