Social Groups and Children’s Intergroup Attitudes: Can School Norms Moderate the Effects of Social Group Norms?

The effects of social group norms (inclusion vs. exclusion vs. exclusion-plus-relational aggression) and school norms (inclusion vs. no norm) on 7- and 10-year-old children's intergroup attitudes were examined. Children (n = 383) were randomly assigned to a group with an inclusion or exclusion norm, and to 1 of the school norm conditions. Findings indicated that children's out-group attitudes reflected their group's norm but, with increasing age, they liked their in-group less, and the out-group more, if the group had an exclusion norm. The school inclusion norm instigated more positive attitudes toward out-group members, but it did not moderate or extinguish contrary group norms. The use of school norms to counteract the effects of children's social group norms is discussed.     

Characterizing Children’s Expectations About Expertise and Incompetence: Halo or Pitchfork Effects?

Do children expect an expert in one domain to also be an expert in an unrelated domain? In Study 1, 32 three‐ and four‐year‐olds learned that one informant was an expert about dogs relative to another informant. When presented with pictures of new dogs or of artifacts, children who could remember which informant was the dog expert preferred her over the novice as an informant about the names of dogs, but they had no preference when the informants presented artifact labels. In Study 2, 32 children learned that one informant was incompetent about dogs whereas another was neutral. In this case, children preferred the neutral speaker over the incompetent one about both dogs and artifacts. Taken together, these results suggest that for children, expertise is not subject to a “halo effect,” but incompetence may be subject to a “pitchfork effect.”     

Who Makes the Choice? Rethinking the Role of Autonomy and Relatedness in Chinese Children’s Motivation

The importance of autonomy for children's motivation in collectivistic cultures has been debated hotly. With the understanding that autonomy is not equivalent to freedom of choice, 4 studies addressed this debate by investigating how socioemotional relatedness, choice, and autonomy were related to Chinese children's motivation. Study 1 (N = 56, mean age = 10.77 years), Study 2 (N = 58, mean age = 10.59), and Study 3 (N = 48, mean age = 10.53) found consistently that freedom of choice mattered less if children were socioemotionally close to the adults who made choices for them. However, Study 4 (N = 99, mean age = 11.27) showed that autonomy mattered at every level of socioemotional relatedness. These results suggested that socioemotional relatedness might have facilitated internalization and that children who did not have choice might still feel autonomous.     

Peer Effects in Preschool Classrooms: Is Children’s Language Growth Associated With Their Classmates’ Skills?

With an increasing number of young children participating in preschool education, this study determined whether peer effects are present in this earliest sector of schooling. Specifically, this work examined whether peer effects were influential to preschoolers' growth in language skills over an academic year and whether peer effects manifest differently based on children's status in reference to their peers. Peer effects were assessed for 338 children in 49 classrooms. A significant interaction between the language skills of children's classmates and children's fall language skills indicated that peer effects were strongest for children with low language skills who were in classrooms that served children with relatively low skill levels, on average. Findings further showed that reference status, or children's relative standing to their peers, has the greater consequence for children with very low language skills in relation to their peers.     

Where Is the Essence? Developmental Shifts in Children’s Beliefs About Internal Features

The present studies investigated children's and adults' intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about 2 different ways of determining an unknown object's category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence) or taking a sample from one specific region (localized view of essence). Results from 3 studies indicated that adults strongly endorsed the distributed view, and children showed a developmental shift from a localized to distributed view with increasing age. These results suggest that even children go beyond mere placeholder notions of essence, committing to conceptual frameworks of how essences might be physically instantiated.     

Does Higher Quality Early Child Care Promote Low‐Income Children’s Math and Reading Achievement in Middle Childhood?

Higher quality child care during infancy and early childhood (6–54 months of age) was examined as a moderator of associations between family economic status and children's ( N  = 1,364) math and reading achievement in middle childhood (4.5–11 years of age). Low income was less strongly predictive of underachievement for children who had been in higher quality care than for those who had not. Consistent with a cognitive advantage hypothesis, higher quality care appeared to promote achievement indirectly via early school readiness skills. Family characteristics associated with selection into child care also appeared to promote the achievement of low-income children, but the moderating effect of higher quality care per se remained evident when controlling for selection using covariates and propensity scores.     

Can ‘Philosophy for Children’ Improve Primary School Attainment?

There are tensions within formal education between imparting knowledge and the development of skills for handling that knowledge. In the primary school sector, the latter can also be squeezed out of the curriculum by a focus on basic skills such as literacy and numeracy. What happens when an explicit attempt is made to develop young children's reasoning—both in terms of their apparent cognitive abilities and their basic skills? This paper reports an independent evaluation of an in‐class intervention called ‘Philosophy for Children’ (P4C), after just over one year of schooling. The intervention aims to help children become more willing and able to question, reason, construct arguments and collaborate with others. A group of 48 volunteer schools were randomised to receive P4C (22 schools) or act as a control for one year (26). This paper reports the CAT results for all pupils in years 4 and 5 initially, and the Key Stage 2 attainment in English and Maths for those starting in year 5. There was no school dropout. Individual attrition from a total of 3,159 pupils was around 11 percent—roughly equal between groups. There were small positive ‘effect’ sizes in favour of the P4C group in progress in reading (+0.12) and maths (+0.10), and even smaller perhaps negligible improvements in CAT scores (+0.07) and writing (+0.03). The results for the most disadvantaged (free school eligible) pupils were larger for attainment (+0.29 in reading, +0.17 writing and +0.20 maths), but not for CATs (–0.02). Observations and interviews suggest that the intervention was generally enjoyable and thought to be beneficial for pupil confidence. Our conclusion is that, for those wishing to improve attainment outcomes in the short term, an emphasis on developing reasoning is promising, especially for the poorest students, but perhaps not the most effective way forward. However, for those who value reasoning for its own sake, this evaluation demonstrates that using curriculum time in this way does not damage attainment (and may well enhance it and reduce the poverty gradient in attainment), and so suggests that something like P4C is an appropriate educational approach.     

Does Maternal Employment Following Childbirth Support or Inhibit Low‐Income Children’s Long‐Term Development?

This study assessed whether previous findings linking early maternal employment to lower cognitive and behavioral skills among middle‐class and White children generalized to other groups. Using a representative sample of urban, low‐income, predominantly African American and Hispanic families (n = 444), ordinary least squares regression and propensity score matching models assessed links between maternal employment in the 2 years after childbearing and children’s functioning at age 7. Children whose mothers were employed early, particularly in their first 8 months, showed enhanced socioemotional functioning compared to peers whose mothers remained nonemployed. Protective associations emerged for both part‐time and full‐time employment, and were driven by African American children, with neutral effects for Hispanics. Informal home‐based child care also heightened positive links.     

Does God Make It Real? Children’s Belief in Religious Stories From the Judeo‐Christian Tradition

Four- to 6-year-old children (N = 131) heard religious or nonreligious stories and were questioned about their belief in the reality of the story characters and events. Children had low to moderate levels of belief in the characters and events. Children in the religious story condition had higher levels of belief in the reality of the characters and events than did children in the nonreligious condition; this relation strengthened with age. Children who used God as an explanation for the events showed higher levels of belief in the factuality of those events. Story familiarity and family religiosity also affected children's responses. The authors conclude that God's involvement in a story influences children's belief in the reality of the characters and events in that story.     

Does Chronic Classroom Peer Rejection Predict the Development of Children’s Classroom Participation During the Grade School Years?

A sample of 398 children was followed up from ages 5 to 12 to investigate the relation between peer group rejection and classroom participation. The participation trajectories of individuals and groups of children who were rejected for differing periods of time were examined both during and after rejection using piecewise growth curve analyses. The results showed that whereas during periods of rejection, children exhibited negative or negligible growth in participation, when nonrejected, they manifested positive growth. These findings corroborated the hypothesis that (a) peer rejection creates constraints that inhibit children's classroom participation and (b) the cessation of rejection enables children to become more active and cooperative participants in classroom activities.     

Predicting College Students’ Intergroup Friendships Across Race/Ethnicity,Religion, Sexual Orientation,and Social Class

This study seeks to expand the literature on predicting friendship diversity beyond race/ethnicity to include religion, social class, and sexual orientation. Survey packets elicited information regarding up to four close friendships developed during college. Additional measures assessed pre-college friendship diversity, participation in college activities and diversity education, intergroup attitudes, and interpersonal communication apprehension. A total of 588 friendships (213 intragroup and 375 intergroup) were reported by 151 college students. Pre-college friendship diversity was the primary predictor of college friendship diversity across each intergroup dimension. Implications for prejudice reduction are discussed.     

Rolling out ‘good’, ‘best’ and ‘excellent’ practice. What next? Perfect practice?

The identification and dissemination of ‘good practice’ has for years been a central part of the Government's strategy for radical change of the education system. ‘Good practice’, however, is no longer good enough, nor is ‘best practice’. The requirement now for post‐compulsory education and training (from which all our examples are taken) is nothing less than ‘excellent practice for all’. This article critically examines these highly significant shifts in the rhetoric of policy, finds them wanting and argues that we need to face up to the complexities involved in deciding not only what is ‘excellent practice’ but also in working through all the stages which would be needed to transmit it throughout the sector. In particular, recent documents from the Quality Improvement Agency and the Learning and Skills Council on the pursuit of excellence are critically appraised. The views of those practitioners who are part of the authors' project in the Economic and Social Research Council's Teaching and Learning Research Programme are also explained in relation to ‘good practice’. The authors attempt to explain the frenetic activity of politicians and policy makers in this sector, and end by moving from critique to construction by considering what can be rescued from the inherently contestable notion of ‘good practice’, and, in doing so, draw heavily on the work of Robin Alexander.     

What Develops in Infants’ Spatial Categorization? Korean Infants’ Categorization of Containment and Tight‐Fit Relations

Korean‐learning infants’ categorization of two spatial categories, one consistent and one inconsistent with the Korean semantic category of “kkita,” was examined. Infants of 10 months (n = 32) and 18 months (n = 49) were tested on their categorization of containment or tight fit spatial relations. At 10 months, infants only formed a category of containment, but at 18 months, their categorization of tight fit was significantly stronger than containment. The results suggest that Korean infants benefit from their language environment in forming a category of tight fit when the exemplars are perceptually diverse. In particular, infants’ language environment may bolster their ability to generalize across diverse exemplars to form abstract categorical representations of spatial relations.     

Born Again or ‘Dumbing Down’? Cultural Trends in the 1990s

A person who everyday looks upon a beautiful picture, reads a page from some good book, and hears a beautiful piece of music will soon become a transformed person – one born again [Labour, 1997]. Across the world, music audiences are being eroded by an array of domestic electronic attractions. Habitual concertgoers fear to venture into the inner city after dark, or get deterred by traffic jams and parking restrictions. A new generation raised on television soundbites and instant hamburgers has been jaggedly desensitised to the stately magniloquence of an hour-long symphony. The sharing of music within families has been blighted by the decline of the nuclear family. Music teaching, insofar as it is still provided in public school systems, has been rendered almost worthless by a politically correct tendency to treat all musics as equal – the primitive with the refined, the commercial with the spiritual [Lebrecht, 1996].     

Understanding: ‘Knowledge’, ‘Belief’ and ‘Understanding’

The following paper is intended as an exercise in friendly criticism of one of Harvey Siegel's and Mike Smith's (Knowing, Believing and Understanding, this volume). I'm in substantial sympathy with the general thrust of their paper and my remarks merely provide some criticism of their discussion's conceptual coherence and clarity and a correspondingly slightly adjusted version of what they have to say. My focus is limited to the conceptions of knowledge, belief and understanding and their inter-relationships in terms of which they offer suggestions to science educators.     

‘Are we being de‐gifted,Miss?’ Primary school gifted and talented co‐ordinators’ responses to the Gifted and Talented Education Policy in England

Over a decade ago the UK government launched its gifted and talented education policy in England, yet there has been very little published research which considers how schools and teachers are interpreting and implementing the policy. By seeking the views of the gifted and talented co‐ordinators (For ease of reference, the term gifted and talented (G&T) co‐ordinator is used throughout the paper as a generic shorthand for the research participants who were either designated school gifted and talented co‐ordinators or teachers or head teachers with responsibility for policy implementation) with responsibility for addressing the requirements of the policy, the study reported in this paper explored how primary schools in England responded to the policy. Drawing on data gathered using questionnaires with a national sample of primary schools as well as follow‐up in‐depth interviews with a sample of G&T co‐ordinators, the authors report their findings. The study found that there was considerable unease about the concept of identifying and ‘labelling’ a group of pupils as ‘gifted and talented’. G&T co‐ordinators found it difficult to interpret the policy requirements and were responding pragmatically to what they considered to be required by the government. Curriculum provision for the selected group of gifted and talented pupils was patchy. The paper concludes by identifying a need for further professional development for teachers and by challenging the policy's over‐emphasis on identifying and labelling gifted and talented pupils. We posit whether the gifted and talented education policy would have been better introduced and enjoyed greater success by leaving the identification of pupils to one side and by placing greater emphasis on developing effective learning and teaching strategies instead.