Evaluating metacognitive scaffolding in Guided Invention Activities

Invention and Productive Failure activities ask students to generate methods that capture the important properties of some given data (e.g., uncertainty) before being taught the expert solution. Invention and Productive Failure activities are a class of scientific inquiry activities in that students create, implement, and evaluate mathematical models based on data. Yet, lacking sufficient inquiry skills, students often do not actualize the full potential of these activities. We identified key invention strategies in which students often fail to engage: exploratory analysis, peer interaction, self-explanation, and evaluation. A classroom study with 134 students evaluated the effect of supporting these skills on the quality and outcomes of the invention process. Students in the Unguided Invention condition received conventional Invention Activities; students in the Guided Invention condition received complementary metacognitive scaffolding. Students were asked to invent methods for calculating uncertainties in best-fitting lines. Guided Invention students invented methods that included more conceptual features and ranked the given datasets more accurately, although the quality of their mathematical expressions was not improved. At the process level, Guided Invention students revised their methods more frequently and had more and better instances of unprompted self-explanations even on components of the activity that were not supported by the metacognitive scaffolding. Classroom observations are used to demonstrate the effect of the scaffolding on students’ learning behaviours. These results suggest that process guidance in the form of metacognitive scaffolding augments the inherent benefits of Invention Activities and can lead to gains at both domain and inquiry levels.     

The passion of successful leadership

This paper reports multiperspective research on 10 successful, experienced headteachers working in a range of urban and suburban schools of different sizes (with different school populations and free school meals indices of between 20% and 62%). All had raised the levels of measurable pupil attainments in their schools and all were highly regarded by their peers. A key characteristic among the heads was that, regardless of styles and strategies, all revealed a passion for education, for pupils and for the communities in which they worked. The research revealed that the 10 headteachers sustained their success by the application of the a combination of 10 essential leadership qualities, skills and principles and that these enabled them to manage a number of tensions and dilemmas associated with the management of change. Fundamental to the achievement of success, however, was their passion for students, school and community. This paper explores the nature of this passion in relation in particular to six factors which are fundamental to success; achievement, care, collaboration, commitment, trust and inclusivity.1 This research is part of a longitudinal, international, eight country study (ISSLP) which is seeking to establish cross‐country, cross‐cultural comparisons of successful headship in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, England, Norway, Sweden and the USA. For details of this project see: www.oise.utoronto.ca/～schoolleadership/ssl.html. The English study on which this research is based was financially supported by N.C.S.L., NAHT and S.H.A.      

The industrial middle class and the development of sport and in a railway town

ABSTRACT

Increased industrial activity during the Victorian period led to the creation of industrial townships such as Crewe, whose growth was stimulated and sustained by the involvement of the London and North Western Railway Company. As in other townships, the paternalism of employers was reflected in company involvement in all aspects of the social, political and economic life of Crewe and the influence that was exerted on the population through the company’s middle-class managers. Men such as manager Francis Webb and company clerk Thomas Abraham had a significant impact on the sporting life of the town, and this paper explores their life courses to chronicle their involvement. These men were not public-school- or university-educated but they shared similar attitudes to sport with their middle-class counterparts in the South, and this paper uses their biographies to suggest that individuals concerned with the organisation of amateur sport across the country adhered to the basics tenets of the amateur ethos. The authors also reinforce the notion that, while the creation of governing bodies was certainly important in structuring late-nineteenth-century sport, the commitment and motivation of the individual was always critical in ensuring that local sport was played ‘in the right way’.     

The (hidden) injuries of NAPLAN: two standardised test events and the making of ‘at risk’ student subjects

Standardised testing regimes, including the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia, have impacted on relationships between and within schools, and on teachers’ work and on pedagogies. Previous analyses of the effects of NAPLAN have been generated outside of the test situation: frequently through attitudinal surveys and qualitative interviews. This article takes as its point of departure two intensely affective events associated with the NAPLAN test day itself. These events erupted in two qualitative studies of students’ schooling experiences: a study of students’ experiences of NAPLAN and a study of students’ experiences of student voice at school. We ask, after Deleuze and Guattari, What can a NAPLAN test do? Exploring the entangled corporeal (physical and embodied) and incorporeal (psychic and subjectivating) wounds effected in and through these events, we analyse the dynamic constitution and re-constitutions of ‘at risk’ categorisations. While the NAPLAN test is not claimed to cause physical and psychical injury, we argue that standardised test conditions, in these singular events, are inextricably entwined with the formation of particular students’ schooled subjectivities.     

Teaching the ultimate crime: Genocide and international law in the criminal justice curriculum

The rapid expansion of international law and the establishment of an international criminal court have resulted in new justice institutions that should not be ignored in criminal justice curricula. Genocide, as the focal point of an entire course or a unit within other courses, provides instructors with an organizational framework for addressing a wide variety of topics related to international law. This paper discusses how the crime of genocide can be integrated into criminal justice curricula and the opportunities it provides for examining international law, history, current events, and the interdependence of criminal justice system components. A course on genocide taught to advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students is described and evaluated.     

Understanding the role of private speech in children's emotion regulation

Self-regulation includes both cognitive and affective components, but few researchers have investigated how these components interact to better explain self-regulation. The purpose of this study was to investigate how children's private speech, which is typically related to cognitive ability, was utilized during an emotion-eliciting task. By examining the social and private speech that occurred as children coped with a frustration task, a better understanding of how children regulate their emotional displays can be achieved. Children's speech, emotional expressions (sadness and anger), and emotion regulation strategies (distraction and self-comforting) were coded during a frustration task completed by preschool-aged children (N = 116). Children's social speech to mothers and private speech were transcribed. Children's private speech was categorized according to five mutually exclusive categories: vocalizations, inaudible muttering, task-irrelevant, negatively valenced task-relevant, or facilitative task-relevant. Sadness was associated with more social speech and negatively valenced task-relevant private speech, whereas anger was associated with less distraction and facilitative task-relevant private speech and more vocalizations and negatively valenced task-relevant private speech. Additionally, private speech predicted unique variance beyond that explained by the emotion regulation strategies and moderated the relations of emotion regulation strategies to both anger and sadness. These empirical findings support theoretical propositions that language is a factor in children's emotion regulation. The implications of these findings include support for the encouragement of private speech in the classroom because of its relation to emotional, in addition to cognitive, regulatory functions.     

Interpreting the Cultural Revolution politically

Abstract

This essay reviews the recent work of three sociologists, Andrew Walder, Alessandro Russo, and Joel Andreas, on factionalism in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR). To varying degrees, all three authors under review question the dominant sociological interpretation of CR factionalism, which directly links factional allegiance to objective class position, and they each attempt to develop a political interpretation instead. Politics, however, is understood differently by the authors. Walder argues that, through attending to the ‘event sequence’ of the CR in which factionalism emerged, factional politics can be de‐linked from the sociological base to which it is usually tied. Russo, influenced by the work of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, argues that the factionalism of the CR should be linked to the emergence of a subjective ‘political sequence’ and not to the pre‐existing structural organization of Chinese socialism. Unlike Walder, for whom mass politics seems to be firmly identified with elite intra‐party power struggle, for Russo a space between elite power struggles and the pluralization of mass political organizations allowed a genuine subjective politics to emerge. Joel Andreas employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of political and cultural capital in order to study the development of CR factions in the Qinghua Attached Middle School and Qinghua University, painting a complex political and sociological understanding of factionalization. These works not only offer reinterpretations of the CR itself, but also help to generate interesting questions about the political relationship between the present and the 1960s, both in China and globally.