THE STUDENT AS A PERSON

This article is a plea that university teachers and administrators never forget that students are also people whose intellectual development is strongly linked to their personal development. Students grow through learning, something which in order to be successful a teacher must understand. Certain disfunctionalities and their remedies are described. Upon completion of his undergraduate studies, a student should have gained a great deal of personal autonomy and be sure of his identity. The role of the university as a place in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake should be cherished for its value as a means of student personal and psychological development.     

Children's Memory and Comprehension of Two Science Programmes

A total of 111 children, 55 aged 8 to 9 years and 56 aged 14 to 15 years of age, watched one of two single‐topic prime‐time science programmes. Recall and comprehension scores following the viewing of the programmes were assessed. In addition, a number of demographic factors including age, sex, linguistic fluency, prior television viewing and reading habits were investigated as possible predictors of learning from television. It was found that age was a significant factor in both recall and comprehension, but even more important was general knowledge. Sex and linguistic fluency was neither systematically nor frequently associated with good performance. Prior viewing habits concerning science programmes on television and reading behaviour were found to have particular effects but were not major predictors of performance. Knowledge growth (defined as differences in performance between pre‐ and post‐test performance on key, repeated, items specifically addressed by the viewed programme) was consistently observed. This major finding indicated clearly that children can learn prime‐time television science information.     

Plausibility and the construal of grammatical relations in illocutionary sentences by deaf and hearing children.

Groups of deaf and hearing children who had not fully mastered the rules for the assignment of the subject of the dependent verb for sentences of the form: Noun Phrase ₁ (NP₁) + Illocutionary Verb + Noun Phrase ₂ (NP₂) + to + Infinitive Verb were tested for the influence of four kinds of plausibility cues. In three sets the social power relations holding between the occupants of the respective NP's were used to construct plausible, neutral and implausible frames as judged by the tendency to construe NP₂ as the subject of the dependent verb. In the fourth, implausible verb (IV), the dependent verb referred to an action difficult for others to control, and so was neutral for regular illocutionary verbs requiring NP₂ as subject, but positive for NP₁ construals appropriate to the irregular illocutionaly verb, promise. The hearing children proved sensitive to the plausibility cues, showing much larger differences in success with the regular and exceptional verb for the plausible than for the implausible set, with the neutral and IV sets occupying intervening positions. Deaf children did not respond to the plausibility variable. It was concluded that although it had been demonstrated that the referential meaning of individual words can influence the construal of meaning of word combinations, the strategy might not be successful with the deaf unless preceded by further training in the denotative and connotative meanings of individual words.     

The Human Face Becomes Mapped as a Sensorimotor Reaching Space During the First Year

Although recent behavioral and neural research indicates that infants represent the body’s structure, how they engage self-representations for action is little understood. This study addressed how the human face becomes a reaching space. Infants (N = 24; 2–11 months) were tested longitudinally approximately every 3 weeks on their ability to reach to a vibrating target placed at different locations on the face. Successful reaches required coordinating skin- and body-based codes for location, a problem known as tactile remapping. Findings suggest that a functional representation of the face is initially fragmented. Infants localized targets in the perioral region before other areas (ears/temples). Additionally, infants predominantly reached ipsilaterally to targets. Collectively, the findings illuminate how the face becomes an integrated sensorimotor space for self-reaching.     

A Critical Social Literacy Project: Newfoundlanders Challenge The Shipping News

In this paper we challenge traditional classroom reading and writing practices by presenting a critique of a critical literacy project that used hypermedia as the vehicle for textual engagement and resistance. We begin with remarks that locate critical literacy within a postmodern world, explain why we invited our students in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland to read The Shipping News (1993), and continue with an analysis of their constructed World Wide Web texts. In addition to the Web pages, our data consist of students' commentaries on the course assignments, emails to the instructors, and the Internet audience's responses to the site. Literacy emerges and expands well beyond its earlier restrictive text-based practices. It assumes a plurality of constructions and meanings that are situated within social engagements with the world in which the students live.