A Study of Children’s Fears

In carefully examining the thesis of a paper by Anderson, Nelson, and Edgington (1984) concerning the socalled Fool’s Type IIa error, one realizes that certain fundamental statistical tenets have been overlooked or ignored. The purpose of the present paper is to discount the notion of a Fool’s Type IIa error under the Neyman-Pearson philosophy of testing statistical hypotheses and to highlight the need for improved statistical education related to hypothesis testing. If the importance of Type I and Type II errors cannot be quantified, then the Neyman-Pearson approach to hypothesis testing is of no value, and hence a Fool’s Type IIa error is irrelevant. If statistical testing errors are important and can be quantified, then adjustment for the Fool’s Type IIa error region is equivalent to increasing the probability of making a Type I error.     

What the Pendulum Can Tell Educators about Children’s Scientific Reasoning

Inhelder and Piaget (1958) studied schoolchildrens understanding of a simplependulum as a means of investigating the development of the control of variablesscheme and the ceteris paribus principle central to scientific experimentation.The time-consuming nature of the individual interview technique used by Inhelderhas led to the development of a whole range of group test techniques aimed attesting the empirical validity and increasing the practical utility of Piagets work.The Rasch measurement techniques utilized in this study reveal that the Piagetian Reasoning Task III — Pendulum and the méthode clinique interview revealthe same underlying ability. Of particular interest to classroom teachers is theevidence that some individuals produced rather disparate performances across thetwo testing situations. The implications of the commonalities and individualdifferences in performance for interpreting childrens scientific understanding arediscussed.     

A Phonetic Study of Young Children’s Speech

Abstract. The author examined the effectiveness of training in symbolic logic for improving students' deductive reasoning. A total of 116 undergraduate students (approximately equal numbers of men and women) enrolled in 1st-year university philosophy courses in symbolic logic participated in 2 studies. In both studies, students completed booklets of categorical and conditional syllogisms at the beginning of the course and again at the end of the course. In Study 2, students also specified their reasoning strategies. Results indicated that students' strategies changed with training (students increased their use of mental models and mental rules with categorical and conditional syllogisms, respectively), but their reasoning performance improved only moderately. The educational implications of these results are explored.     

Young Children’s Development of Scientific Knowledge Through the Combination of Teacher-Guided Play and Child-Guided Play

Research in Science Education - Play-based approaches to science learning allow children to meaningfully draw on their everyday experiences and activities as they explore science concepts in...     

Thought-Experiments About Gravity in the History of Science and in Research into Children’s Thinking

This article examines the main strands of thinking about gravity through the ages and the continuity of thought-experiments, from the early Greeks, through medieval times, to Galileo, Newton and Einstein. The key ideas are used to contextualise an empirical study of 247 children’s ideas about falling objects carried out in China and New Zealand, including the use of scenarios involving thrown and dropped items, and objects falling down deep well holes (as in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland). The sample included 68 pre-school pupils, 68 primary school pupils, 56 middle school students, and 55 high school students; with approximately equal numbers in each group and of boys and girls in each group in each culture. The methodology utilised Piagetian interviews with three media (verbal language, drawing, and play-dough), a shadow stick; and everyday items including model people and soft model animals. The data from each group was categorised and analysed with Kolmogorov–Smirnov Two-Sample Tests and Spearman r _s coefficients. It was hypothesised and confirmed (at K–S alpha levels .05; r _s : p < .001) that cross-age and cross-cultural research and analysis would reveal that (a) an intuitive sense of gravity is present from an early age and develops in association with concepts like Earth shape and motion; (b) the development of concepts of gravity is similar in cultures such as China and New Zealand where teachers hold a scientific world view; and (c) children’s concepts of Earth motion, Earth shape, and gravity are coherent rather than fragmented. It was also demonstrated that multi-media interviews together with concrete experiences and thought-experiments afforded children the opportunity to share their emerging concepts of gravity. The findings provide information that teachers might use for lessons at an appropriate level.     

Study of O’Neill’s Tragic View in the Light of his Life Experience

O’Neill’s tragedy deeply rooted in his own life experience and his family heredity.He is an offspring of Irish immi grants,his homelessness as a child,his early education in the catholic school and his later break with religion,his foreign expedi tion,life on the sea and his three marriages all influenced his life and his career and his theme decisively.     

A Longitudinal Study of Children’s Developing Knowledge and Reasoning in Science

The growth in science understanding and reasoning of 12 children is being traced through their primary school years. The paper reports findings concerning children’s growing understandings of evaporation, and their changing responses to exploration activities, that show the complexity and coherence of learning pathways. Children’s responses to identical explorations of flight, separated by two years, are used to explore the interactions between conceptual knowledge and scientific reasoning, and the manner in which they change over this time. The paper discusses the particular insights afforded by a longitudinal study design, and some attendant methodological issues.     

Influence of Self-Regulation on the Development of Children’s Number Sense

The present study examined predictive power of behavioral self-regulation, family and child characteristics on children’s number sense. The participants consisted of 101 kindergarten children. A subsample of 30 children was randomly chosen for the reliability procedures of Assessing Number Sense and Head, Toes, Knees and Shoulders instruments. Thus, data from 71 children were used for further analysis. Multiple regressions using stepwise method were computed for determining whether self-regulation, family income, parents’ level of education, gender, and age related to and were predictive of scores on number sense. Results of the study indicated that behavioral self-regulation, mothers’ education level, gender and age are significant predictors of number sense, and behavioral self-regulation was the most influential predictor, followed by mothers’ education level, gender and age. Findings are discussed in terms of influential factors of number sense in early childhood.     

Children’s Models about Colours in Nahuatl-Speaking Communities

This paper presents the development and structure of indigenous children’s ideas about mixing colours as well as their ideas about each colour, derived from their traditions. The children were interviewed both at school and outside it, and an educational proposal was implemented. Ideas expressed in the school context were analysed using the partial possible model, which states that the inferences and explanations used to describe a subject consist of constricting ideas, rules of correspondence, and a set of phenomenological inferences about processes. After identifying these components in the children’s ideas, we developed models to describe their conceptions about mixing colours. We employed a different approach to analyse children’s ideas related to their cultural context. The results showed that children change from a conception that focuses on colours as entities that do not change and as properties of objects (model 1) to the idea that colour represents a quality of substances or objects that can be modified by mixing colours (model 2). Cultural context analysis showed that stories are independent from one another and that they are not connected to colour mixing processes, only to the actions of colour on people. We concluded that students generate independent constructions between school and cultural knowledge.     

Gender Effects in Children’s Development and Education

This paper attempts to clarify several lines of research on gender in development and education, inter‐relating findings from studies on intuitive/informal knowledge with those from research on achievements and attitudes in science. It acknowledges the declining proportions of male teachers world‐wide and examination successes which indicate a reversal of educational disadvantage from female to male; as well as the recent evidence on the effects of the gender of teachers upon student success. An empirical contribution to the literature is offered, drawing from the gender‐related findings from research on children’s cosmologies in China and New Zealand with 346 boys and 340 girls (of whom 119 boys and 121 girls participated in the current study). The investigation focused on children’s concepts of the motion and shape of the Earth through observational astronomy and gave children opportunities to express their ideas in several modalities. The in‐depth interviews allowed children to share their meanings with gender differences becoming apparent (e.g. girls’ superior ability to visually represent their cosmologies and boys’ greater awareness of gravity). However, these differences were not universal across genders or cultures and marked similarities were apparent both in the content of children’s responses and in their reasoning processes. By comparing boy/girl cosmological concept categories and by tracking their developmental trends by age, statistical evidence revealed the extent of the similarities within and across these diverse cultures. The findings reinforce those from the authors’ knowledge restructuring and cultural mediation studies and provide support for the view that boys and girls have similar, holistic‐rather‐than‐fragmented, cosmologies which have features in common across cultures and ethnic groups.     

A Study of Presupposition in Hotel’s English

As a common phenomenon in language,presupposition plays an important role in linguistic communication.Study of presupposition in hotel’s English reveals that on account of the felicity of information-conveying,presupposition has been em ploying by Hotels’staff intentionally or unintentionally.In hotels’service,proper use of presupposition ensures the normal con duction of hotels’service circuits,contributes to the economy and coherence of communication,facilitates understanding be tween guests and the hotels’staff.In addition,it enhances persuasion and latency of staff’s speech,guarantees satisfactory settle ment of complaints.     

The Development of Children’s Concept of a Substance: A Longitudinal Study of Interaction Between Curriculum and Learning

This paper is a reflection on a three-year longitudinal study that explored the development of children’s concept of a substance, for which detailed results concerning children’s understandings have been reported elsewhere. The attention in this paper is on the methodological features related to the longitudinal nature of the study and the insights into pupils’ learning that were afforded by its design. There is, of course, an extensive literature on children’s understandings of scientific ideas, and the nature of conceptual change involved in learning is a contested area. I argue in the paper that longitudinal studies are uniquely placed to inform the debate, and by focusing on this particular study the aim is to demonstrate the kind of contribution that can be made.     

Thinking Counterfactually Supports Children’s Evidence Evaluation in Causal Learning

Often, the evidence we observe is consistent with more than one explanation. How do learners discriminate among candidate causes? The current studies examine whether counterfactuals help 5-year olds (N = 120) select between competing hypotheses and compares the effectiveness of these prompts to a related scaffold. In Experiment 1, counterfactuals support evidence evaluation, leading children to privilege and extend the cause that accounted for more data. In Experiment 2, the hypothesis that accounted for the most evidence was pitted against children’s prior beliefs. Children who considered alternative outcomes privileged the hypothesis that accounted for more observations, whereas those who explained relied on prior beliefs. Findings demonstrate that counterfactuals recruit attention to disambiguating evidence and outperform explanation when data contrast with existing beliefs.     

Confucian Principles: A Study of Chinese Americans’ Interpersonal Relationships in Selected Children’s Picturebooks

There has not been enough critical analysis of children’s literature by and about Chinese Americans, especially when compared to other minority groups in the United States. In particular, Chinese American historical books lack extensive analysis. It is important to reflect cultural accuracy in literature and to help children develop clear concepts of self and others by providing precise cultural and physical characteristics of people. While cultural authenticity allows children the opportunity to see a reflection of real experiences within a book instead of seeing stereotypes or misrepresentations, obtaining correct information about a certain time period can help children to see images of immigration accurately represented in literature. Using the Confucian delineation of interpersonal relationships as the major criterion of cultural authenticity, this article examines three currently available children’s picturebooks set in the historical period between 1848 and 1885. In addition to exploring how Chinese Americans’ interpersonal relationships are portrayed in these children’s historical books, this article argues for more proactive inclusion of the diversity in selection of picturebooks.     

A Contrastive Study of the Heroines in A Doll’s House and Macbeth

A Doll’s House and Macbeth obviously belong to different categories in content. However, the two heroines in these two plays, Nora Helmer and Lady Macbeth, demonstrate similar feminist qualities. By st...     

Children’s Ecoliterature and the New Nature Study

This essay explores how nineteenth-century nature study principles inform a twenty-first century New Nature Study movement, and gives examples of a trend toward nature writing in recent picture books. The pedagogical principles of nineteenth-century nature study, ascendant at the turn of the twentieth century and implicit in interwar children’s literature, yielded to a model founded on Cold War competition rather than environmental stewardship. In mid-century narratives for children, technological progress prevailed. In the 1990s, the ideals of the first nature study movement reemerged in a call for meaningful conservation to sustain future generations. Like the original nature study, the New Nature Study arises from anxieties about industrial development, habitat loss and extinction, and hazards to childhood itself. The New Nature Study treats children as agents for change and citizens being denied their full human rights when their land, soil, water, and lives are bought and sold.     

A Contrastive Study of the Heroines in A Doll’s House and Macbeth

A Doll’s House and Macbeth obviously belong to different categories in content. However, the two heroines in these two plays, Nora Helmer and Lady Macbeth, demonstrate similar feminist qualities. By staging an overall contrastive analysis on the personality and tragic life of two protagonists from the perspective of feminism, it is founded that both of them are victims oppressed by the patriarchal system and they all have feminine consciousness against this system. Nevertheless, their distinctive complex personalities and different story settings make the reasons for their rebellion differ in many ways and they end up with different endings.