Intonation and communicative intent in mothers' speech to infants: is the melody the message?

This study explores the power of intonation to convey meaningful information about the communicative intent of the speaker in speech addressed to preverbal infants and in speech addressed to adults. Natural samples of infant- and adult-directed speech were recorded from 5 mothers of 12-month-old infants, in 5 standardized interactional contexts: Attention-bid, Approval, Prohibition, Comfort, and Game/Telephone. 25 infant-directed and 25 adult-directed vocalizations were electronically filtered to eliminate linguistic content. The content-filtered speech stimuli were presented to 80 adult subjects: 40 experienced parents and 40 students inexperienced with infants. The subjects' task was to identify the communicative intent of the speaker using only prosodic information, given a 5-alternative forced choice. Listeners were able to use intonation to identify the speaker's intent with significantly higher accuracy in infant-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. These findings suggest that the prosodic patterns of speech to infants are more informative than those of adult-adult speech, and may provide the infant with reliable cues to the communicative intent of the speaker. The interpretation of these results proposed here is that the relation of prosodic form to communicative function is made uniquely salient in the melodies of mothers' speech, and that these characteristic prosodic patterns are potentially meaningful to the preverbal infant.     

Abusive and nonabusive mothers' ability to identify general and specific emotion signals of infants

Slides depicting infants in 7 different emotion states were shown to 20 abusive mothers and to 20 matched, nonabusive mothers. The ability of these subjects to identify general emotional affect (positive and negative) and specific emotion signals was tested. Results indicated that abusive mothers were more likely than the comparison group to incorrectly identify specific emotion signals and to label negative affect as positive.     

Cross-domain effects of achievement goals: social costs and benefits

European Journal of Psychology of Education - In this research, we examined cross-domain effects of achievement goals. In two experimental studies, we manipulated achievement goals and assessed...     

Rupture and adaptation: British technical expertise to the Singapore Polytechnic and the transition to a nation-state

The Singapore Polytechnic underwent a period of both rupture and adaptation as British advisers worked with the post-colonial government to facilitate technical education reform and Singapore’s transition to a nation-state. Established in 1958 and based on the metropolitan model, the Singapore Polytechnic constituted an imperial project for orderly development and decolonisation. It encountered criticisms from nationalists for its colonial links and a brief period of conflict between the advisers and the post-colonial People’s Action Party (PAP) government, underlining colonial Singapore’s uneven transition to its post-colonial future. However, the PAP quickly repaired its relationship with the advisers to plan the next phase of the Polytechnic’s development into a technical university in the 1960s. Unlike many other cases, the history of the Singapore Polytechnic suggests that technical experts, while tied to political interests, did not always fail.     

Supported playgroups in schools: bonding and bridging family knowledge about transition to formal schooling

Supported Playgroups in Schools (SPinS) are a new initiative in the Australian early childhood education landscape. SPinS are playgroups hosted by a playgroup coordinator co-located on a local school site. Research has identified positive benefits of playgroup participation for children and families. However, little is known about the potential for SPinS to contribute to families’ knowledge about transition to formal schooling. This paper uses the social capital concepts of ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ to examine caregivers’ perspectives on their participation in a SPinS with potential to build parental knowledge about their child’s transition to formal schooling. Three main elements of caregivers’ participation in SPinS with such potential are identified, and these elements are mapped into a continuum of low-to-high bonding and bridging relationships to illustrate the potential for SPinS to contribute to the development of increased knowledge about transition to formal schooling by families of young children.     

Children's achievement moderates the effects of mothers' use of control and autonomy support

Two studies investigated the effects of parents' control and autonomy support on low- and high-achieving children. In Study 1, mothers' (N=110) involvement with children (7 to 10 years old) in the context of a challenging task was observed. During this interaction, mothers' control predicted diminished engagement and their autonomy support predicted enhanced performance for low-achieving children more than for high-achieving children. In Study 2, mothers' (N=121) responses to children's (9 to 12 years old) failure were assessed with a daily checklist. Children's grades were obtained at this time and 6 months later. Mothers' controlling responses predicted decreased performance and their autonomy-supportive responses predicted increased performance over time for low achievers more than for high achievers.     

An integrative review of the cognitive costs and benefits of note-taking

Students frequently engage in note-taking to improve the amount of information they remember from lectures. One beneficial effect of note-taking is known as the encoding effect, which refers to deeper processing of information as a consequence of taking notes. This review consists of two parts. In the first part, four lines of research on the encoding effect are summarized: 1) manipulation of the lecture material, 2) manipulation of the method of note-taking, 3) the importance of individual differences, and 4) the testing procedure used in the empirical studies. This review highlights the fragmented nature of the current literature. In the second part of this review five forms of cognitive load that are induced by note-taking are distinguished. Cognitive load theory is used to integrate the divergent results in the literature. Based on the review, it is concluded that cognitive load theory provides a useful framework for future theory development and experimental work.     

The economics of vocational and technical education: Do the benefits outweigh the costs?

This is an economic analysis of education that is specific to a particular profession or vocation, but not to a particular firm. It is therefore new in relation to Becker's analysis, which distinguished only between firm-specific training and general training without addressing this in-between case. The basic issue is the optimum degree of vocationalization of the curriculum. The evidence is that a properblance between vocational and general curricula is efficient. But there are growthrelated criteria for different rates of expansion for each. Criteria for the most efficient mixture of vocational schooling and on-the-job training are considered, as are the implications for policy and equity of overexpanding separately tracked schools.

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Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel ist eine Wirtschaftsanalyse von berufsspartenoder berufsspezifischer jedoch nicht firmenspezifischer Ausbildung. Mit der Analyse Beckers verglichen, die nur zwischen firmenspezifischer und allgemeiner Ausbildung unterscheidet, ohne diesen Zwischenbereich zu behandeln, ist sie daher neuartig. Hauptsächlich geht es dabei um den optimalen Grad an Berufsorientierung des Curriculums. Es hat sich gezeigt, daß die richtige Ausgewogenheit zwischen berufsorientierten und allgemeinen Curricula effizient ist. Es gibt jedoch wachstumsbezogene Kriterien für unterschiedliche Expansionsraten. Kriterien für die wirksamste Verflechtung von Berufsbildung und berufsbegleitender Ausbildung werden ebenso berücksichtigt wie die Auswirkungen auf Richtlinien und Gleichstellung bei der Überexpansion verschiedener Schulsparten.

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Résumé L'article présent est une analyse économique de la formation spécifique à une profession ou à un métier particuliers, et non à une firme particulière. Elle diffère donc de celle de Becker qui distingue seulement la formation spécifique à une firme et l'enseignement général sans tenir compte de ce cas intermédiaire. La question fondamentale qui est posée est celle relative au degré optimal de professionnalisation des contenus de l'éducation. II apparait évident qu'un équilibre convenable entre l'enseignement professionnel et l'enseignement général est positif. Il existe cependant des critères de grandeur pour les différent taux d'expansion de chacun. Les critères du système le plus efficace combinant un enseignement professionnel et une formation en cours d'emploi sont analysés ainsi que les implications pour la politique et l'équité d'une expansion excessive d'écoles dispensant un enseignement spécialisé.

     

The development of computational estimation in the transition from informal to formal mathematics education

European Journal of Psychology of Education - The transition from informal to formal mathematics is an important episode in children’s mathematical development. The current study investigated...     

The Logic of Loans: students' perceptions of the costs and benefits of the student loan

Government policy towards financial support for students means that students increasingly have to bear the costs of their education, often through acquiring significant student debt. This policy is largely justified with reference to the private benefits (through enhanced life-time earnings) that university graduates can expect to enjoy. Using evidence from a qualitative study of 49 students, this paper analyses the extent to which students are engaged in a process of rational weighing-up of the costs and benefits of higher education as implied by the policy stance. It also explores their interpretation of their financial position and Government policy towards them. It argues that students are very poorly informed about both the costs and benefits of higher education, and that financial outcomes are not created in an essentially private and individual fashion, but instead are strongly mediated by cultural and familial resources.     

Revisiting the dialogue on the transition from coteaching to inservice teaching: new frameworks, additional benefits and emergent issues

In this rejoinder, we respond to the major points made by Gallo-Fox (this forum), Beers (this forum), Carambo and Stickney (this forum), and Murphy, Carlisle and Beggs (this forum). We focus primarily on the benefits and considerations that stem from employing additional theoretical frameworks for analyzing research in coteaching. We also address some of the future directions that should be explored in coteaching research.

Economic costs and benefits of educating foreign students in the United States

In recent years some western European countries have adopted restrictive rationing/pricing policies to regulate the accelerated inflow of foreign students. There is no such policy in the U.S. If the current trends continue the population of foreign students in the U.S. may reach one million or so by 1990. In view of their large and rapidly expanding number, it is of some interest to study the economics of their education. An attempt is made here to estimate the economic costs and economic benefits to the U.S. of educating foreign students. It should be emphasized at the outset that the conceptual and data problems have made it impossible to estimate some economic costs and benefits, thereby constraining the comprehensiveness of the overall estimates.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 47th Annual Meeting, Midwest Economics Association, St. Louis, Missouri, April 1983.     

Identifying the costs and benefits of educational psychology: a preliminary exploration in two local authorities

This article provides an account of a small-scale pilot study of the cost and perceived benefits of the educational psychology services in two comparably small local authorities in England. This study is preparatory to a more detailed examination of the costs and likely benefits of state provision of educational psychology services in England. The work is contextualised by acknowledgement of the growing pressure on local authority services to trade and for schools to directly commission the services of educational psychologists. Provisional findings indicate significant differences between the impact of the two services that participated. The authors offer speculation on the effects for local authorities and schools, and ways in which the study might be developed to provide more satisfactory answers to the questions of “what is the value of educational psychology in practice” and “how best to deploy educational psychology services?”     

In-service teacher training to provide psychosocial support and care in high-risk and high-need schools: school-based intervention partnerships

This article uses a South African case study to argue that postcolonial, emerging economy societies in transition often contain schools characterised as high risk and high need. Such schools require teachers to adapt to roles other than facilitating learning, such as psychosocial support and care, and which requires additional professional development. In the absence of structured teacher professional development programmes, alternatives are required to assist teachers. The paper describes a nine-year partnership between higher education researchers and teachers in high-risk and high-need schools in three South African provinces. The participatory reflection and action (PRA) study served as platform for a school-based intervention to assist in-service teachers to adapt to their additional responsibilities. Thematic analysis was used to identify the ways in which teachers’ adaptation to high risk benefitted from the programme, and self-determination theory is used to argue for a dynamic and interconnected relationship between the teachers’ demonstrated pathways to psychosocial support and care. The article argues that in socio-politically transforming societies where need is high for in-service teacher training and formal structures for teacher professional development may be limited, partnerships between researchers and teachers appear to be useful platforms for school-based interventions to support teacher resilience.     

Practices that support the transition to public preschool programs: Results from a National Survey

The number of children participating in public school preschool programs has steadily increased over the last two decades. While the use of specific practices to support the transition to kindergarten has received a great deal of attention, there are little data on the use of transition practices by public school preschool teachers to support children's entry into the public school preschool setting. This article presents findings from a national sample of 2434 public school preschool teachers on the use of 25 transition practices to support the transition of young children into public school preschool programs. The study represents a collaborative extension of the National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) Kindergarten Transition Survey [Pianta, R. C., Cox, M. J., Taylor, L., & Early, D. (1999). Kindergarten teachers’ practices related to the transition to school: Results of a national survey. Elementary School Journal, 100(1), 71–86]. Public school preschool teachers reported using an average of 12.81 of the 25 transition practices included in the survey, with a total of 12 of the 25 transition practices reportedly in use by 70% or more of teachers responding to the survey. Findings from this study indicate that three variables – training on the use of specific transition practices, classroom composition, and school context – were related to the use of transition practices by public school preschool teachers.