Environmental education research: to what ends?

This paper engages questions about ends in environmental education research. In doing so, I argue that such questions are essentially normative, and that normative questions are underrepresented in this field. After cautioning about perils of prescribing research agendas, I gently suggest that in environmental education key normative questions exist at the intersection of ‘education’ and ‘ethics’, and that they point to an area of research that deserves more attention. In describing the intersecting nature of these ideas, I show that how education is conceived in turn shapes interpretations of ethics, and vice versa. Seen this way, I also show how ethics inquiry in an educational context can be conceived as a means to explore controversy, dissonance, unconventional ideas, and to imagine new possibilities. Finally, I argue that research at this intersection of education and ethics can provide insights that can enable us to teach, inquire, and ultimately live as if the world mattered.     

Looked-after Children: what supports them to learn?

This paper outlines a study which explored six young Looked-after Children’s perceptions of what supports them to learn. The participants were aged between eight and nine years old and lived in the UK. The study adopted semi-structured interviews and notepad diaries as research methods and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as the research methodology. Three super-ordinate themes were developed, which focussed on the importance which participants placed on school as the major support for learning as summarised in the themes: a place where I am accepted; a place where I can make choices; and a place which personalises learning. A model seeking to outline the findings was generated and the implications which the research raises are discussed. Additionally, considerations for future research are outlined.     

Attitudes to reading: what can stories tell us?

Children’s attitudes to reading clearly influence their success in it and, while teachers have known this for some while, they have lacked easy ways of establishing what these attitudes are. Here Pauline Davis suggests one approach to this through story-telling.     

New medical technology: to what does it lead?

In this paper I first discuss the concept of medical technology. (I thank Knut Arnesen, Arvid Fennefoss, and Aslaug H?ye for many informative and educational conversations about problems pertaining to technology). Then, I review some different meanings of the term, and then discuss the relationship between ethics and the scientific method. Finally, the understanding that emerges from this account is applied to a special problem: the relationship between technology and deafness.     

Children's perceptions of wider reading: to what extent do 7- and 8-year-old children read beyond the scheme books?

A case study was conducted with a class of twenty 7- to 8-year-old children in a primary school in the North West of England, to explore possible links between the use of a school reading scheme and children's involvement in wider reading. A questionnaire was administered to all children in the class, followed by semi-structured interviews with three children. The findings revealed that the vast majority of the children held extremely positive views of their reading scheme books but were also very enthusiastic wider readers, be it either independent reading or reading with a parent or carer. Further findings emerged suggest that environmental factors, such as access to books at home and library usage, also play an important part in children's involvement in wider reading.     

Children's Responses to Contrasting `Realistic' Mathematics Problems: Just how realistic are children ready to be?

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis within the world of mathematics education on realistic problem solving. At the same time research has shown that children typically remain apparently unwilling or unable to introduce realistic considerations when solving supposedly realistic word problems, though research has also shown that children's behaviour in this domain does vary as a function of the nature of the item, its context and the child's social background. This paper analyses 11–12 year-old English children's responses to two realistic problems. The first is taken from English national tests; the second is a revised version of this item which has been rewritten to encourage a more realistic pattern of responses. Through a comparison of responses to the two items it is suggested that, given suitable realistic problems, many children may be more willing and able to introduce realistic responses in a testing context than earlier research might lead us to expect.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Ready to learn? Children's pre-academic achievement in pre-Kindergarten programs

We examined children's growth in school-related learning and social skills over the pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) year in state-funded programs designed to prepare children for kindergarten. We expected that children's gains in academic and social skills could be attributed to variations in the structural and classroom process dimensions of program quality. Nearly 3000 (n = 2800) children were randomly selected, four per classroom, from approximately 700 randomly selected, state-funded pre-Kindergarten classrooms in eleven states. Enrollment in pre-K appeared related to gains in academic skills. Children showed larger gains in academic outcomes when they experienced higher-quality instruction or closer teacher–child relationships. Gains were not related to characteristics of the child or program (i.e., ratio, teacher qualifications and program location and length). These findings have implications for a range of state and local policy and program development efforts as well as for theories of contextual influences on development.     

Case study: what supports students to improve their grades?

Abstract

This case study considers students who achieved ‘borderline’ (40–45%) grades in their first assignment on a module, but went on to markedly improve their grades over the course of the module. The students were studying nursing and social work at the UK Open University, and they were all sponsored by employers. Semi-structured telephone interviews were used to explore the experiences of the students, including the way in which they reacted to assessment feedback and how this contributed to their learning and development. Other themes that emerged from the study include the emotions experienced by the students, sometimes challenging their self-confidence and evoking feelings associated with emotional vulnerability, and the tendency for students to initially approach assessment independently, but later to create and take advantage of opportunities for social learning. The role of the tutor in helping students to prepare for assessment appears to be significant, as does the fact that students are sponsored by their employers, which provides an additional incentive to complete the module.     

Superhighway or Road to Nowhere? Children's Relationships with Digital Technology

This article offers a critical overview of the cultural and educational benefits and dangers of digital media for young people. It argues that public debates on this issue have veered from utopian hype to moral panic. In contrast, the author argues for a more measured account of how young people appropriate such technologies in the context of their everyday lives. The article goes on to provide brief accounts of the author's previous research on children's engagement with computer games, and on their creative uses of multimedia in the home, which illustrate this approach. The article concludes with some broad principles which might guide future policy in this field.     

What is to be done? Children's ascriptions of conventional obligations

It is often not apparent what people ought to do. Three experiments explored cues that children and adults may use to identify conventional obligations. Experiment 1 addressed the hypothesis that young children identify obligations with expected outcomes. Although preschool-aged (4-5 years) children often expected consistency, they and school-aged (7-8 years) and adult participants indicated that obligations may be at odds with costs and benefits. In Experiment 2, all participants realized that people may have obligations they are unaware of. Preschool-aged children often used information about obligations to identify characters' beliefs. In Experiment 3, preschool but not school-aged children reliably identified obligations with the desires of authorities. The results are discussed in terms of expectations about canonical relations between mental states, outcomes, and obligations.     

Children's understanding of the additive composition of number and of the decimal structure: what is the relationship?

Nunes and Bryant (Children doing mathematics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996) proposed that an understanding of the additive composition of number could be a precursor to an understanding of the decimal structure. If this is so, children should achieve an understanding of additive composition before they can handle the decimal structure. The aim of our study was to determine the developmental timing of these two forms of mathematical understanding. 5- and 6-year-old children each completed both an addition task and Terezinha Carraher's (In: Streefland, L. (Ed.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, vol. 1. Research Group on Mathematics Education and Computer Centre, State University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1985, pp. 288–303) shop task, with concrete materials. The addition task tested an understanding of additive composition by measuring whether children used a counting-all or counting-on strategy to add two quantities. The shop task tested an understanding of the decimal structure by investigating whether or not children could successfully combine tens and ones in producing a given amount of money. Our results suggest that learning about the decimal structure enhances children's understanding of the general principle of additive composition.     

International large-scale assessments: what uses,what consequences?

Abstract

Background: International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) are a much-debated phenomenon in education. Increasingly, their outcomes attract considerable media attention and influence educational policies in many jurisdictions worldwide. The relevance, uses and consequences of these assessments are often the focus of research scrutiny. Whilst some argue that the assessment outcomes provide an effective basis for informed policy-making, critics claim that the use of international assessment data can result in a range of unintended consequences, such as the shaping and governing of school systems ‘by numbers’.

Purpose: This article explores and analyses the arguments about the uses and consequences of ILSAs. In particular, the discourse about the assessments’ consequential validity will be discussed and evaluated.

Sources of evidence: Literature relating to the uses and consequences of large-scale assessment was analysed, with a focus on research on the consequential aspects of validity.

Main argument: Much research suggests that ILSAs have unintended consequences that affect and influence educational policy. However, the influences on educational policy are complex and interwoven: for example, it is not clear-cut whether effects such as converging curricular are, necessarily, direct consequences of large-scale assessments. Further, it is suggested that a beneficial consequence of large-scale assessment is the infrastructure they provide for studies in the social sciences, although caution must be applied to causal claims, in particular because of the cross-sectional design of the assessments.

Conclusions: The considerable literature discussing the uses and consequences of large-scale assessments tends to point out potential negative aspects of the studies. However, it is also apparent that large-scale international assessments can be a valuable resource for studying global trends and evolving systems in education. Despite the extensive debates around large-scale assessment outcomes both in the media and in educational policy arenas, empirical educational research all too often appears underused in the discussion.     

Futures for Children's Literature: Evolution or radical break?

As electronic media increasingly dominate narratives for children, not merely the form or the content but the very nature of narrative is changing. Future narratives for the 'computer reader', using the Internet and multimedia may seem to be no more nor less than individual, unassessable chaos. But these readers still need to subsist in a linear educational system and teachers will have to negotiate the profound intellectual shift that the mediation between old and new narratives implies. At the most basic level this will involve revising what we mean to be 'literate' and to be a 'good reader'.     

Listening to children’s views of spiritual and metaphysical concepts: A new dimension to educational psychology practice?

Educational psychologists (EPs) have for many years been developing techniques for listening to children. The aim of the present research was to investigate ways of listening to the “spiritual” views of children in order to develop questions that educational psychologists might use as part of the assessment repertoire. The study explored children’s spiritual concepts such as their purpose for “being on the planet” and the “meaning of their life”. The findings suggest that primary and secondary school children from mixed religious backgrounds can respond to spiritual questions in a clear way. In addition, most children believed that spiritual views influence how children behave. Further research is required to explore whether children’s views of spiritual concepts are linked to learning and progress in school and in life.     

Teacher change and “high-stakes” assessment: what happens to professional development?

This study explored the impact of learning a new instructional practice in a US school district that places great value in a statewide student assessment. Grounded Theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin, 1998, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, 2nd Edition, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA) was used to analyze interview and observation data from 20 teachers undergoing professional development in a new reading strategy. We found that teaching in a “high-stakes” assessment environment impacts the implementation, fidelity, and sustainability of new teaching methods. Most importantly, our results suggest that some teachers may use “high-stakes” assessments as their primary reference point in which to gauge the merit of innovative teaching practices. Furthermore, decisions regarding which components to implement, how often to use these components, and what materials to utilize in their implementation may be influenced by the preparation for and expected results of these tests.