Novice teachers need mentoring support from experienced teachers as they prepare to become teachers. Such mentoring support needs to be responsive and adaptive to novice teachers’ learning. Mentor... Show moreNovice teachers need mentoring support from experienced teachers as they prepare to become teachers. Such mentoring support needs to be responsive and adaptive to novice teachers’ learning. Mentor teachers therefore require knowledge of novice teacher learning and of mentoring activities to support this learning. These are critical but underdeveloped components in the knowledge base of mentoring. This thesis draws on mentor teachers’ practical knowledge to inform the knowledge base of mentoring, and focuses on the question: What is the content of mentor teachers’ practical knowledge of adaptive response to their mentee teachers’ learning? Through questionnaires and interviews, the study elicited four components of mentor teachers’ practical knowledge of adaptive mentoring: 1) their mentoring conceptions, 2) their knowledge of mentoring activities, 3) their knowledge of novice teacher learning, and 4) their heuristics for responding to specific mentoring situations. Findings show that adaptive mentors focus on novice teacher construction of practical knowledge of teaching, and that confronting novices with problems is a central activity of adaptive mentoring. The study provides representations of shared mentor teacher knowledge of adaptive mentoring and a component model of mentor practical knowledge of adaptive mentoring, useful for developers of mentor training. Show less
Although many neuroimaging studies have investigated adolescent risk taking, few studies have dissociated between decision-making under risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown... Show moreAlthough many neuroimaging studies have investigated adolescent risk taking, few studies have dissociated between decision-making under risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown probabilities). Furthermore, which brain regions are sensitive to individual differences in task-related and self-reported risk taking remains elusive. We presented 198 adolescents (11-24 years, an age-range in which individual differences in risk taking are prominent) with an fMRI paradigm that separated decision-making (choosing to gamble or not) and reward outcome processing (gains, no gains) under risky and ambiguous conditions, and related this to task-related and self-reported risk taking. We observed distinct neural mechanisms underlying risky and ambiguous gambling, with risk more prominently associated with activation in parietal cortex, and ambiguity more prominently with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), as well as medial PFC during outcome processing. Individual differences in task-related risk taking were positively associated with ventral striatum activation in the decision phase, specifically for risk, and negatively associated with insula and dorsomedial PFC activation, specifically for ambiguity. Moreover, dorsolateral PFC activation in the outcome phase seemed a prominent marker for individual differences in task-related risk taking under ambiguity as well as self-reported daily-life risk taking, in which greater risk taking was associated with reduced activation in dorsolateral PFC. Together, this study demonstrates the importance of considering multiple risk-taking measures, and contextual moderators, in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent risk taking. Show less
