美国5岁儿童早期学习标准的内容分析及启示

通过对美国各州5岁儿童早期学习标准的内容分析发现,各州制定的5岁儿童早期学习标准充分考虑到了各州的地域经济和文化发展特点,也充分考虑到了幼小衔接的需要,同时文本内容具有较强的可操作性.这些特点对我国<3～6岁儿童学习与发展指南>的制定与实施有启示意义.     

美国早期艺术领域学习标准内容的分析及启示

进入21世纪以来,美国等西方发达国家为更好地实现教育公平,进一步提高学前教育的质量,着手制定并推行早期学习标准.到目前为止,美国50个州和1个特别行政区相继出台了针对3～5岁儿童的早期学习标准.本文在收集和整理美国各州早期艺术领域学习标准文本的基础上,从艺术活动的参与、艺术的表现表达、艺术的欣赏与理解三个部分展开内容介绍与分析,归纳了美国儿童早期艺术学习标准的特点,即关注艺术教育内容与儿童艺术能力两大维度上的构建,突出艺术教育中的儿童创造能力的培养,并由此总结对我国学前儿童艺术教育实践的启示.     

美国“力争上游——早期学习挑战”计划(RTT-ELC)的“核心领域”与启示

美国政府为实现早期教育机会公平和提升早期教育质量,制定了《力争上游——早期学习挑战》,以公平竞争和财政刺激的方式,推动各州加快早期教育改革。从此项计划来看,美国早期教育改革聚焦于以下几个"核心领域",即在早期教育课程上引导各州制定切合实际的早期学习与发展标准;在幼儿教师发展上引导各州建立以"能力为核心"的教师专业知识与技能标准等;在早期教育评价上确立和完善州的分层质量评价与改进体系。     

早期学习标准与教育质量:美国的经验及启示

美国各州继制定了早期学习标准之后,政府和学界开始对如何运用早期学习标准提升教育质量进行深入思考。本文主要介绍早期学习标准的具体运用,以及将早期学习标准与质量评定和推进系统相结合的系统化的质量提升策略,并提出相关启示。     

美国各州pre-k阶段儿童学习与发展标准的内容分析——数学领域之形体和空间感子领域

以美国50个州和哥伦比亚特区教育部公布的儿童早期学习标准为研究对象,对该标准中pre—k年龄阶段儿童数学领域中形体和空间感子领域的各项标准进行内容分析。比较分析得出该子领域包含对形体的辨认和命名,描述形体的基本特征,形体的比较和分类,对形体的拼、搭和建造,辨认和命名空间方位,认识以自身为中心的方位,认识物体的空间方位关系,向指定方向移动,词汇的掌握,实际生活情境中的应用等十项标准。总结了各州要求儿童针对这十项标准学习与发展时应该达到的水平。希望为我国学前教育领域中早期儿童学习标准的制定,以及幼儿园关于形体和空间感的实践提供启示。     

美国早期学习标准中身体发展与健康领域的内容分析及其启示

美国所有50个州和哥伦比亚特区都已经明确了各自的早期学习标准.通过对这些早期学习标准中身体发展与健康领域的内容分析发现,身体发展与健康领域包含大肌肉运动、小肌肉运动、身体健康、安全四个子领域,每个子领域都有相应的标准条款,每条标准条款都有具体的行为表现指标.美国各州针对身体发展与健康领域制定的早期学习标准值得借鉴.     

美国早期学习标准中有关测量内容的文本解读及启示

美国早期学习标准的内容具体、丰富.本文通过对美国51份州(特区)早期学习标准文件内容的分析,概括出3～5岁儿童测量领域的具体指标与内容,包括测量形式、测量内容、测量语言的使用以及测量应用四个方面.美国早期儿童数学教育中对儿童非正式数学经验的重视、对儿童早期数学学习兴趣的培养、有具体的内容指标供教师参考等做法对我国早期儿童学习标准的制定和推行具有一定的启示.     

美国早期学习标准对教师的影响及实践探索

早期学习标准是美国各州出台的有关儿童在早期教育中“应当知道什么,会做什么”的文件规定.标准的推行给坚持以幼儿为中心的美国早期教育界带来了挑战,由于教育经验、环境、理念的不同,教师可能会持不同的应对方式.为保障标准顺利推行,学界及相关各方在针对标准的培训形式、内容等方面做了很多尝试,并总结了相应的经验,这些经验能够为我国当前即将出台的《3-6岁儿童早期学习与发展指南》的教师培训工作提供借鉴.     

英国0～3岁婴幼儿早期有效学习项目评介

英国0～3岁婴幼儿早期有效学习项目将评价过程与教育过程相融合,制定了多元、完善的评估体系.该项目在实施过程中充分关注和尊重儿童,聚焦儿童与教师在活动中的状态和相互作用,对提升托幼机构教育质量和促进儿童发展很有帮助.     

早期学习标准的制定与实施——我们可以向美国学习什么?

本文介绍了美国早期学习标准制定和实施的做法和经验,从发展适宜性、文化适宜性以及横向联系和纵向衔接等几个方面进行了分析,可供我国制定和推行<3-6岁儿童学习和发展指南>借鉴.     

One Cow Does Not an Animal Make: Young Children Can Extend Novel Words at the Superordinate Level

Six match-to-sample picture/object selection experiments were designed to explore children's knowledge about superordinate words (e.g., "food") and how they acquire this knowledge. Three factors were found to influence the learning and extension of superordinate words in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 230): The number of standards (one versus two), the type of standards presented (from different basic-level categories versus from the same basic-level category), and the nature of the object representations used (pictures versus objects). A different pattern of superordinate word acquisition was found between 3-year-olds and 4- and 5-year-olds. Although 4- and 5-year-olds could learn and extend novel words to superordinate categories in the presence of two picture exemplars from different categories or a single three-dimensional (3-D) exemplar, 3-year-olds could do so only in the presence of two 3-D exemplars. These findings indicate that young children's acquisition of superordinate words is influenced by multiple factors and that there is a developmental progression from multiple exemplars to single exemplars in superordinate word learning.     

Children's use of nonegocentric standards in judgments of functional size

Dimensional adjectives are inherently relative in meaning, and so provide a test of children's ability to apply nonegocentric standards. The present research investigates children's ability to apply one kind of relative standard assessing the size of an object with regard to its intended use (a functional interpretation). In 3 experiments, children 3-5 years of age were asked to judge objects as "big" or "little" according to their function (e.g., a hat for a doll; a key for a door). Contrary to previous claims, the ability to use nonegocentric functional standards was present by age 3. However, 3-year-olds performed above chance only when their attention was directed to the relevant function, either by means of action (when actually shown how the objects fit together) or by means of language. In contrast, 4-year-olds performed well without additional action-based or linguistic cues. It is suggested that children have an implicit ordering in their interpretations of big and little, such that functional judgments are lower in priority than 2 other standards: normative (the size of an object is compared to a stored mental standard, e.g., a chihuahua is small for a dog) and perceptual (the size of an object is compared to another physically present object of the same type, e.g., a chihuahua 6 inches tall is big compared to a chihuahua 4 inches tall). Even 3-year-olds can make nonegocentric functional judgments of relative size, but the basis of the judgment must be unambiguous.     

美国0~3岁婴幼儿早期学习指南之运动子领域解析

深入分析美国21个州制定的0～3岁婴幼儿早期学习指南中运动子领域的具体内容发现,各州的指南都非常重视婴幼儿动作发展的连续性和可期待性,在婴幼儿精细动作的发展方面突出强调了手部(包括手臂和手掌)动作由整合到分化的发展过程,同时也强调婴幼儿生活自理能力的提高。美国的经验值得我们借鉴。我们还要注意0～3岁婴幼儿学习指南的制定要尽可能详细具体,以便教育者能较为准确地判断婴幼儿的发展水平。     

Are Reading Standards Falling?

The re-standardisation of the Hunter-Grundin Reading-for-Meaning Scale (first standardised in 1979) shows no drop in reading standards among 7–12-year-olds, but does show a widening performance gap between middle-class and ‘low-income’ schools. This seems due to pupils being much more segregated into schools for different socio-economic groups in 1996 than in 1979. It is concluded that primary teachers do as good a job now as they did eighteen years ago.     

Parental Beliefs and Children's School Performance

Immigrant parents from Cambodia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Vietnam and native-born Anglo-American and Mexican-American parents responded to questions about child rearing, what teachers of first and second graders should teach their children, and what characterizes an intelligent child. Immigrant parents rated conforming to external standards as being more important to develop in their children than developing autonomous behaviors. In contrast, American-born parents favored developing autonomy over conformity. Parents from all groups except Anglo-Americans indicated that noncognitive characteristics (i.e., motivation, social skills, and practical school skills) were as important as or more important than cognitive characteristics (i.e., problem-solving skills, verbal ability, creative ability) were to their conceptions of an intelligent first-grade child. Parental beliefs about conformity were correlated with measures of kindergarten (5- and 6-year-olds) and first- (6- and 7-year-olds) and second-grader (7- and 8-year-olds) children's school performance (i.e., teacher ratings of children's classroom performance; Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills reading, math, and language scores; and Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test scores).     

Equality and Education: Fact and Fiction

This paper reports on a series of statistical analyses carried out on some of the National Curriculum tests in mathematics for 11-year-olds in England. In England all 7-, 11- and 14-year-olds are tested in English, mathematics and science (11- and 14-year-olds only). The tests for 11-year-olds are very high stakes, in that the results are published in a school-by-school basis in newspapers etc. The analyses were prompted by the suggestion (from governmental organisations) that the balance of the curriculum content in the mathematics tests should be changed to accommodate better the require ments of the government-initiated National Numeracy Strategy. The analyses were carried out on two datasets, involving nationally representative samples of 11-year-old pupils. The analyses reveal some interesting patterns of change in the overall outcomes when Handling Data questions were statistically replaced by Number items of various kinds and also some interesting changes at the individual level, which could potentially affect the Level outcomes of a significant number of children nationally. However, the final conclusion reached is that, given an appropriately sized and structured pool of items across the curriculum content areas, tests can be constructed which are of an appropriate level of difficulty and discrimination power and which still allow year-on-year calibration of the national standards in mathematics.     

Young Children's Understanding of Forgetting over Time

2 studies investigated young children's understanding that as the retention interval increases, so do the chances that one will forget. In Study 1 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 characters who simultaneously saw an object, the character who waited longer before attempting to find it would not remember where it was. In study 2 (24 3-year-olds and 24 4-year-olds), 4-year-olds but not 3-year-olds understood that of 2 objects seen by a character, the object that was seen a "long long time ago" would be forgotten and the object seen "a little while ago" would be remembered. The findings are discussed in relation to research on young children's understanding of the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of knowledge over time.     

Seeing Is Believing: Children's Explanations of Commonplace, Magical, and Extraordinary Transformations

Children's magical explanations and beliefs were investigated in 2 studies. In Study 1, we first asked 4- and 5-year-old children to judge the possibility of certain object transformations and to suggest mechanisms that might accomplish them. We then presented several commonplace transformations (e.g., cutting a string) and impossible events (magic tricks). Prior to viewing these transformations, children suggested predominantly physical mechanisms for the events and judged the magical ones to be impossible. After seeing the impossible events, many 4-year-olds explained them as "magic," whereas 5-year-olds explained them as "tricks." In Study 2, we replaced the magic tricks with "extraordinary" events brought about by physical or chemical reactions (e.g., heat causing paint on a toy car to change color). Prior to viewing the "extraordinary" transformations, children judged them to be impossible. After viewing these events, 4-year-olds gave more magical and fewer physical explanations than did 5-year-olds. Follow-up interviews revealed that most 4-year-olds viewed magic as possible under the control of an agent (magician) with special powers, whereas most 5-year-olds viewed magic as tricks that anyone can learn. In a third study, we surveyed parents to assess their perceptions and conceptions of children's beliefs in magic and fantasy figures. Parents perceived their children as believing in a number of magic and fantasy figures and reported encouraging such beliefs to some degree. Taken together, these findings suggest that many 4-year-olds view magic as a plausible mechanism, yet reserve magical explanations for certain real world events which violate their causal expectations.     

Developmental progression in performance evaluations: Effects of children's cue-utilization and self-protection

To effectively self-regulate learning, children need to self-evaluate whether they meet learning goals. Unfortunately, self-evaluations are often inaccurate, typically, children are overconfident. We investigated two explanations for developmental progression in self-evaluations related to children's (48 5/6-year-olds and 53 7/8-year-olds) interpretations of performance: Improved reliance on item difficulty, and reduced sensitivity to self-protection biases. Self-evaluations were more accurate for 7/8-year-olds than for 5/6-year-olds. There was no developmental increase in reliance on item difficulty; even 5/6-year-olds made adaptive use of this cue. Both age groups were overconfident for incorrect responses, but were able to use performance feedback to improve confidence judgments. However, when self-rewarding, 5/6-year-olds were less likely to take negative performance feedback into account than 7/8-year-olds. The 5/6-year-olds were able to base confidence judgments on performance feedback, but did not use feedback to the same extent when self-rewarding. This may indicate that self-protective biases are an important cause of overconfidence in children.     

The Representation of Extendedness in Children''s Drawings of Sticks and Discs

Piaget has suggested that the reason why children find it difficult to draw foreshortened views is because they lack any conscious awareness of their own viewpoint. Instead, it is proposed that most of these difficulties derive from the constraints of drawing as a representational system: for example, although a round region shows a true view of a foreshortened stick, it is unsatisfactory as a representation. To test between these alternative proposals, 4-, 7-, and 12-year-olds were asked to draw sticks and discs in foreshortened and nonforeshortened positions. As predicted, fewer 7- and 12-year-olds used a round region to represent a foreshortened stick, compared with children of the same age who used a long region to represent a foreshortened disc. In addition, the 12-year-olds used a different and more effective denotation system compared with the 7-year-olds.