Education,development and poverty reduction: A literature critique

The concept of development has evolved from an exclusive focus on economic growth towards an interrelated, even integrated approach involving progress across a range of disciplines such as health, education, economics and agriculture. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are rooted in this evolved conception of development. A concerted global effort embracing multiple disciplines in the formal and informal sectors is now essential for their achievement. This paper traces the changing meaning of development, while at the same time tracing the benefits of investing in education for poverty reduction, and the conditions that facilitate and/or hamper education's contribution to poverty reduction.     

Heritability in syntactic development: a critique of Munsinger and Douglass

Munsinger and Douglass (Child Development, 1976, 47, 40-50) used the Assessment of Children's Language Comprehension and the Northwestern Syntax Screening Test as measures of syntactic ability to investigate the heritability factor in language acquisition. By comparing the concordance of scores of twins and siblings, they concluded that heritability was the important variable in test performance (h2 = .79) and that environmental influences were not much over, 10. In the present critique, weaknesses regarding test measures are pointed out, and the validity of these measures for the ages of the children used in the study is questioned. It is also emphasized that the question of environmental effects in normal circumstances remains unquantified, and research indicates that language intervention programs with deficient populations can be beneficial.     

Education for sustainable development in Africa: a critique of regional agendas

Asia Pacific Education Review - Education is often perceived in policy agendas as playing a transformative role in realising sustainable development and the SDGs on the continent. The assumption is...     

Disconnecting knowledge and understanding from human values: a critique of National Curriculum development

This research was prompted by the developing political discourse proposing the teaching of Britishness and British values in the context of the United Kingdom. This discourse will be reviewed in the first part of the article, in the context of previous work which has sought to assess how Britishness and related concepts might be promoted through education. The second part will be based on questionnaire responses from a sample of students following post-graduate initial teacher training programmes in a number of higher education partnerships. It indicates that, while political discourse and educational policy have sensitised trainee teachers to the agenda, there remains a deep uncertainty and misgiving about this as an educational objective.     

Child care in the preschool years: Attachment,behaviour problems and cognitive development

The possible implications of the experience of non parental care on cognitive development and on behaviour problems are considered in interaction with individual and contextual variables. A sample of 47 Swiss children who experienced varying kinds of care arrangements were studied longitudinally between 1 and 5 years of age. The effects of the experience of care were related to mothers’ reports of behavioral problems (CBCL, with subscales of internalizing and of externalizing problems) at age 5, and to cognitive developmental quotients (at 1, 2 and 5 years). Several variables were considered for their potential interaction with the experience of care, such as the pattern of attachment to the mother (observed at 21 months of age in the “Strange Situation”), characteristics of the experience of care (duration and type of care), its quality (relationship with non parental caregivers), the socio-economic status of the family, etc. The effect of non parental care on behaviour problems (5 years) happened to be mediated by the the pattern of attachment to the mother: insecurely attached children had some risk to be reported as having externalizing problems, but this didn’t occur when they had an extended experience of non parental care, and when non parental care was mainly family-based. The effect of non parental care on cognitive development was mediated by the quality of care: children with a positive contact with the caregivers had greater cognitive gains between 2 and 5 years; the relationship with the care-givers itself was influenced by the quality of the relationship with the mother. The limited size and origin of the sample restricts generalization, however these data might contribute to the notion that non parental care can have varying effects depending of the type of care, the quality of the relation with the caregivers, the age and personal traits of the child.     

依恋理论述评及展望

依恋不仅是儿童社会性发展的开端,也是个体毕生社会化的基础。基于此,在回顾各学派视角下的依恋理论,指出毕生发展是依恋理论研究值得重视的取向的基础上,简析依恋的毕生发展研究需解决的问题。     

Attachment to Mother/Attachment to Father: A Meta-Analysis

An important tenet of attachment theory is that classification of security or insecurity as derived from the Strange Situation reflects the quality of an infant's relationship with its caregiver. One piece of evidence supporting this claim is the lack of concordance of classification between an infant and its mother and father. We performed a meta-analysis of the 11 studies that have examined the concordance of mother/father attachment to an infant. We found that security of attachment to one parent was dependent upon security to the other parent, that type of insecurity (avoidant/resistant) to one parent was dependent upon type of insecurity to the other, and that subcategory classification within the secure category (B1B2/B3B4) to one parent was dependent upon subcategory classification to the other. These data raise important questions regarding the meaning of infant attachment classification as derived from the Strange Situation. Among the possible explanations for the pattern of data are existence of concordant parenting styles and/or influence of infant temperament (possibly the tendency to cry upon separation) on classification of security/insecurity in the Strange Situation.     

可持续发展的理论框架与体系

本文在介绍了可持续发展的前期理论,当代可持续发展的实践与理论的基础上,全面阐述了以人为本的可持续发展理论体系：全方位的适度人口论;稀缺资源论;生态系统论;总体效益经济效益论;社会协调发展论。     

Fanaticism: A practical critique

Brock's (1985) recent suggestion that rhetorical critics who work out of the philosophy of dramatism could enrich their analyses by utilizing Burke's pentad and terms for order in combination is taken up in this essay. Enhancing these grammatical and formal features of drama through application of Burke's “principle of perfection,” nine “indexes of dramatic intensity” are proposed and were employed in a study of the tragic‐symbol preaching of Rev. Jerry Falwell. Falwell's televised discourses are found to be strongly dramatic and appropriately so, given the audience of true believers bent on changing society he addresses.     

Learning Hierarchies: a critique

Learning hierarchies have received much attention from developmental and instructional psychologists. This article notes that conceptual confusions and methodological deficiencies occur in much of the research so far published. The conceptual confusions concern the terminology used; the ‘likelihood’ or ‘causal’ relationships between elements in the hierarchy; the distinction between ‘prerequisition’ and ‘positive transfer'; the distinction between single pieces of learning and classes of learning; the inclusivity of hierarchical relationships. The methodological deficiencies arise from an inability to measure ‘causal’ relationships; the omission of measurements of ‘positive transfer'; the difficulty of measuring the range of possible relationships within a hierarchy; the need to remove instructional effects from hierarchy validation studies. It is concluded that these confusions and deficiencies preclude data from learning hierarchy studies from being used to diagnose learning failure and in test construction. Suggestions for alternatives to, and improvements on, current methods are made.     

依恋关系的丧失与重建——从依恋研究谈儿童收养

收养家庭亲子依恋关系问题一直是发展心理学和社会心理学非常关注的话题。文章介绍了亲子依恋关系的丧失与收养过程中的重建、影响依恋重建的因素及依恋重建的干预和治疗措施,以期对中国收养家庭的亲子依恋重建问题提供借鉴。