TEACHING AND LEARNING ABOUT MATTER IN GRADE 6 CLASSROOMS: A CONCEPTUAL CHANGE APPROACH

The purpose of this study was to enhance the teaching and learning of matter and its properties for grade 6 students. The development of a conceptual change approach instructional unit was undertaken for this purpose. Pre- and post-concept surveys, classroom observations, and student and teacher interviews were used to collect data. The teaching activities not only challenged and encouraged students’ conceptual change but also indicated that teachers needed to develop their content knowledge and teaching strategies. The participants developed more scientific conceptions and were able to apply these in appropriate contexts. This study illustrates how a conceptual change approach can be accomplished in the Thai context.     

Antenatal prediction of mother-infant difficulties

A prospective study of 143 "low risk" pregnant women expecting their first baby was conducted in Newcastle, Australia. The study was designed to examine the contribution of a woman's perception of her own childhood experiences, her trait anxiety level, socioeconomic status, and social support network to difficulties in her relationship with her baby during the baby's first year. The women were initially interviewed during pregnancy and followed up 3 and 12 months postpartum. Follow-up measures included the Dimensions of Perinatal Adjustment, the Neonatal Perception Inventory, the Ainsworth Strange Situation, and information from hospital records, family doctors, and baby health centre sisters. Women who perceived their social network as less supportive during pregnancy were likely to see their one-year-old babies (p less than .05) as more difficult. The other antenatal measures were not significantly predictive of outcome.     

Spirituality in children and young people: a suitable topic for educational and child psychologists?

In this article the concept of spirituality, especially with relation to school age children and young people, is discussed. Some of the possibilities and constraints present in this area are noted, especially the unease with which many researchers and practitioners view such a difficult to define topic and also its traditional association with religious organisations.

However, in more recent literature, the spiritual dimension has been seen as a universal human characteristic (within which spirituality in religion is viewed as a sub‐set), which is characterised by a deeper state of meaningfulness. In the case of children and young people, modern writers have argued that the encouragement of spiritual growth is important because it is related to a non‐material, ethical and self‐awareness aspect of their development and is a necessary counterbalance to the attainment‐focused demands of the National Curriculum.

As an aid to future study in this area, a possible measurement of spirituality in school‐aged children (The SQ Pupil Inventory) is reproduced at the end of this article. This inventory represents the work in progress of the late Beverley Ruddock who was carrying out her doctoral research in this topic until her sudden death in late 2008.     

Measuring language learning environments in secondary science classrooms

The purpose of this study was to explore a new learning environment instrument which could be used by teaching practitioners and other educators to measure the language learning environment in the secondary science classroom. The science teacher is central in creating science classrooms conductive to the language needs of students and should be promoting the learning of language in the science curriculum and in the teaching strategies with English as second language learners. The data in this study were collected using a structured self-administered survey with a sample of 240 secondary school students from eight science classrooms. Factor analysis identified five dimensions, namely, Teacher Support, Vocabulary Development, Assessment, Motivation and Language for Learning Science. These five dimensions explained 56.9% of the variance in the language learning environment instrument. The internal reliability of the dimensions using Cronbach’s α ranged from 0.603 to 0.830. The study revealed significant differences in the dimensions of the language learning environment between what the students perceived to actually be occurring to what they would prefer. Implications from this preliminary research include the ability for measuring the language learning environment in the secondary science class and the potential for practitioners to use the information to develop teaching strategies conducive to learning for all students.     

‘Othering’ the archive—from exile to inclusion and heritage dignity: the case of Palestinian archival memory

This paper seeks to address, from the critical perspectives of cultural heritage discourse, the issues at stake in critically apprehending the archive as both a technology of disinheritance and one of potential inclusion and re-inheritance. The first section draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said and other critics whose work has sought to address the marginalizing capacity of dominant European/North American archival and cultural–museological institutions. The remainder of the paper grounds these conceptual–ethical issues in the context of Palestinian cultural politics and memory-work. This critical framework is used not only to draw out the absences and silences in archives and cultural institutions, and the epistemological and ‘real’ violences at play in what Derrida characterises as ‘archive trauma’, but responds to Said’s call to ‘re-read’ the colonial archive ‘contrapuntally’ in order to create an ‘othering’ of dominant archival discourse. What is needed to provoke such an ‘othering’ is a commitment to rethink the archive in terms of alternative understandings of ‘hospitality’, ‘memory-work’ and what Derrida has referred to as ‘heritage dignity’. This strategy is capable of apprehending in greater depth the moral-ethical ‘debts’ and ‘duties’ and the operational ‘responses’ and ‘responsibilities’ towards ‘inclusion’ and towards full recognition of those constituencies which have been disenfranchised or exiled outside the realms of dominant cultural–institutional discourse.