VISIONS OF CURRICULUM, COMMUNITY, AND SCIENCE

A bstract .  Although the natural sciences are dedicated to understanding the natural world, they are also dynamic and shaped by cultural values. The sciences and attendant technologies could be very responsive to a population that participates in and uses them responsibly. In this essay, Nancy Brickhouse and Julie Kittleson argue for re-visioning the sciences in ways that respond to diversity. By way of educational processes, the sciences might be reshaped to advance critical issues such as social justice and eco-justice. This vision of science and science education opens up new possibilities for what counts as scientific knowledge and what it means to participate in science. We envision schools where young people learn to engage in science in ways that lead to the development of the science we need. To disengage in science is to leave it in the hands of elites whose values may work against the possibility of an ecologically and socially just society.     

ORIGINATING VISIONS AND VISIONARIES OF THE REA

Abstract One hundred years ago an assembly of four hundred met at Chicago's Auditorium Hotel to create the Religious Education Association. This article traces the influences of William Rainey Harper, John Dewey, and George Albert Coe in the REA's formation, and explores social and intellectual conditions shaping this movement in its beginnings. The author highlights contributions of George Albert Coe as the leading theorist in the religious education movement from the beginnings of the REA into the middle of the 20th century.     

ANXIETY AND ACHIEVEMENT IN A MULTICULTURAL SITUATION

Oral reading comprehension test scores are generally determined by a variety of factors, not only by task difficulty and examinee proficiency, but also by stimuli extraneous to the testing task itself — such as group vs. individual testing situation, scorer method and bias, and examinees’ sociolinguistic background, motivational disposition, and anxiety during the test.

By giving the same examination under the same testing conditions to students, teachers and administrators generally believe that they are thereby being fair in their testing practice. However, if the same test situation debilitates the motivation and performance of some groups while increasing the motivation and performance of others, the assumption of fairness in standardised test procedure may be only illusory. Indeed, while stimuli in the test situation appear to be held constant from the examiner's point of view, they may interact with background variables to differentially affect levels of test performance (Cole and Bruner, 1970).

Two types of anxiety effects have been differentiated in the literature, namely debilitative and facilitative effects (Alpert and Haber, 1960).

The present study sets out to examine the effects of the following factors on oral reading comprehension test scores: (a) anxiety under varying test conditions, (b) students’ gender, (c) students’ native language, (d) the testing situation (individual vs. group), and (e) the relative difficulty of the English language texts.

Two studies were conducted during an advanced English reading course at Haifa University to examine these issues. Study One, based on a sample of 170 students, was designed to examine the affective, cognitive, and sociolinguistic correlates within the test situation. No meaningful relationship was observed between students’ attitudes and test performance. Study Two, using 112 students, was undertaken to examine the roles of anxiety, sociolinguistic background, and text difficulty within the oral testing situation in greater depth. Test scores were affected by gender and ethnic affiliation but not by text difficulty, reported level of anxiety, or group vs. individual testing situation.     

RATES AND TYPES OF TEACHER PRAISE: A REVIEW AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The use of teacher praise in the classroom has been the subject of empirical research since the 1970s, but despite more than four decades of research on the use of teacher praise, large gaps continue to exist in the literature. Clarifying the role and benefit of teacher praise is particularly important because the use of positive, proactive strategies is promoted by large‐scale behavior initiatives (e.g., Positive Behavior Interventions and Support). The goal of this review is to summarize the existing research on teacher praise, including rates of praise, types of praise, and the association between praise and student behavior. In addition to summarizing the extant literature, future directions for research are highlighted. This review reveals that there is a need for current, large‐scale studies with consistent operational definitions that measure the rate of different types of praise across different grades and instructional activities, while simultaneously measuring student behavioral outcomes.     

PITFALLS AND PROMISES: THE USE OF SECONDARY DATA ANALYSIS IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

ABSTRACT:  This paper considers the use of secondary data analysis in educational research. It addresses some of the promises and potential pitfalls that influence its use and explores a possible role for the secondary analysis of numeric data in the 'new' political arithmetic tradition of social research. Secondary data analysis is a relatively under-used technique in Education and in the social sciences more widely, and it is an approach that is not without its critics. Here we consider two main objections to the use of secondary data: that it is full of errors and that because of the socially constructed nature of social data, simply reducing it to a numeric form cannot fully encapsulate its complexity. However, secondary data also offers numerous methodological, theoretical and pedagogical benefits. Indeed by treating secondary data analysis with appropriate scepticism and respect for its limitations, by demanding that tacit assumptions about the unreliability of secondary data are applied equally to other research methods, and crucially by combining secondary data analysis with small-scale in-depth work, this paper argues for a return to prominence of secondary data analysis in its own right as well as becoming a central component of the new political arithmetic tradition of social research.