Age and Gender Differences in Children's Self- and Task Perceptions during Elementary School

We examined the development of children's self- and task perceptions during the elementary school years. 865 first-, second-, and fourth-grade children (ages 7–10) completed questionnaires assessing their perceptions of competence in, and valuing of, activities in several activity domains (math, reading, sports, and instrumental music). Factor analyses showed that even the first graders had differentiated self-beliefs for the various activities. These analyses also indicated that children's competence beliefs and subjective task values formed distinct factors. Analyses assessing age and gender differences in children's beliefs showed that for all the activities except sports, younger children's (particularly the first graders) perceptions of competence and subjective task values were more positive than the beliefs of the older children. Boys had more positive competence beliefs and values than did girls for sport activities, and more positive competence beliefs for mathematics. Girls had more positive competence beliefs and values than did boys for reading and music activities.     

Imagery as a private audiovisual aid

Mental images are conscious representations of our knowledge of the world. Like audiovisual aids in instructional programs, they can be intentionally and systematically used as the informational base for cognitive operations and as an aid to new learning. They permit one to make judgments, computations, and inferences that depend upon world knowledge. They can be consciously manipulated for problem solving and creative purposes. They can be used as learning and memory aids in numerous tasks, including foreign language learning where they function as a kind of private voix et image program that provides referential contexts for the language in the absence of the referent objects and situations themselves. Experimental evidence is cited to support these claims.     

Adolescent males in New Zealand school choirs: the contradictory business of being in the gender vanguard

School choirs have been stigmatised for adolescent males in New Zealand, resulting in constraints in involvement, bullying, and threat to gender identity. In other national contexts, boys who sing in choirs have experienced a negative stereotype associated with accusations of inferior masculinity, yet little research has probed whether such forces are at play for their New Zealand counterparts. The current study was conducted with a sample of adolescent male school choir members in New Zealand (a country where essentialist gender attitudes have existed). Adolescent male choristers’ perceptions of the gender stereotype, its moderation by cultural context, and how the stigmatised choral domain was negotiated, were explored within a framework of critical masculinities. Such a stereotype and wider implications for gendered structures found in society at large were confirmed. Personal and school-based factors enabling the male choristers’ endurance in a domain that rendered their construction of masculinity subordinate, are discussed.     

School size and effectiveness: Policy implications

For the first 75 years of this century, the only good schools were considered to be large. Today the buzz word is small. Educators who still promote the idea of biggest, largest, or strongest are living in the post-sputnik era, when for national pride we had to be number one. Today small is related to school effectiveness, community and school identity, and individual fullfillment and participation. Big corresponds with school inefficiency, institutional bureaucracy, and personal loneliness.     

Head Start Parents' Beliefs about Their Children's Abilities, Task Values, and Performances on Different Activities

As part of larger intervention study designed to facilitate the transition of Head Start children into kindergarten and the early elementary grades, we assessed parents beliefs about former Head start children's abilities and values in several activity domains—academics, sports, and social skills—during the children's kindergarten ten year. Parents' expectations for their children's future also were examined. One hundred and twenty-four parents and 155 children participated; all children had attended Head Start, and the sample is ethnically and racially diverse. One group of children and parents received the additional services, and a second group did not. Parents, were quit optimistic about their children's prospects for the future. There were ethnic differences in parents were quit optimistic about their children's prospects for the future. There were ethnic differences in parents' beliefs about children's abilities and future prospects in different areas. Parents beliefs related both to children's attitudes toward school and to their performance on mathematical and reading achievement tests.     

Session Limits and the Probability of the Next Visit

Among the approaches that have been used to balance the demand for services with the agency’s service resources is to limit the number of visits available to clients. Such limits have been introduced, however, without any empirical basis for estimating the impact of a limit on the overall demand for services or the proportion of clients. The probability of a next visit is a statistic that addresses these shortcomings. Analyses indicate that there is a fairly stable pattern to students use of counseling services, that this pattern is affected by the imposition of a limit, and that reducing the probabilities of a next visit for the first, second, and third visits has a greater impact on reducing total service demand than imposing a limit at the 12th visit, the most commonly reported point     

STEM Motivation Interventions for Adolescents: A Promising Start,but Further to Go

One way to increase students’ participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is to target their motivation. Researchers have conducted a growing number of interventions addressing students’ motivation in STEM; however, this body of work has not been adequately reviewed. We systematically reviewed experimental and quasi-experimental studies (n = 53) targeting adolescent students’ motivation for STEM subjects. While some interventions showed positive effects on a variety of motivational constructs and academic outcomes, others showed mixed or non-significant effects. We recommend that researchers more frequently examine moderating variables that might limit interventions’ results, including individual-level variables such as gender, contextual-level variables such as the subject in which an intervention was conducted, and design-level variables such as intervention length. Additionally, researchers might better align their interventions with motivation theory. Future research should address these limitations so that the results of successful interventions can better inform educational policy and practice.     

The Effects of Conversational Language on Group Interaction and Group Performance in Computer-Supported Collaborative Argumentation

This study examined the effects of conversational language (e.g., asking questions, inviting replies, acknowledgments, referencing others by name, closing signatures, ‘I agree, but’, greetings, etc.) on the frequency and types of responses posted in reply to given types of messages (e.g., argument, evidence, critique, explanation), and how the resulting response patterns support and inhibit collaborative argumentation in asynchronous online discussions. Using event sequence analysis to analyze message-response exchanges in eight online group debates, this study found that (a) arguments elicited 41% more challenges when presented with more conversational language (effect size .32), (b) challenges with more conversational language elicited three to eight times more explanations (effect size .12 to .31), and (c) the number of supporting evidence elicited by challenges was not significantly different from challenges that used more versus less conversational language. Overall, these and other findings from exploratory post-hoc tests show that conversational language can help to produce patterns of interaction that foster high levels of critical discourse, and that some forms of conversational language are more effective in eliciting responses than others.     

Community participation in large public school systems

In a 1980 nationwide survey of school systems enrolling 50,000 or more students, it was found that community participation existed at the local school and districtwide levels for all 66 school systems, while 42 (67%) also reported community participation at the decentralized level. School systems with 50,000 to 74,900 students exhibited lower community participation scores than larger school systems with 75,000 or more students. Predominantly white school systems (+50%) tended to have higher community participation scores than predominantly minority school systems (+50%) at the local school and districtwide levels. At the decentralized level, the community participation scores between predominantly white and minority schools were similar. Suburban school systems' community participation scores were higher than city and county school systems' scores at the local, decentralized, and districtwide levels; county school systems' scores were lower at all three organizational levels. Community participation tended to be higher in the Southwest and West and lowest in the Midwest.