“Texts Like a Patchwork Quilt”: Reading Picturebooks About Slavery

This article examines narrative strategies present in picturebooks about slavery that feature quilts. Against the depicted dangers of slavery, images of quilts serve to offer a sense of hope and in that way they provide a means of discussing difficult subjects with very young readers. As a central image in these texts, the quilt is variously represented as an artifact of remembrance, an image of hope, a type of testimony, and a sign of safety. This article focuses on a selection of texts to explore how verbal and visual images work to present and mitigate issues of historical violence. Additionally, the ways the image of the quilt intra- and extra-textually functions as a metanarrative comment on the construction of picturebooks are examined.     

Are You a Hero or Zero?

1.You're walking by a park and notice a little kid stuck on top of the monkey bars(双杠). What's your first move? a.Keep walking.1 b.Grab some rocks and toss them at the kid.3 c.I'd check to make sure the kid's parents were there and then offer to lend a hand.2 d.I'd rush over andhelp the little kid down.4     

“Are There Other Kids Like Me?” Children With a Parent in Prison

The number of children who experience parental incarceration continues to rise with the United States. In 1999, an estimated 1.5 million minor children had a parent in a United States prison. One-fifth of these children are under 5 years of age (Mumola, Incarcerated parents and their children, Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, 2000). A brief overview of some of the issues associated with parental incarceration is presented. The inclusion of books about having a parent in prison in the classroom is discussed as one method of supporting children and families.     

Teachers’ Perceptions of Infusion of Values in Science Lessons: a Qualitative Study

Research in Science Education - Much has been written and debated on the importance of including moral, character or values education in school curricula. In line with this, teachers’ views...     

Are traditional extension services dead or have they a role in rural development?

Abstract

Rural areas are changing and extension if it is to remain relevant must meet the current needs of rural people. Over 50% of farm households in Ireland will have difficulty in maintaining viability and many farm households have an increasing dependence on off-farm earned income and on social transfers. The Irish advisory service Teagasc strongly supports the development of a competitive agriculture and although charging for some of its services is still heavily subsidised by state funding. The number of people employed by Teagsac is falling and it is suffering from an embargo on the recruitment of new staff. Other broader based rural development type extension services are emerging. The role that traditional extension services should play is now a critical issue and its response may determine whether it lives or dies.     

Tacit Knowledge in Expert Coaching: Science or Art?

Effective coaching is a mixture of pedagogy and principles of sciences, e.g., motor skill acquisition, sociology, and physiology, often referred to as the science of coaching. Instinctive or intuitive coaching has often been incorrectly viewed as the art of coaching. More important should be how coaches develop knowledge, how they access that knowledge at the appropriate times and how this affects their decision-making process. The study of expert coaches should allow inferences to be drawn from their development and applied to coach education. This article intends to clarify coaching expertise and examine the role of tacit knowledge within coaching. The lack of a clear development pathway for aspiring expert coaches is a clear indicator that the current coach education system needs review. Any effective education system should be based on knowledge and understanding rather than mimicry and the implications for the future of coach education are considered.     

State Testing and Inquiry-Based Science: Are They Complementary or Competing Reforms?

The effect of district strategies for improving high-stakes test scores on science teachers practice is explored in case studies of six middle schools in six Massachusetts districts. At each school, science teachers, curriculum coordinators, principals, and superintendents shared their strategies for raising scores, their attitudes towards the test, the changes that they were implementing in their curriculum and pedagogical approaches, and the effects that the test was having on staff and on students. Results from these case studies suggest that districts chose markedly different strategies for raising scores on high stakes tests, and that the approaches taken by districts influenced the nature of pedagogical and curriculum changes in the classroom. District strategies for raising scores that were complementary to the districts prior vision of science reform tended to cause less teacher resentment towards the test than strategies that departed from previously adopted goals. Differing effects on teachers in socio-economically advantaged, middle, and challenged districts are discussed.     

Is Uncertainty a Barrier or Resource to Advance Science? The Role of Uncertainty in Science and Its Implications for Science Teaching and Learning

Science & Education -     

Writing Like a Scientist: Exploring Elementary Teachers’ Understandings and Practices of Writing in Science

This qualitative study examined the connections between elementary teachers’ conceptions of how scientists use writing and how the teachers used writing during science lessons. Data collected included lesson observations, interviews, handouts to students, and curriculum resources. The findings revealed that teachers in this study thought scientists write for several purposes: the presentation of data, observations, experiences, procedures, and facts. The teachers used writing tasks that mirrored this with their students. The teachers also had a limited definition of creativity in writing, and when they had students write creatively in science it was to add in fictional elements. Implications of this study include providing teachers with better models for how and why scientists write, including these models in more inquiry-based science lessons, and directly relating concepts of nature of science to elementary science writing.     

Are mathematics disabilities due to a domain-general or a domain-specific working memory deficit?

The relationship between verbal and visual-spatial working memory and mathematical computation skill was examined in children and adults with and without disabilities in mathematics. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that, when partialing for the influence of reading ability, age, and gender, mathematical computation was better predicted by verbal than by visual-spatial working memory. Furthermore, the results showed that the relationship between mathematics ability and working memory were not significantly moderated by age but were stable across a broad age span. We concluded that, regardless of age, deficits in mathematics are mediated by both a domain-general and a domain-specific working memory system.     

Living Like a Chicken

How would you like an easy way to earn $2,500? All you have to do is to sit around and wait for your meals. There's a catch, however. You have to stay in a chicken cage with a stranger for a whole week. There are no books or television or radio for amusem…     

Enhancing Visitors’ Interest in Science – A Possibility or A Paradox?

Within the enterprise of science and technology centres there exists explicit aims and ambitions to enhance visitors’ interest in and knowledge about science. Meanwhile, several researchers question the choice of the scientific content in exhibitions when arguing that a too unproblematic view of science commonly is presented. But how do staff members consider what scientific content to include and how this content can be organised in exhibitions? The results from interviews of staff members, responsible for planning and creating new exhibitions, suggest that they consider the scientific content of their exhibitions to a high extent in terms of organizational matters. This means that the staff members tend to not consider discussions about what aspects of science to include or exclude. Further on, the results imply that the relation between science and society risk being implicit to the visitors, whereas the aspect of scientific processes tend to be overlooked when constructing new exhibitions. The staff members express an anxiety in displaying scientific uncertainties or different models of explanations when arguing that this risks confusing the visitors. However, these aspects of science are, in the field of science education, considered crucial in order to create curiosity and interest in science. Does this mean that science and technology centres, through their eagerness to enhance young visitors’ scientific literacy, risk contributing to their detachment from or unconcern for scientific issues?     

Are effective or meritorious schools meretricious?

Data on student achievement gain in a large urban school district during the 1984–85 school year were analyzed to identify schools with achievement consistently higher or lower than schools with similar student and school characteristics. Before calculating gain scores, students were grouped with others of the same sex, ethnicity, initial grade level, and initial achievement level. After residuals for students who were above or below similar students were summed and averaged for reading and math at each grade, school-level regression analysis was used to further control for student and school characteristics. Results indicated that schools with reading gains one standard deviation above the mean had average raw scores less than two items higher than the district average on the sixty-item reading test, while schools with math gains this large had raw scores little more than one item higher than the average on the 44-item math test. In addition, examination of data on schools with residual (combined) reading and math gain scores 1.5 or more standard deviations above the average showed that after taking account of student background information and salient school characteristics, only one elementary school among 173 and no secondary school among 71 had unusually high achievement scores. Implications are discussed regarding efforts to identify and reward meritorious schools which allegedly have improved achievement more than other similar schools.     

“Big Science” or “Little Science”?--A case study of basic research in Universities

people pay more attention to the evaluation and research on Big Science. However, Little Science is the most suitable and inno vative science system that can produce original innovation. University-based research was studied as an example. It was proposed that Little Science should receive more attention. Several measures were also suggested to optimize the system of Little Science.     

German — a Dying Language in Science

In the second May issue of the Deutsche Universitäts-Zeitung [German University Journal] there was an article entitled "Is There Still Any Demand for German?" by Doctor Maas, which deals rather thoroughly with the importance of the German language and generally gives a positive impression, even in the realm of science. I have taken Dr. Maas's article as an opportunity to present my own observations over the years on this topic. The changes I have observed are not positive. In my opinion, their effects are harmful over the long term.