How children revise their beliefs in light of reasons

We investigate how the ability to respond appropriately to reasons provided in discourse develops in young children. In Study 1 (N = 58, Germany, 26 girls), 4- and 5-, but not 3-year-old children, differentiated good from bad reasons. In Study 2 (N = 131, Germany, 64 girls), 4- and 5-year-old children considered both the strength of evidence for their initial belief and the quality of socially provided reasons for an alternative view when deciding whether to change their minds. Study 3 (N = 80, the United States, 42 girls, preregistered) shows that 4- and 5-year-old children also consider meta-reasons (reasons about reasons) in their belief revision. These results suggest that by age 4, children possess key critical thinking capacities for participating in public discourse.     

Children's developing commitments to joint goals

This study investigated young children's commitment to a joint goal by assessing whether peers in collaborative activities continue to collaborate until all received their rewards. Forty-eight 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children worked on an apparatus dyadically. One child got access to her reward early. For the partner to benefit as well, this child had to continue to collaborate even though there was no further reward available to her. The study found that 3.5-year-olds, but not 2.5-year-olds, eagerly assisted their unlucky partner. They did this less readily in a noncollaborative control condition. A second study confirmed that 2.5-year-old children understood the task structure. These results suggest that children begin to appreciate the normative dimensions of collaborative activities during the 3rd year of life.     

Implicit STEM ability beliefs predict secondary school students' STEM self-efficacy beliefs and their intention to opt for a STEM field career

Despite the widely accepted view that low self-efficacy beliefs negatively influence students' intention to opt for a STEM field oriented study or career path, it remains unclear how to effectively stimulate these beliefs in students who do seem to have the ability and motivation to opt for a STEM career. A suggestion from previous literature is that students' implicit beliefs about the malleability of their learning ability can have a major impact on their self-efficacy beliefs, and, importantly, that these implicit beliefs are malleable themselves. Even though this relation between implicit beliefs, self-efficacy, and STEM field aspirations has been suggested multiple times, there is no empirical evidence to support this claim. The goal of the current study was to examine whether implicit beliefs about the malleability of STEM ability are associated with secondary school students' intention to opt for a STEM field bachelor's degree, using a Structural Equation Modelling approach. Furthermore, we examined the mediating role of STEM-oriented self-efficacy beliefs on the relationship between implicit ability beliefs and STEM intention. We used a Likert-type questionnaire, consisting of subscales to measure ability beliefs, self-efficacy, and intention to opt for a STEM degree of secondary school students in their fifth grade (n = 483). Results showed that there is a positive relation between implicit STEM ability beliefs and the intention to opt for a STEM field bachelor degree, and that this relation is partly mediated by self-efficacy beliefs. Incremental STEM ability beliefs predicted positive self-efficacy beliefs and increased STEM intention. These findings provide a foundation for a novel approach to stimulate and motivate students for the STEM field, namely by stimulating incremental beliefs about their STEM ability.     

Children's ability to impute inferentially based knowledge

Do young children appreciate the importance of access to premises when judging what another person knows? In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N=31) were sensitive to another person's access to premises when predicting that person's ability to point to a target after eliminating alternatives in a set of 3 cartoon characters. Experiment 2 replicated the finding when 5- to 6-year-olds (N=102) judged who the other person thought the target was, and whether the other person knew who the target was. Experiment 3 demonstrated that children aged 5-7 years (N=107) more successfully imputed inference by elimination than syllogistical inferential knowledge. Findings suggest that an early understanding of inference by elimination offers a route into understanding that people can sometimes gain knowledge without direct perceptual access.     

Children's ability to recognize other children's faces.

Facial recognition ability was studied with 288 children from 4 grades--first, second, third, and sixth--who also varied by sex race, and school type, the last being segregated or integrated. Children judged whether each of 40 pictures of children's faces had been present in a set of 20 pictures viewed earlier. Facial recognition ability increased significantly with each grade but leveled off between ages 8 and 11. Blacks' performance is significantly better than whites', and blacks are better at recognizing faces of whites than whites are at recognizing blacks. Children from an integrated school show smaller differences recognizing black or white faces than children from segregated schools, but the effect appears only for children of the integrated school who also live in mixed-race neighborhoods.     

Children's agency beliefs, cognitive performance, and conceptions of effort and ability: individual and developmental differences

In order to understand how children's beliefs and cognitive performance vary according to development in their conceptions of effort and ability, 120 fourth and sixth graders were given the following assessments: (a) a measure of agency beliefs, defined as the extent to which persons believe they have access to certain classes of potential means, including effort, ability, powerful others, and luck; (b) a battery of intelligence test scales, including figural patterns, letter series, arithmetic, and spelling; (c) an interview designed to assess developmental levels in conceptions of effort and ability. Correlations between intelligence scores and agency beliefs for effort decreased with increasing levels of reasoning about effort and ability, but correlations between intelligence scores and agency beliefs for ability increased with increasing levels of reasoning. No such trends were found in correlations between performance and agency beliefs for luck or for unknown causes. The results are discussed in terms of the interaction between individual differences and developmental change.     

开发非智力因素培养中学生的自我调控能力

激发学生的潜能,重视学生的非智力因素的开发,积极培养中学生的自我调控能力,帮助他们形成健全的人格和心理,成为对社会有用的人才.2001年以来,我们《中学生心理健康研究及对策》课题组在柳州地区高中的帮助下,开展了本课题的研究活动.经过两年的实验研究,结果表明激发学生的潜能,重视学生的非智力因素的开发,不仅能培养学生良好的学习和生活习惯,更重要的是能让学生的身心得到健康的发展,为全面提高学生的素质奠定基础.     

在素质教育中要重视培养学生的数学猜想能力

江泽民同志说 :“一个没有创新能力的民族难以屹立于世界民族之林。”时代进步和科技发展要求今后的劳动者必须要有创新能力 ,因而呼唤肩负着培养面向二十一世纪劳动者的教育工作者要转变教育观念 ,改革人才培养模式 ,激发学生独立思考和创新意识。在数学教学中 ,培养学生的数学猜想能力有助于发展学生的创新能力。猜想 ,是进行科学研究的一种广泛应用的思想方法 :它是根据已知的原理和事实 ,对未知的现象及其规律所作出的一种假定性命题。当然 ,这样的假定命题是否正确 ,尚需通过验证和论证。在数学发展过程中 ,数学家们提出了各种各样的数…     

增强逆向思维培养创新能力

数学解题中有很多问题不能从正面分析得出结论,现从4个方面分析逆向思维思考问题,使解决问题准确、快速、灵活,而且培养了学生的创新思维能力.     

从半岛电视台看发展中国家如何提高国际传播力

本文从半岛电视台的成功崛起出发,探讨发展中国家尤其是我国如何提高国际传播力,与发达国家在话语空间抗衡。     

Implicit writing beliefs and their relation to writing quality

Writers have beliefs that may influence engagement during writing and consequently effect writing quality. Students completed a writing beliefs inventory that identified transmissional and transactional beliefs. Transmissional beliefs reflect limited cognitive and affective engagement during writing whereas transactional beliefs reflect higher engagement. Relations between writing beliefs and writing quality were examined with a different group of students. ANOVA results indicated that students with low transactional beliefs scored low on organization and overall writing quality and students with high transactional beliefs scored high on idea-content development, organization, voice, sentence fluency, conventions, and overall writing quality. Results indicate that individuals hold implicit writing beliefs that can be measured and that relate in stable and predictable ways to writing quality.     

Children's suggestibility in relation to their understanding about sources of knowledge

In the experiments reported here, children chose either to maintain their initial belief about an object's identity or to accept the experimenter's contradicting suggestion. Both 3- to 4-year-olds and 4- to 5-year-olds were good at accepting the suggestion only when the experimenter was better informed than they were (implicit source monitoring). They were less accurate at recalling both their own and the experimenter's information access (explicit recall of experience), though they performed well above chance. Children were least accurate at reporting whether their final belief was based on what they were told or on what they experienced directly (explicit source monitoring). Contrasting results emerged when children decided between contradictory suggestions from two differentially informed adults: Three- to 4-year-olds were more accurate at reporting the knowledge source of the adult they believed than at deciding which suggestion was reliable. Decision making in this observation task may require reflective understanding akin to that required for explicit source judgments when the child participates in the task.     

Parental beliefs and their role in child-rearing

Beliefs have been a topic of considerable interest among researchers in various fields. In this article 71 articles reporting a study on parental beliefs and published in the course of fifteen years (1980–1995) are reviewed. After clarifying the term ‘belief’, the topics and the methodological solutions of the studies are discussed. Throughout the discussion the question of the origins of parental beliefs and the belief — behaviour dilemma are dealt with. Finally, the implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are presented.     

Children's developing awareness of diversity in people's trains of thought

This research explored the development of one insight about the mind, namely, the belief that people's trains of thought differ even when they see the same stimulus. In Study 1, 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults heard stories about characters who saw the same object. Although the older groups predicted the object would trigger different trains of thought, most 5-year-olds did not. In Study 2, 5-year-olds (preschoolers and kindergartners) and 7-year-olds heard similar stories, plus stories with additional individuating information about each character. With age, children increasingly recognized that thoughts would differ and could explain why. The development of this insight during the school years likely provides children with a more complete understanding of what it means to be a unique individual.     

Children's choice of drawings to communicate their ideas about technology

This study examines children's choice of drawing to communicate their understanding of the concept “technology”. The study explored whether the children's drawings accurately reflected the depth and range of their understanding of technology in a way that was interpretable by others. Data were collected from 314 primary school children in England and 745 children in Western Australia. Children were invited to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding about technology by responding to a writing/drawing activity and a representative subsample were then interviewed about their responses. About two-thirds of children's responses to the activity included drawings. Children held a wide range of ideas about technology and only rarely was a drawing difficult to interpret. Although overall the drawings reflected the range of children's ideas, sometimes they did not reveal the depth or breadth of an individual child's understanding. Consistent with the ideas represented in the drawings, the interviews found that younger children held simpler ideas about technology, while older children held more complex, and sometimes quite abstract concepts of technology. A notable difference between the two countries was the emphasis on “design and make” and a smaller proportion of no response in the English sample, reflecting the greater length of time technology education has been implemented in England compared to Western Australia.     

From safe spaces to communities of disagreement

The idea of the classroom as a ‘safe space’ has been popular in education for at least two decades. More recently, the term has also been used by religious education scholars not least in the wake of the use of the term in the influential Council of Europe publication ‘Signposts’. In this article, I want to question the usefulness of the term ‘safe space’ within RE. The argument is not against many of the pedagogical aims and strategies that are referred to by the term ‘safe space’. However, the term is ambiguous, fraught with politicised controversy and promises more than in can deliver. These problems cannot be easily fixed by defining the term anew. The article is not only critical in its aim. It presents an alternative strategy. In the conclusion of the article, I suggest construing the RE classroom as a community of disagreement.     

Individual differences in gender role beliefs influence spatial ability test performance

The gender role hypothesis posits that performance on a cognitive ability test is influenced by whether the test instructions frame the test as measuring a skill that is consistent or inconsistent with the test taker's gender role beliefs. The Bem sex role inventory was used to measure the gender role of female college students, and the group embedded figures test (GEFT) was used to measure their spatial ability. Masculine gender role women scored significantly higher on the GEFT when the test was described as measuring spatial ability, whereas feminine gender role women scored significantly higher when the test was described as measuring empathy. In a second experiment, men did not show the same effects. Implications of individual differences in gender role beliefs are discussed.     

科学教学中学生反思能力培养的基本策略

新课程改革需要反思型的教师,科学教学中离不开对学生反思能力的培养。根据元认知理论在教学中如何培养学生的反思能力提出了几种基本策略,并通过建议和讨论,旨在促进广大教师在科学教学中提高学生的反思能力和科学素养。     

浅谈英语阅读能力的培养

培养学生阅读能力是英语教学的目的之一。在阅读教学中,为提高学生英语水平,并由此增强学生的英语自学能力,通过培养学生的阅读兴趣,养成良好的阅读习惯,增加词汇积累,选择适当的阅读教材,熟练掌握阅读技巧等方法和手段是必须的。