Children’s Models about Colours in Nahuatl-Speaking Communities

This paper presents the development and structure of indigenous children’s ideas about mixing colours as well as their ideas about each colour, derived from their traditions. The children were interviewed both at school and outside it, and an educational proposal was implemented. Ideas expressed in the school context were analysed using the partial possible model, which states that the inferences and explanations used to describe a subject consist of constricting ideas, rules of correspondence, and a set of phenomenological inferences about processes. After identifying these components in the children’s ideas, we developed models to describe their conceptions about mixing colours. We employed a different approach to analyse children’s ideas related to their cultural context. The results showed that children change from a conception that focuses on colours as entities that do not change and as properties of objects (model 1) to the idea that colour represents a quality of substances or objects that can be modified by mixing colours (model 2). Cultural context analysis showed that stories are independent from one another and that they are not connected to colour mixing processes, only to the actions of colour on people. We concluded that students generate independent constructions between school and cultural knowledge.     

Children’s Likes and Dislikes about what they Read

Abstract

Based on Fiedler’s contingency model of leadership, it was assumed that the teacher style required for effective student learning in the classroom depends on the favorableness of the situation for teaching (favorableness is defined in terms of ease of exercising influence). A person-oriented teacher was expected to be more effective than a task-oriented teacher in a situation of intermediate favorableness. A task-oriented teacher was expected to be more effective in an unfavorable situation. In support of these predictions, eighth-grade male students in a situation of intermediate favorableness rated the person-oriented teacher more positively than the task-oriented teacher in terms of effectiveness, encouragement, interest, and how much they learned. In an unfavorable situation, the opposite pattern occurred: students rated the task-oriented teacher more positively than the person-oriented teacher. Results on a performance test at the end of the lesson, though not significant, were in the predicted direction that paralleled the results on students' impression ratings. The implications of these results for teacher education were considered.     

Children’s sexual behavior problems: An ecological model using the LONGSCAN data

BackgroundAlthough prior research has indicated that sexual behavior problems (SBPs) are present among maltreated and non-maltreated children, risk factors for SBPs remain understudied. Further, few studies have examined multiple forms of trauma such as exposure to community violence and several likely important familial and environmental factors have yet to be investigated in the context of SBPs. The use of a more comprehensive ecological model of child, trauma-related, family, and environmental risk factors may help to further delineate the factors that contribute to the development of SBPs.ObjectiveThe aim of the current study was to build upon previous research by utilizing an ecological model that includes child, trauma-related, caregiver and familial, and environmental factors as potential predictors of SBPs.Participants and SettingThe present study was conducted with 1,112 8-year-old children (51.6% female; 48.9% Black) and their primary caregivers from the Longitudinal Studies in Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN) study.ResultsSeveral child, caregiver, and familial factors, as well as sexual and physical abuse demonstrated bivariate associations with SBPs. A number of these factors remained significant in a regression model, such as child’s living arrangement, child’s aggressive behaviors and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), sexual and physical abuse, caregiver’s psychological difficulties, and children’s perceptions of family health.ConclusionsThe findings highlight the role of select child, trauma-related, caregiver and familial, and environmental factors in the context of SBPs and also demonstrate the need to examine multiple levels of children’s environments when investigating SBPs.     

ALPSP-blog-News about JZUS: Innovation versus ’very good’ journals

YH(Helen)ZHANG won‘The Chinese Government Award for Publishing’for Figures in 2014YH(Helen)ZHANG was elected as a new member of‘PILA/CrossR ef Board Directors 2014’The updated website of JZUS(http://www.zju.edu.cn/jzus)has been launched in December 2014     

Lie-telling as a mode of antisocial action: Children’s lies and behavior problems

Despite the fact that lie-telling is a common concern among parents, clinicians, and professionals, there has been little systematic investigation of the lies that children tell in relation to their problematic behaviors, nor of other social factors that may influence this relation. This study explored the relation between children’s problem behaviors and their lie-telling in two studies. The first examined whether children would tell an antisocial lie to an unfamiliar adult to conceal cheating behavior. The second analyzed the relation between children’s problem behaviors, parenting styles, and the frequency of lies reported by parents over two weeks at home. Results suggest that children with higher levels of behavior problems are more likely to tell an antisocial lie to an unfamiliar adult and have a higher frequency of parent-reported lies. Results also indicate that parenting approaches moderate the relation between behavior problems and the frequency of lies that parents report.     

Motor Impairment in Children’s Literature: Asking the Children

How do schoolchildren respond when they encounter a wheelchair user in a fictional text? This article describes a doctoral project where groups of children were presented with excerpts from books by Hilary McKay and Jacqueline Wilson in which wheelchair users play a significant role. The pupils were asked to discuss issues arising from these readings. The views pupils expressed were relevant, imaginative and positive. Only on two rare occasions did the pupils respond in ways that could be categorised as prejudicial towards disabled people. The article describes the methodology adopted for the study, directly quotes from and explores the views of the pupils. The teaching of children about disability and disabled people currently in the English curriculum for Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) is alleged to be inadequate; a weakness which could be addressed in the manner described, using literature for sensitive educational debate. This study is unusual in that the research subjects include a group of children who are motor impaired. The Doctor of Education who conducted the research for her thesis and authored this article is also herself a fulltime wheelchair user.     

What the Pendulum Can Tell Educators about Children’s Scientific Reasoning

Inhelder and Piaget (1958) studied schoolchildrens understanding of a simplependulum as a means of investigating the development of the control of variablesscheme and the ceteris paribus principle central to scientific experimentation.The time-consuming nature of the individual interview technique used by Inhelderhas led to the development of a whole range of group test techniques aimed attesting the empirical validity and increasing the practical utility of Piagets work.The Rasch measurement techniques utilized in this study reveal that the Piagetian Reasoning Task III — Pendulum and the méthode clinique interview revealthe same underlying ability. Of particular interest to classroom teachers is theevidence that some individuals produced rather disparate performances across thetwo testing situations. The implications of the commonalities and individualdifferences in performance for interpreting childrens scientific understanding arediscussed.     

Children’s transitions to school: ‘so what about the parents’? or ‘so,what about the parents’?

Children progress through a number of life transitions and each is a pivotal point of development and growth for them, their parents and family members. Through a review of the literature, the Bioecological Model will be used to frame childhood transitions as highly social, contextualised and political. This paper will assert that governments, schools and educators have an increased role in supporting parents with their changing roles, responsibilities and relationships as their child transitions to school and that schools need to provide space for parents to share their own transition to school narratives in order to better understand the effect these stories may have on the transition process for them and their children. Finally, schools and systems will be challenged to engage in a strengths-based approach to support parents at this pivotal time in their own and their child’s growth and development and call for increased research to identify ways in which this can occur within respectful, collaborative and agentic relationships.     

A discussion of the developing role of educational psychologists within Children’s Services

This paper reflects upon the developing role of educational psychologists (EPs) within the local authority Children’s Services, from the starting point that the EP role has, through numerous reviews, been clearly conceptualised. Detailing the philosophy and framework for the inception of Children’s Services in England, the authors propose two specific directions for EP work within this context. With an illustrative case study of one local authority EP service, it is argued that, whilst the core EP functions remain constant, it is the range and derivation of EP work which is being, and will continue to be, transformed. Reinforcing Stobie’s emphasis from 2002 upon EPs’ ability to respond flexibly to the changing socio‐political context, and the associated challenges for initial professional training, the authors highlight the significance of issues of role specialisation, commissioning of educational psychology services, and evaluation of the outcomes of EP work. A strategy for future EP role reviews is proposed.     

Yesterday’s conservationists: how were they educated about the outdoors and the environment?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of early-life educational experiences on the development of environmental attitudes among historical conservation individuals. Five key individuals who were active in conservation and environmental issues were identified in this study. Specifically, the goal was to discover what caused conservation and environmental ideals and behaviors among the historical figures chosen for this study. The factors found to be consistent in influencing the environmental attitudes of historical environmental/conservation scholars are interaction with nature (alone or with friends), family and education (reading).     

Small Talk: Children’s Everyday ‘Molecule’ Ideas

This paper reports on 6–11-year-old children’s ‘sayings and doings’ (Harré 2002) as they explore molecule artefacts in dialectical-interactive teaching interviews (Fleer, Cultural Studies of Science Education 3:781–786, 2008; Hedegaard et al. 2008). This sociocultural study was designed to explore children’s everyday awareness of and meaning-making with cultural molecular artefacts. Our everyday world is populated with an ever increasing range of molecular or nanoworld words, symbols, images, and games. What do children today say about these artefacts that are used to represent molecular world entities? What are the material and social resources that can influence a child’s everyday and developing scientific ideas about ‘molecules’? How do children interact with these cognitive tools when given expert assistance? What meaning-making is afforded when children are socially and materially assisted in using molecular tools in early chemical and nanoworld thinking? Tool-dependent discursive studies show that provision of cultural artefacts can assist and direct developmental thinking across many domains of science (Schoultz et al., Human Development 44:103–118, 2001; Siegal 2008). Young children’s use of molecular artefacts as cognitive tools has not received much attention to date (Jakab 2009a, b). This study shows 6–11-year-old children expressing everyday ideas of molecular artefacts and raising their own questions about the artefacts. They are seen beginning to domesticate (Erneling 2010) the words, symbols, and images to their own purposes when given the opportunity to interact with such artefacts in supported activity. Discursive analysis supports the notion that using ‘molecules’ as cultural tools can help young children to begin ‘putting on molecular spectacles’ (Kind 2004). Playing with an interactive game (ICT) is shown to be particularly helpful in assisting children’s early meaning-making with representations of molecules, atoms, and their chemical symbols.     

Children’s Intergroup Attitudes: Insights From Iran

Children generally favor individuals in their own group over others, but it is unclear which dimensions of the out-group affect this bias. This issue was investigated among 7- to 8-year-old and 11- to 12-year-old Iranian children (N = 71). Participants evaluated in-group members and three different out-groups: Iranian children from another school, Arab children, and children from the United States. Children’s evaluations closely aligned with the perceived social status of the groups, with Americans viewed as positively as in-group members and Arabs viewed negatively. These patterns were evident on measures of affiliation, trust, and loyalty. These findings, which provide some of the first insights into the social cognition of Iranian children, point to the role of social status in the formation of intergroup attitudes.     

Reading and Reinterpreting Picture Books on Children’s Television: Implications for Young Children’s Narrative Literacy

Bookaboo is a television programme aiming to promote literacy and reading among young children. In each episode, a celebrity reads a book to Bookaboo, a dog who plays the drums in a rock band, in order to help him overcome stage fright. Using the episode featuring the picture book (Cowell and Layton in That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, 2006) as a case study, this article explores how this type of adaptation of picture books transforms the original narrative, with implications for children’s developing narrative literacy. Taking a multimodal social semiotic perspective, this study investigates the changes in meaning which result from the employment of semiotic resources such as animation, sound, and camera movement in the representation of the book on the television show. We argue that the deployment of such resources can subtly reshape the meanings expressed through the modes of language and images in the original picture book, potentially affecting the child viewer’s engagement with the narrative. Examining the use of these resources in the picture book’s televisual representation is thus an important first step towards developing frameworks for evaluating the ability of television programmes that incorporate picture book reading to support children’s literacy.     

Being mean: children’s gendered perceptions of peer teasing

Recent research suggests that social cognition may play a role in the connections among gendered experiences of teasing within the grade school classroom. Within the framework of social-cognitive developmental theory, this qualitative research study investigates how gender may influence young children’s experiences and perception of teasing within the context of peer relationships. The present study explored the role gender plays in 89 Canadian children’s (4–9 years of age, 39 girls, 50 boys) perceptions of peer teasing through participants’ drawings and accompanying narratives. Results indicate that gender may help shape girls’ and boys’ perceptions of peer teasing in the classroom and suggest the need for educators to build a school culture of kindness, peace, and compassion to enhance children’s social-emotional lives.     

From Young Children’s Ideas about Germs to Ideas Shaping a Learning Environment

This paper is concerned with highlighting young children’s ideas about the nature, location and appearance of germs, as well as their reasoning strands about germs’ ontological category and biological functions. Moreover, it is concerned with exploring how all these could be taken into account for shaping a potentially fruitful learning environment. Conducting individual, semi-structured interviews with 35 preschoolers (age 4.5–5.5) of public kindergartens in the broader area of Patras, we attempted to trace their ideas about what germs are, where they may be found, whether they are good or bad and living or non-living and how they might look like in a drawing. Moreover, children were required to attribute a series of biological functions to dogs, chairs and germs, and finally to create a story with germs holding a key-role. The analysis of our qualitative data within the “NVivo” software showed that the informants make a strong association of germs with health and hygiene issues, locate germs mostly in our body and the external environment, are not familiar with the ‘good germs’-idea, and draw germs as ‘human-like’, ‘animal-like’ or ‘abstract’ entities. Moreover, they have significant difficulties not only in employing biological functions as criteria for classifying germs in the category of ‘living’, but also in just attributing such functions to germs using a warrant. Finally, the shift from our findings to a 3-part learning environment aiming at supporting preschoolers in refining their initial conceptualization of germs is thoroughly discussed in the paper.