Rediscovering the teacher within Indian child-centred pedagogy: implications for the global Child-Centred Approach

The Child-Centred Approach (CCA) is increasingly promoted within India and internationally as a response to the challenge of delivering quality education. From identifying and examining Indian indigenous and global concepts of CCA within traditional and contemporary child-centred pedagogic discourse, this paper reveals the complexities of underlying agendas within the domestic and international setting and the implications of this for the integration of CCA and the ‘child-centred’ teacher in India. Based on empirical analysis of teachers’ interviews, the findings demonstrate that the role of the teacher continues to be largely overlooked in spite of a willingness from teachers to engage within the child-centred pedagogic discourse. Disempowerment, a lack of autonomy and limited professional status are highlighted. Therefore, this paper calls for the rediscovery of the ‘child-centred’ teacher to advance from within the nation. Without this, it is asserted that the authenticity of the CCA model will continue to be compromised, and with it, any indigenous expressions of a similar epistemology will be fundamentally restricted.     

Predicting first-time-in-college students’ degree completion outcomes

Higher Education - About one-third of college students drop out before finishing their degree. The majority of those remaining will take longer than 4 years to complete their degree at...     

Sex Differences in Science and Technology Among 11‐year‐old Schoolchildren: II‐‐affective

Two thousand and sixty‐five 11‐year‐olds in their first term at secondary school were given a variety of attitude and achievement tests. Overall both girls and boys had positive attitudes to science but there were substantial sex differences‐‐boys were much keener than girls to learn about physical science, and girls were keener than boys to learn about nature study and human biology. Boys had much greater experience than girls of tinkering activities, but girls had more experience of biological science activities. Boys were much more likely than girls to see science as a masculine preserve. At this age attitudes to science were virtually unrelated to achievement in science‐ and technology‐related areas. One important exception to this is that girls who saw science as masculine tended to perform worse on the cognitive tests.     

Predicting word and pseudoword reading in Arabic-speaking children: the independent contributions of phonological and morphological awareness and visual attention

The present study explored whether phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA) and visual attention (VA) independently predict word and pseudoword reading accuracy in native Arabic-speaking children from grades 4 and 5. A total of 141 participants took part in the study, and were divided into two groups of readers with (n = 30) and without (n = 111) dyslexia. PA was measured with orally administered syllable manipulation and deletion tasks. The MA task targeted the dismantling of composite Arabic words into meaningful parts in oral modality. VA was assessed by objects and letters cancellation tasks. The results showed that the two groups differed significantly in all of the measures. The regression analysis output showed that VA emerged as a significant predictor of word and pseudoword reading beyond the predictive role of PA and MA. These results have implications for the understanding of the underlying factors of word and pseudoword reading development in Arabic.