Do transitional classrooms really provide transitional time?

In the United States, kindergarten marks the beginning of formal schooling for more than 3 million children each year (Shepard & Smith, 1986). At the end of the kindergarten year, most of these children demonstrate expected levels of achievement and are promoted to traditional first-grade classrooms. Others are labeled unready or immature for successful performance in today's academically rigorous first grade. In most elementary schools, the placement for these at-risk children is either retention in kindergarten or social promotion to first grade. An alternative in approximately 17% of the nation's elementary schools is assignment to a transitional classroom between kindergarten and first grade (Educational Research Service, in press). This additional year of instruction is often viewed as a gift of time — time for children to mature and make a gradual transition from kindergarten to first grade.Judith E. Stroud is Assistant Professor of Elementary Education, Ball State University, Munice, IN. R. Ann Williams is Professor of Elementary Education, Ball State University, Muncie, IN.     

Choosing competency-based,humanistic and self-directed programs: The contribution of personality and reasoning

Fifty-five college women enrolled in competency-based, humanistic or self-directed education programs completed their California Personality Inventory and listed five reasons for selecting their program. CPI results indicated that self-directed students scored lower than other students on the Femininity Scale (p.001). Using Chickering's seven vectors of change as a framework, the study found competency-based students identifying purpose and competence, humanistic students identifying inter-personal relationships and integrity, and self-directed student identifying autonomy and purpose as reasons for enrolling in their nontraditional programs. The study used these results to question the mythology that adherents to different programs are of different personality types and to argue that differences in perceptions of purpose in education distinguish students in the three programs.     

Talk,read, joke,make friends: Language power for children

The lusty birth cry with which most babies enter the world is the first in a long series of vocal behaviors which ever increase in communicative effectiveness as a child grows through infancy into the preschool years. By the time a child enters elementary grades, he or she can understand and use thousands of words (Honig, 1982b). Pronunciation is almost entirely comprehensible. The child uses the main grammatical rules very well such as adding ing for the progressive tense, or ed for the past tense, or using negation correctly as in I don't like liver (De Villiers & De Villiers, 1979; Elliot, 1981). Children can understand double meanings for words by four years of age. A child might explain to you that A turn is when your car turns around a corner, and it also is when you take turns on the playground. Linguistic humor becomes possible as the child becomes able to play with and make a play on words (Honig, 1988). Alice Sterling Honig teaches at Syracuse University in the Department of Child and Family Studies, College for Human Development, in Syracuse, NY. She is an editorial board member of Day Care & Early Education.     

Education of the refugee in the United States

Conclusion This historical survey of the educational goals developed on behalf of the immigrant and refugee in America indicates that there has been a complete cycle. The first systematic educational efforts, as we have shown, were aimed at teaching the immigrant the English language so that he would be useful for his tasks in American industry. Then came the period which extended this educational goal by offering instruction in several aspects of acculturation (officially, assimilation, but a concept which has never been put into effect in the history of America's minorities). The post-war period saw the stress on the academic level on the cultural democracy concept; but this ideal has been more academic than practical, and World War II saw no definite evidences of the popular interest in any Americanization program. The recent waves of refugees, bringing in more or less well-educatedindividuals, saw a revival of educational efforts on their behalf; but they differ from the former endeavors in their emphasis on individual education and on instruction in English. The social aspects of acculturation — featuring, in general, the period between World War I and II — have been entirely ignored 1).     

Community attitudes and the urban university

This study looks at the relationships between a number of personal and social characteristics of a random sample of 254 urban citizens from the Twin Cities and their satisfaction with a University. Most of the urban citizens had considerable university related experiences, and they believed that faculty and students are sincere and hardworking. Most were satisfied with different facets of University life, endorsed the broad principle of campus freedom of expression, but were generally opposed to the goals of students when they used more active methods of dissent. Citizens' satisfaction with the University was heavily related to their perception of campus life as it related to the ideological criteria of Work Ethic and Americanism.     

Beyond a transmission model of communication

Elbers grapples with two persistent issues in psychology: (a) the role of the adult and the child in development, and (b) depictions of competence as context specific or generalized. Elbers' entrenchment in a transmission model of meaning undermines his portrayal of the child as an active participant in development. Furthermore, his characterization of competence as something in the head of the individual hinders his attempts to contextualize competence. We outline a framework informed by Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and others, which depicts both the formation and the functioning of mental processes (or competence) as fundamentally interactive. Mental functions arise in social interactions in which all participants accommodate each other, thus obviating the question of who is active or passive in the interaction. Furthermore, the social interactive origins of mental functioning impose a social context on all competencies. Such a framework facilitates movement away from the dilemmas which Elbers cogently raises.     

The instructor self-evaluation form: Development and validation of an ipsative forced-choice measure of self-perceived faculty performance

An ipsative forced-choice college faculty self-evaluation questionnaire was developed. The instrument was validated by comparing self-evaluation scores to student rating scores and by comparing superior and nonsuperior instructors on the basis of student ratings. Both analyses yielded positive, but modest, indications of validity. Implications are discussed relative to the questionnaire's utility in faculty development activities.     

The relationship between attributes of a children's radio program and its appeal to listeners

An approach was developed to investigate the link between attributes of a children's radio program and children's judgments of appeal. Program tapes were divided into 28 segments and were rated for the presence of 30 attributes. Through multidimensional scaling analysis, attributes were organized into six clusters of Superattributes on the basis of their co-occurrence across the 28 segments. Superattributes were labeled and assigned scores that reflected the degree to which each was present in the 28 segments. A sample of 42 children 8–12 years old listened to the test tapes and provided a written judgment of their interest in the program at each segment. Results revealed that the Superattributes Instruction, Intro Talk, and Jokes were negatively associated with children's interest, while Popular Music was positively correlated with interest. In planning programs and understanding the effects of radio on children, designers and researchers should pay special attention to those formats in radio programming that are familiar to children, especially popular music and instructional material.     

Factors affecting probabilistic judgements in children and adolescents

Six hundred and eighteen pupils, enrolled in elementary and junior-high-school classes (Pisa, Italy) were asked to solve a number of probability problems. The main aim of the investigation has been to obtain a better understanding of the origins and nature of some probabilistic intuitive obstacles. A linguistic factor has been identified: It appears that for many children, the concept of certain events is more difficult to comprehend than that of possible events. It has been found that even adolescents have difficulties in detaching the mathematical structure from the practical embodiment of the stochastic situation. In problems where numbers intervene, the magnitude of the numbers considered has an effect on their probability: bigger numbers are more likely to be obtained than smaller ones. Many children seem to be unable to solve probability questions, because of their inability to consider the rational structure of a hazard situation: chance is, by itself, an equalizing factor of probabilities. Positive intuitive capacities have also been identified: some problems referring to compound events are better solved when addressed in a general form than when addressed in a particular way.     

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.     

Emigration,internationalization, and “brain drain”: Propensities among British Academics

This research links two important higher education phenomena: potential brain drain among academics abroad and the U.S. academic labor market. The inquiry draws on the brain drain literature and is grounded primarily on a secondary analysis of a major survey (1989) of British university and polytechnic faculty members. The anlaysis shows that fully 40.0 percent of university faculty are seriously considering a move abroad with the substantial majority favoring the United States as a destination. Faculty characteristics—including academic field, research versus teaching orientation, rank, age, gender, and political identification—are correlated with faculty members' professed interest in emigration. The analysis also compares (former) polytechnic to university faculty as well as to a subset of Oxford and Cambridge faculty.     

A comparative study of occupational stress among African American and white university faculty: A research note

This paper is a comparison of levels of occupational stress among African American and white college and university faculty members in U.S. institutions. Using survey data collected from a national sample of faculty, an analysis of reported occupational stress levels was undertaken to determine if issues raised in previous research regarding extra-academic assignments given to African American faculty limits their access to the more traditional faculty roles, creating pressure to perform in ways not expected of white faculty. To test these assertions, scales measuring stress from teaching, research, and service activities were constructed for African American and white faculty from a larger faculty stress index. Results of the analysis indicate that African American faculty report generally higher levels of occupational stress than their white counterparts, especially in the areas of research and service activities.     

Infusing humanistic activities into cognitively oriented curriculum

In our current quest for excellence, we often miss the essential nature of it. It is trendy to use such terms as back-to-basics, gifted education, and excellence to describe a new teaching strategy or innovative educational program. It is also true that many of these programs designed for children are really intended to benefit others.Harry Morgan is Chairman of Early Childhood Education at West Georgia College in Carrollton. He is author ofThe Learning Community (Charles Merrill).     

Studying construction work: Connecting classroom centers

Johnny has one hammer, one hammer, one hammer; Johnny has one hammer, Johnny has two, sings a small group of children in the woodworking center as they pound small cuts of wood with hammer and nails. Hey, Ronnie, put that block here. We're making a chimney for our house, directs one youngster in the block center. We can move in when we're finished, he tells his two companions.Laverne Warner is Professor of Early Childhood Education within the Division of Teacher Education at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Melissa Sepulveda is a kindergarten teacher at Lowery Elementary School in the Cy-Fair Independent School District in Houston, Texas.     

Career Counseling for Longevity: Self-Care and Burnout Prevention Strategies for Counselor Resilience

Balancing self-care and other-care is often a struggle for career counselors and others in the helping professions. The process of caring is made up of a constant series of empathic attachments, active involvements, and felt separations. The ability to continually engage in the caring cycle is important for success. However, the constant need to re-create the cycle of caring can lead to counselor depletion and burnout. This article provides a developmental framework for assisting career counselors to avoid depleted caring while prolonging their professional longevity. The model of self-care includes recognizing the hazards of high touch work, such as limited resources and constant one-way caring. Also addressed are specific means of professional and personal sustenance, such as maximizing experiences of professional success and balancing personal wellness throughout one's career.     

Becoming a mature student: How adult appplicants weigh the advantages and disadvantages of higher education

The data presented in this paper is taken fromthe results of two much larger studies ofmature student decision-making and HigherEducation (HE), which considerprocesses of agency from initial considerationof the possibility of becoming a studentto eventually becoming one. In thispaper, six categories of applicant to HE arediscussed: `Delayed traditional students', `Late starters' who have undergone alife-transforming event e.g. redundancy ordivorce and require `a new start'. `Single parents' `Careerists', who are currently in employment who seek a qualification to make progress in their existing careers, `Escapees' who are currently in employment who want a qualification as a way out of `dead-end' jobs, Finally, the `personal growers', a small number pursuing education for its own sake.These categories of applicants are discussed inlight of the factors that both catalyse andinhibit individuals' decision-making duringapplication to HE.     

“It's Easier to Be Yourself When You Are Invisible”: Female College Students Discuss Their Online Classroom Experiences

There has been considerable scholarly interest in issues related to gender in the classroom, especially in terms of finding ways in which classrooms might be configured to be more welcoming--and less chilly--to female students. There is some evidence to suggest that the online learning environment may provide educators with opportunities to achieve a more female-friendly classroom, and this study was designed to gather information about that question. 125 female college students who had completed at least one online, college-level class were invited to discuss their experiences learning online. These data show that female college students respond to the online environment in a variety of ways. A small group of students indicated that they did not enjoy learning online, while others expressed mixed feelings. The majority, however, had positive things to say about their online classroom experiences; and of these, a large number identified anonymity as the most important positive aspect of the online learning environment.     

Informal interaction and faculty projections of student ratings of the institutional climate

This study employed the Semantic Differential technique to investigate the relationship between informal interaction with students and the accuracy with which faculty members project students' perceptions of the institutional climate at two colleges of Arts and Sciences. When subdivided into nominal categories of high, moderate, and low interactors on the basis of their frequency of informal, out-of-class contacts with students, high interactors were found to project consistently more accurate student ratings of the climate on a bureaucracy factor than low interactors. A similar, though not consistent, relationship was found between high and low interactors on an intellectualism/scholarship dimension.     

Whitehead and a new look at teaching elementary science

If Whitehead is right, science teachers who try to increase student interest by making the science they teach more pure and by covering more material are going about their work in just the wrong way. Science, for purposes of precision in measurement, translates the dynamic world of feeling and force, of causal efficacy (for example, the San Francisco earthquake), into a static representation spatialized and given presentational immediacy (for example, the Richter scale). But notice that the Richter scale isn't very interesting (even as abstract art) apart from its connection, via symbolic reference, to the earthquake. Such reference is essential to give both a sense of reality and a feeling of interes to the subject, but it makes the science less pure, and it takes more time to cover the material. An example of teaching pure and impure formal logic is given as a case study.