The effects of teaching self-determination skills on the externalizing behaviors of students with emotional behavioral disorders

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of teaching self- determination skills on the externalizing behaviors of students with emotional and behavioral disorders. The Research method was quasi experimental with pre and post- test and control group. To achieve our goals, thirty students who received high scores in the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) were selected and randomly assigned to either the experimental group (N = 15) or the control group (N = 15). Students in the experimental group participated in 16 sessions (1 session per week) receiving Self determination curriculum (Field and Hoffman’s model) intervention, and the control group did not receive any training. The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) by participants was completed before and after intervention. MANOVA was used for data analysis. The findings showed that the effects of teaching self- determination skills on decreasing the externalizing behaviors of students with emotional and behavioral disorders was significant. The emerged finding can have clinical applications in prevention and treatment of student’s behavioral disorders. Implications and future directions for research and practice are discussed.     

Making Associativity Operational

The purpose of this paper is to propose an operational idea for developing algebraic thinking in the absence of alphanumeric symbols. The paper reports on a design experiment encouraging preschool children to use the associative property algebraically. We describe the theoretical basis of the design, the tasks used, and examples of algebraic thinking in 5–6-year-old children. Theoretically, the paper makes a critical distinction between operational and structural meanings of the notion of equality. We argue that mathematical thinking involving equality among young learners can comprise both an operational and a structural conception and that the operational conception has a side that is productively linked to the structural conception. Using carefully designed hands-on tasks, the crux of the paper is the realization of algebraic thinking (in verbal mathematics) as operationally experienced in the ability to transform one number structure, with a quantity that is subject to change, into another through equality-preserving transformations.     

‘Brown Morning:’ classed interpretations of anti-racist text

This article examines the interpretations of high school students from different socioeconomic locations (in terms of socioeconomic class and ethnicity) with regard to the text Brown Morning, used as a didactic tool for antiracism education within the framework of Civics courses. The research findings uncover differences in the students’ interpretations of the text. An in-depth understanding of these differences will be attained through clinical analyses based on the distinctions between metaphor and metonymy made by linguist Roman Jakobson. Among students from low socioeconomic locations, interpretations related to racism were dominated by metonymic characteristics, while that of students from higher socioeconomic locations were predominantly metaphoric. Study findings do not only show the different interpretations among the students, but also the various ways in which metaphorical and metonymic language affect teachers. These analyses will focus on the reasons for these differences and their implications regarding the links between social locations, language, and education.