Practice-oriented research is scientific research that is conducted with the primary goal to realize practical impact in relevant work fields. It shares with academic research the necessity to design and conduct the research in a methodologically sound way. It differs from typical academic research in the sense that academic research is on average more theory driven. The term "scientific" means that practice-oriented research, like academic research, has to conform to contextually relevant demands of reliability and validity. Accordingly, good practice-oriented research is research that conforms to relevant methodological demands and is useful to practitioners. Moreover, just like academic research, practice-oriented research should be in line with ethical standards. There is no single valid practice-oriented research method.
In general, teacher educators are considered to be educational specialists whose main task is to communicate content-based concepts to prospective teachers. However, unfortunately, most studies on teacher professional development overlook this specific language-oriented aspect of content-based teaching. Therefore, we address the aforementioned research gap and argue that teacher educators’ evaluation of their language-oriented performance in educational communication enhances the quality of their content-based teaching. Accordingly, we examine how the language-oriented performance of teacher educators is evaluated by both individual teacher educators (sample size N=3) and their students (N=32) in a small-scale intervention study. The findings of the study reveal that there is a relationship between the order of application of five language focus areas (i.e., language awareness, active listening, formalizing interaction, language support, and language and learning development, as noticed by the students), and teacher educators’ ability to apply these areas in accordance with their objectives related to content-based teaching.
In this paper, we focus on how the qualitative vocabulary of Dynalearn, which is used for describing dynamic systems, corresponds to the mathematical equations used in quantitative modeling. Then, we demonstrate the translation of a qualitative model into a quantitative model, using the example of an object falling with air resistance.
