Mothers’ Implicit and Explicit Attitudes and Attributions in Relation to Self-Reported Parenting Behavior

Objective. Parenting behavior is presumed to be related to the thoughts about child behavior that parents report in a controlled and explicit manner and to more implicit parent cognitions that occur outside of conscious awareness and are less accessible to verbal report. Design. We examined mothers’ attitudes toward their children as correlates of self-reported parenting behavior. We used a combination of a self-report questionnaire and a reaction-time method (the Implicit Association Test) to assess explicit and implicit attitudes, respectively. We also assessed mothers’ implicit and explicit attributions for child misbehavior in relation to parenting, using a questionnaire measure of attributions completed under high-cognitive load (implicit attributions) or under low-cognitive load (explicit attributions). Mothers of 124, 6- to 10-year-olds (52% male) participated. Results. Attitudes assessed by self-report questionnaire and the Implicit Association Test were uniquely associated with negative parenting. The cognitive load manipulation moderated associations between attributions and parenting, such that child-blaming attributions were inversely associated with positive parenting only under conditions of high-cognitive load. Conclusions. Compared to traditional self-report questionnaires, methods such as the Implicit Association Test or cognitive load manipulations may more effectively assess implicit parent cognitions.     

Why Is It Better to-Marry Egyptian Woman than Polish？——A Cross-cultural Perspective of Implicit and Explicit Gender Attitudes of Polish and Egyptian Women

Two series of experiments were conducted on Polish and Egyptian women. The differences in implicit and explicit attitudes towards men and women were examined using implicit and explicit measures of each. The explicit attitude was measured by rating male and female objects （family members, e.g. mother, husband, and son） on 5-point scale. A modified version of an Implicit Association Test （IAT - Greenwald, McGhee ＆ Schwartz, 1998） was used for measuring implicit gender attitudes. Two series of experiments were conducted. The first series consisted of 6 experiments. Three of them were conducted on female students of different departments of Gdafisk University （the samples of 45, 26 and 38 persons）. Married, unemployed women from small Polish villages took part in the following two experiments （the samples of 30 and 30 women）. The sixth experiment consisted of the participants of three-year personal development training. The second series of experiments consisted of 5 researches. Three of them were conducted on unemployed, married Egyptian women living in small villages. Female students of South Valley University took part in two other experiments. All experiments conducted on Polish samples demonstrate the presence of negative implicit attitude of women towards men and positive implicit attitude of women towards women. At the same time Polish women demonstrate a strongly positive explicit attitude towards both men and women. Experiments conducted on non-educated Egyptian women found neutral and positive implicit attitude towards men. Educated Egyptian women associate negative effect with the category of men. The experiments also demonstrated positive implicit attitude of Egyptian women towards own sex. Furthermore. positive conscious attitude emerged from explicit measures.     

School Discipline,Race–Gender and STEM Readiness: A Hierarchical Analysis of the Impact of School Discipline on Math Achievement in High School

The Urban Review - While research on school suspensions and its impact on students is not new, scholars have not yet explored whether there is a link between school suspensions and high school...     

Special Education–Non-Special Education Achievement Gap in Math: Effects of Reporting Methods,Analytical Techniques,and Reclassification

Federal regulations indicate that the achievement gap must be closed between subgroups, including the gap between special education and non-special education students. We explored the ways in which achievement trends are influenced by three methods of reporting (cross-sectional, cohort–static, and cohort–dynamic). We also investigated (a) the ways in which achievement gaps change when different analytical techniques (proficiency levels, scale scores, effect size) are used, and (b) the relationship between student achievement and the extent to which students’ special education status changes across years. We conclude by discussing the practical and policy implications of using the three methods for reporting data about the performance gap.     

Teacher Depressive Symptoms and Child Math Achievement in Head Start: The Roles of Family–Teacher Relationships and Approaches to Learning

This study examined the direct and indirect associations of teachers’ depressive symptoms with children’s math achievement through teachers’ reports of family–teacher relationships and children’s approaches to learning (ATL) in Head Start. This study included 3- and 4-year-old 1,547 children (49% female; 27% White, 24% Black, 41% Hispanic/Latino, and 8% others) who attended Head Start from fall 2014 through spring 2015. Results indicated that teachers’ depressive symptoms were directly associated with lower gains in children’s math skills over a year. In addition, teachers who reported higher depressive symptoms were less likely to report positive family–teacher relationships. This, in turn, resulted in lower gains in children’s ATL and was associated with lower achievement in math skills (r² = .69).     

Explicit and Implicit Dimensions of Adult–Child Interactions in a Quality Childcare Center

The case study presented in this article is designed to provide an in-depth understanding of how a highly trained and experienced early childhood educator thinks about her interactions with children within the context of a setting identified as providing quality childcare for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. Qualitative research methods are used, including interviews, participant observation, videotaping, and the teacher's reflections on interactions with children. Verbal and nonverbal patterns emerging from videotaped observations demonstrate how the teacher integrates information about specific children into these interactions. Although children's conceptions of time and space are consistently embedded in her thinking and reflected in her behavior, she never explicitly acknowledges these dimensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the discrepancy between the teacher's implicit and explicit understanding of her interactions with children to childcare and the preparation and development of early childhood practitioners.     

Can Explicit Instruction in Social and Emotional Learning Skills Benefit the Social-Emotional Development, Well-being, and Academic Achievement of Young Children?

This study investigated the effect of a social and emotional learning skills curriculum, the You Can Do It! Early Childhood Education Program (YCDI), on the social-emotional development, well-being, and academic achievement of 99 preparatory and grade 1 students attending a Catholic school in Melbourne, Australia. One preparatory and one grade 1 class were randomly chosen to receive structured lessons in YCDI, delivered by their classroom teachers over a period of 10 weeks, while the remaining preparatory and grade 1 class served as the control group. The lessons were designed to teach young children confidence, persistence, organisation and emotional resilience. The educational program consisted of explicit, direct instruction lessons drawn from the YCDI Early Childhood Curriculum taught three times a week, supported by a variety of additional social and emotional teaching practices. The results indicated that YCDI had a statistically significant positive effect on levels of social-emotional competence and well-being for the preparatory and grade 1 students, a reduction in problem behaviours (externalising, internalising, and hyperactivity problems) for the grade 1 students, and an increase in reading achievement (decoding text) for the lower achieving grade 1 students. These findings are discussed with regard to issues concerning the role of explicit instruction in social and emotional learning for the early years.     

Interparental Differences of Opinion and Children’s Academic Achievement

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of elementary school interns trained in a summer program by the Stanford microteaching approach as compared with interns who received conventional classroom observation and student teaching experience. Contrary to expectation based on previous research findings, microteaching was not found to result in significantly higher ratings of teacher effectiveness either immediately after or a year after training. However, it was concluded that microteaching is an effective training strategy since it achieves similar results when compared with conventional training methods but in only one-fifth the time and with fewer administrative problems. An incidental finding was that pretraining ratings of teaching performance based on a brief videotaped lesson were generally good predictors of later ratings of teaching effectiveness.     

Implicit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge and Interactive High School English Instruction

This article,first introduces the terms of implicit knowledge(IK),explicit knowledge(EK) and their distinctions in the process of English language learning,then advocates interactive English instruction in high schools,aiming at improving the learners' communicative competence.It provides an instruction design,which lays emphasis on the conversion of the EK into IK by practicing the former orally so as to interactively internalize the latter,thus,facilitating the learners' language communicative competence.     

Educational Achievement of Immigrant Adolescents in Spain: Do Gender and Region of Origin Matter?

This study explores the educational achievement of immigrant youth in Spain employing data from 3 waves of the Longitudinal Study of Families and Childhood (Pànel de Famílies i Infància), a representative sample of children in Catalonia first interviewed at ages 13-16 in 2006 (N = 2,710). Results suggest consistent disadvantage in achievement among first-generation students. Differences in achievement between the second and third generations are apparent in bivariate analyses, but are explained by observable characteristics in multivariate analyses. Gender-specific analyses uncover a large achievement gap between first-generation girls and their third-generation counterparts, but no equivalent gap for boys. Region-of-origin differences are modest, with the exception of Latin American adolescents who exhibit the lowest educational outcomes. The significance of perceptions about school on achievement are discussed.     

Student–Faculty Interaction in Research Universities: Differences by Student Gender, Race, Social Class, and First-Generation Status

This study examined whether the effects of student–faculty interaction on a range of student outcomes—i.e., college GPA, degree aspiration, integration, critical thinking and communication, cultural appreciation and social awareness, and satisfaction with college experience—vary by student gender, race, social class, and first-generation status. The study utilized data on 58,281 students who participated in the 2006 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES). The findings reveal differences in the frequency of student–faculty interaction across student gender, race, social class and first-generation status, and differences in the effects of student–faculty interaction (i.e., conditional effects) that depended on each of these factors except first-generation status. The findings provide implications for educational practice on how to maximize the educational efficacy of student–faculty interaction by minimizing the gender, race, social class, and first-generation differences associated with it.

Investigation of High School Students’ Online Science Information Searching Performance: The Role of Implicit and Explicit Strategies

Due to a growing trend of exploring scientific knowledge on the Web, a number of studies have been conducted to highlight examination of students’ online searching strategies. The investigation of online searching generally employs methods including a survey, interview, screen-capturing, or transactional logs. The present study firstly intended to utilize a survey, the Online Information Searching Strategies Inventory (OISSI), to examine users’ searching strategies in terms of control, orientation, trial and error, problem solving, purposeful thinking, selecting main ideas, and evaluation, which is defined as implicit strategies. Second, this study conducted screen-capturing to investigate the students’ searching behaviors regarding the number of keywords, the quantity and depth of Web page exploration, and time attributes, which is defined as explicit strategies. Ultimately, this study explored the role that these two types of strategies played in predicting the students’ online science information searching outcomes. A total of 103 Grade 10 students were recruited from a high school in northern Taiwan. Through Pearson correlation and multiple regression analyses, the results showed that the students’ explicit strategies, particularly the time attributes proposed in the present study, were more successful than their implicit strategies in predicting their outcomes of searching science information. The participants who spent more time on detailed reading (explicit strategies) and had better skills of evaluating Web information (implicit strategies) tended to have superior searching performance.     

The Efficacy of Orthographic Rime,Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondence,and Implicit Phonics Approaches to Teaching Decoding Skills

This study compared the efficacy of two decoding skill-based programs, one based on explicit orthographic rime and one on grapheme–phoneme correspondences, to a control group exposed to an implicit phonics program. Children in both explicit decoding programs performed consistently better than the control group in the accuracy with which they read and spelled words covered in the program. Only children in the grapheme–phoneme correspondence program consistently spelled transfer words better than children in the control group. In addition, children in the grapheme–phoneme correspondence group consistently read words more quickly than children in the control group. Children in both explicit decoding programs scored higher than the children in the control group on measures of reading comprehension and oral reading at posttest.     

Time-Indexed Effect Size for Educational Research and Evaluation: Reinterpreting Program Effects and Achievement Gaps in K–12 Reading and Math

Through a synthesis of test publisher norms and national longitudinal data sets, this study provides new national norms of academic growth in K–12 reading and math to help reinterpret conventional effect sizes in time units. We propose d?, a time-indexed–effect-size metric to estimate how long it would take for an “untreated” control group to reach the treatment group outcome in terms familiar to educators—years/months of schooling. It serves as a supplement to conventional effect-size metrics, such as Cohen's d, by taking into account different amounts of time needed for learning at different ages or grade levels. Through applications to Project STAR small class effects and NAEP racial achievement gaps, we demonstrate how to interpret and use d?. It is expected to provide a more developmentally appropriate context for interpreting the size of an effect, a step toward bridging the gap between educational research and practice.     

Fostering Upper Secondary Students’ Ability to Engage in Practices of Scientific Investigation: a Comparative Analysis of an Explicit and an Implicit Instructional Approach

Research in Science Education - Inquiry-based teaching is considered as contributing to content-related, procedural, and epistemic learning goals of science education. In this study, a...     

Gender Differences in Attitudes to Science for Third Year Pupils: an argument for single‐sex teaching groups in mixed schools

An attitude to science scale for third year pupils in mixed and single‐sex schools has been developed and given to 2300 children in the South‐West of England. This test has five components, namely attitudes to science, physics, chemistry, biology and school. The results are analysed and used to support an argument for single‐sexing some school subjects in mixed schools, thus helping to include some of the better features of single‐sex schools in a mixed‐school environment.     

Integrating Laptop Computers into Classroom: Attitudes, Needs, and Professional Development of Science Teachers—A Case Study

The study examines the professional development of junior-high-school teachers participating in the Israeli “Katom” (Computer for Every Class, Student and Teacher) Program, begun in 2004. A three-circle support and training model was developed for teachers’ professional development. The first circle applies to all teachers in the program; the second, to all teachers at individual schools; the third to teachers of specific disciplines. The study reveals and describes the attitudes of science teachers to the integration of laptop computers and to the accompanying professional development model. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight science teachers from the four schools participating in the program. The interviews were analyzed according to the internal relational framework taken from the information that arose from the interviews. Two factors influenced science teachers’ professional development: (1) Introduction of laptops to the teachers and students. (2) The support and training system. Interview analysis shows that the disciplinary training is most relevant to teachers and they are very interested in belonging to the professional science teachers’ community. They also prefer face-to-face meetings in their school. Among the difficulties they noted were the new learning environment, including control of student computers, computer integration in laboratory work and technical problems. Laptop computers contributed significantly to teachers’ professional and personal development and to a shift from teacher-centered to student-centered teaching. One-to-One laptops also changed the schools’ digital culture. The findings are important for designing concepts and models for professional development when introducing technological innovation into the educational system.     

Professional Development for K–12 Math and Science Teachers: What Do We Really Know?

Abstract

As investments in K–12 math and science professional development programs expanded over the past decade, researchers and policymakers have questioned whether and how such programs work to improve student learning. This article summarizes the current knowledge-base and offers a theoretical framework researchers can use to design studies that explore mechanisms through which professional development programs influence teacher knowledge, teacher practices, and ultimately student achievement. We quantitatively pool the most rigorous evaluation research available to determine whether currently held beliefs in the field are supported by the evidence. Although this study does find some support for the guidance propounded by experts, it cautions policymakers and practitioners that the current evidence base is thin. We urge researchers to build on what we have learned through theory and practice to increase the rigor of evaluations on this important topic by incorporating valid and reliable measures of professional development components as well as valid measures of teacher knowledge and practices.