Children's views of collaborative learning

Collaborative learning is a widely used and popular strategy in many primary schools. In this article, the authors review the nature and purpose of collaborative learning and present a summary of how one small group of Year 5/6 children view its effectiveness.     

Children's views of Teaching Assistants in primary schools

This study reports primary children's perceptions of the role of the Teaching Assistant (TA) in three state primary schools in South West England. Through the use of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, an exploration was made of how children view TAs, who are commonly found delivering the curriculum alongside the teacher in the classroom. A simple questionnaire was completed by 419 junior children and 86 infant and junior pupils were interviewed, giving children a ‘voice’ about an environment which they inhabit for a substantial proportion of their lives. The results show that children between the ages of 5–11 perceive the role of the TA to be of value and their work to be useful and helpful. Their accounts of the TAs' work in general and in relation to themselves, in particular, were clear and insightful. They distinguish between teacher and TA in terms of training, vocation and responsibility. Most children consider themselves to be confident and willing to ask for help but a significant minority reported that they preferred not to ask for help. The implications of the findings for further research on children's views and for educational practice are discussed.     

Children's Misconceptions in Primary Science: A Survey of teachers' views

The study examines the effects of Piagetian‐like tasks' characteristics on the performance of these tasks by different age group students. The tasks were taken from a developed and validated test (Shemesh, 1983) which measures students' reasoning skills in six cognitive operations: conservation, proportions, control of variables, probability, combinations and correlations. Subjects were seventh, ninth and twelfth grade students, enrolled in two urban schools. Three different 3X2 factorial research design experiments, with three levels of students age and two versions of the test in each experiment, were set up for this study. Experiment 1 tested the effect of the method of task presentation (video‐taped demonstrations versus paper‐and‐pencil tasks with illustrations). Experiment 2 tested the effect of questionnaire format (multiple‐choice versus short essay questions) and experiment 3 tested the effect of the numerical content (integer ratio like 1:2, 1:3 versus noninteger ratio like 2:3, 3:5) on different age group students' responses.     

What difference does it make? Children's views of the differences between some quadrilaterals

This paper describes an attempt to explore aspects of the language used in children's written work in a secondary mathematics classroom as a means of assessing their mathematical understanding. It focuses on children's conceptualisations of polygons and their attempts to differentiate between them. It also examines the use of database and concordancing software in deepening our understanding of a potentially major source of students' (mis) conceptions: the published materials they engage with. It describes their usefulness in providing a systematic and efficient method of analysis of materials to explore patterns within them. The method is also used to identify possible sources of students' misconceptions about the properties of polygons based on their likely exposure to potentially misleading examples in published materials. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Children's conceptions of the changes of state of water

Children are very familiar with water, ice, and steam as these things have been part of their lives since they first crawled into the kitchen. In this study children's conceptions about familiar phenomena associated with water, e.g., evaporating, condensing, boiling, and the melting of ice, were investigated using a clinical interview technique. The prevalence of specific views at particular age levels was also studied. The results of the investigation indicate that children do have ideas about the changes of state of water which are quite different from the views of scientists. It would also appear that these ideas can sometimes be influenced in unintended ways by science teaching. The implications of these findings for teaching are discussed.     

The Problem of Anxiety in Connection with Investigations concerning Children's Conception of War and Peace

Ålvik, T. The problem of anxiety in connection with investigations concerning children's conception of war and peace. Scand. J. Ed. Res. 215‐233, 1968. The present article deals with the problem of whether or not anxiety is provoked in children when they are questioned about their conception of war and peace. The first part of the article is an introductory discussion and a literature survey where several views on this topic are presented. In the second part of the article two methods of registering variations in level of anxiety are presented. The second method, employing a four‐group pretest/posttest design, is considered the more efficient one. In the last part of the article, results obtained in an exploratory study employing the second method are presented and discussed. The conclusion is that questioning children about matters of war and peace does not seem to provoke anxiety on the part of the subjects. Because of the small number of subjects and the ad hoc instrument used, however, the conclusion must be considered a very tentative one.

     

Teachers' views on recent curriculum changes: tensions and challenges

This article presents the major findings of a small-scale study of recent changes in the elementary school curriculum in Portugal and their implications for teachers' sense of professionalism. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires in a suburban elementary school. Findings suggest the emergence of contradictory trends in teacher professionalism: on the one hand, teachers acknowledge the flexibility and the local logic in the management of school curriculum in which they play a key role; on the other, they highlight issues of bureaucracy and ‘imposed collaboration’, along with the lack of support and guidance to perform their new roles at school. Challenge, ambiguity and tension are key words in defining Portuguese teachers' sense of professionalism in times of change.     

Student views concerning evidence and the expert in reasoning a socio‐scientific issue and personal epistemology

This study investigated their views concerning evidence and expert opinion of 10th‐grade students, accessed by an open‐ended questionnaire in the context of a socio‐scientific issue: the cause of flood disasters, and personal epistemology identified by the Learning Environment Preference Questionnaire (LEP). Students' responses to the open‐ended questions showed that when thinking about the flood issue, most students rely heavily on direct and numerical data to draw their conclusions, while experts represented a source of conclusive information. The LEP scores indicated that, in terms of epistemological development, students were mostly at the stage of the ‘multiplicists’ in Perry's model. The statistical analysis suggested that view towards evidence and expert were associated with personal epistemology.     

Children's views on child abuse and neglect: findings from an exploratory study with Chinese children in Hong Kong

Objectives

This research study explored children's views on issues about child abuse in Hong Kong and examined their implications on child protection work and research in Chinese societies.

Method

Six primary schools were recruited from different districts of Hong Kong. Five vignettes of child maltreatment in the form of flash movies were presented to 87 children in 12 focus groups for discussion. The process was video-taped and the data were transcribed verbatim for data analysis by NUDIST.

Results

(1) Children do not have a homogeneous view on issues about child abuse and neglect, and their awareness and sensitivity to different kinds of child abuse are also different; (2) some of their views on child abuse and neglect are uniquely their own and are markedly different from those of adults; (3) some of the views expressed by children, however, are very much akin to those of adults, such as the factors they would consider in deciding whether a case is child abuse or not; (4) children's disclosure of abuse in Hong Kong is often affected by the Chinese culture in which they live, like filial piety and loyalty to parents.

Conclusion

Children's views on issues of child abuse and neglect, no matter they are the same or different from those of adults, serve to inform and improve child protection work. Children are not only victims in need of protection. They are also valuable partners with whom adult practitioners should closely work.

Practice implications

Children have, and are able to give, views on child abuse. They should be listened to in any child protection work no matter their views are same with or different from those of adults. As this study suggests, the relatively low sensitivity of the children to child neglect and sexual abuse, and their reluctance to disclose abuse and neglect due to their loyalty to parents are areas to focus on in preventive child protection work in a Chinese society like Hong Kong.     

儿童剧与幼儿认知发展

本文以儿童发展的视角,首先阐述了儿童剧教育活动的由来;其次,依据多种发展心理学理论,分析了儿童剧在幼儿心智发展中的重要作用;再次,讨论了儿童剧在不同年龄段所产生的不同作用,指出这种特殊的教育活动对于幼儿认知发展的教育价值尤为重要。针对儿童剧的特点,文章进一步阐述了儿童剧对儿童心智发展及关键经验获得的作用机制,并以莺莺艺术幼儿园多年儿童剧探索的案例,说明了如何在幼儿园进行儿童剧教育活动的实践。     

Learning in the real world? Exploring widening participation student views concerning the ‘fit’ between knowledge learnt and work practices

The aim of this research was to explore why workers in health and social services embarked on a Certificate in Community Care Practice and the extent to which they felt knowledge learnt related to their every‐day work practice. The objective was to indicate how useful more academic courses are for health and social care staff, and to find out the kinds of barriers to practicing theory learnt in the classroom students face in their ‘real world’ of work. Data was collected from 25 mature students (over half were between the ages of 41–50 years), 3 of whom were men from a range of professional backgrounds including; support staff working in residential and domiciliary services and informal (unpaid) carers for people with learning disabilities, mental health difficulties as well as older people. Quantitative (an adapted questionnaire) and qualitative (focus group session which was an integral part of classroom learning about research methodology) methods were employed. Data was analysed using SPSS and thematic analysis. Findings indicated that the main motivators for study was to gain a qualification and for personal development. Students reported their increased desire to link theory learnt which they found highly relevant to their everyday practice, but organisational barriers sometimes precluded them from doing so. The paper ends with policy and practice recommendations.     

Children's memory for phonemically confusable and nonconfusable letters: changes with age and reading ability

This experiment focused on differences that occur with age and reading skill in the use of phonemic codes in short-term retention tasks where stimuli were presented visually. In 1 condition, individuals recalled 6-letter strings composed of rhyming and nonrhyming letters after a 15-sec delay under conditions that permitted phonemic coding and rehearsal. 2 other conditions were designed to suppress (a) rehearsal of certain types of phonemic codes in the delay interval and (b) both phonemic coding at stimulus presentation and rehearsal. Subjects were grade 2 average readers matched in reading skill with grade 4 disabled readers, grade 4 average matched with grade 6 disabled, and grade 6 average matched with grade 4 superior readers. Average readers showed a decrease in errors with age in all 3 conditions, although performance was always better in the nonsuppression condition. In the latter, memory for nonrhyming letters was always better than memory for rhyming letters. Differential use of phonemic codes by good and poor readers in grades 4 and 6 was less than that found in previous research with younger children. Finally, by comparing the performances of grade 2 average with grade 4 disabled readers and grade 4 average with grade 6 disabled readers, the developmental lag hypothesis of reading disability was examined. Problems with testing the hypothesis are discussed.     

培养幼儿自理能力提升幼儿幸福感

学前时期是幼儿自理能力形成的关键时期,幼儿自理能力的培养,有利于幼儿良好生活习惯的养成,有利于增强幼儿的自信心,有利于幼儿身心健康发展.教师应以身作则,做幼儿的榜样,寓教于乐,让幼儿快乐学习,因材施教,正视幼儿的个体差异,还应开展家园共育,共同提高幼儿的自理能力,促进幼儿健康成长.     

孩子们的歌

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