Holistic Media Education: An Assessment of the Effectiveness of a College Course in Media Literacy

The general purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a college course in media literacy. Specifically, the course took a holistic approach to media literacy and was designed to heighten college students' awareness of media structures, content, and impact, as well as to encourage students to become more critical/informed participants in the media environment. A pre-test, post-test, control group post-test only, quasi-experimental design was employed to assess the effectiveness of this approach to media literacy education. Overall, students' responses produced significant differences between the control group and the experimental groups' post-test scores on most (but not all) dependent measures. The implications of these results and suggestions for future research were discussed.     

Re-reading the reading lesson: episodes in the history of reading pedagogy

Reading pedagogy is constantly an object of discussion and debate in contemporary policy and practice but is rarely a matter for historical inquiry. This paper reports from a recent study of the history of reading pedagogy in Australia and beyond. It focuses on a recurring figure in the historical record—the ‘reading lesson’. Presented as a distinctive trope, the reading lesson is traced in its regularity in and through the discourse of reading pedagogy, starting in 1930s Australia and moving back into 19th-century Europe, and with specific reference to the UK and the USA. Teaching reading is expressly identified as a moral project—something that, it can be argued, clearly continues into the present.     

‘We're all in this game whether we like it or not to get a number of As to Cs.’ Design and technology teachers' struggles to implement creativity and performativity policies

Education reform in England has seen many policies and initiatives introduced by central government. This article discusses two such policies, performativity and creativity. Performativity has been central to the government's agenda of raising standards and includes monitoring mechanisms such as Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) inspections, performance management and school league tables, all of which are used to measure or judge the value or worth of a school or individual teacher. At the same time as policies on performativity have been implemented, policy makers have introduced a number of policies to encourage creativity in education. This article foregrounds teachers of design and technology (D&T) at secondary level (11–16 years), describing how they struggled to implement both strategies. Teachers valued creativity and thought it was an important part of the subject, but the pressure to be seen to be performing and getting favourable positions in school league tables and Ofsted inspections meant the teaching of D&T became rather formulaic, which allowed very little opportunity for creative learning. Individual interviews were conducted with 14 D&T teachers across six schools and an open‐ended email survey was conducted with a further 17 D&T teachers from 15 schools during the preliminary phase of a research and intervention project. In addition, 69 D&T teachers across eight schools completed a questionnaire at the start of the main intervention period. Data from 126 student interviews across six schools are used to support the teacher data outlined above.     

Conflict in the family: A continuing education course produced by the open university

This course, first presented by the Open University in 1980, is designed for independent study by people who, in the course of their working lives, come into contact with families suffering serious internal conflicts which place any members—adult or child—in danger of physical or emotional abuse in their own home. The course has been developed at a level which should make it a serious contribution to in-service training for a wide variety of professionals and experienced voluntary workers. It is unique in that it not only examines constructive and destructive aspects of conflict but also integrates written material (16 units) with an audiovisual component (8 TV programmes and 7 cassette tapes) on prevention, diagnosis and intervention relating to the whole spectrum of family conflict and violence including child abuse, sexual abuse, adolescent abuse, spouse abuse, abuse of and by the elderly and abuse of parents by their children. This paper provides a brief outline of the course aims, objectives and content together with information on its usage in the UK and the availability of certain components for international usage.     

ICT Policy and Implementation in Education: cases in Canada,Northern Ireland and Ireland

Countries with similar levels of economic development often implement different education ICT policies. Much of the existing research attributes such differences to economic and political factors. In this paper, we examine the development of ICT policy and implementation in the two parts of Ireland and in two Canadian provinces and find that historical, social and cultural differences also play an important role in the way ICT policies develop. In particular, we see differing historical perceptions of the role of the state and church in education playing a more important role than has hitherto been recognized.     

Infants' Reliance on a Social Criterion for Establishing Word-Object Relations

The language children hear presents them with a multitude of co-occurrences between words and things in the world, and they must repeatedly determine which among these manifold co-occurrences is relevant. Social factors—such as cues regarding the speaker's referential intent—might serve as one guide to whether word-object covariation should be registered. In 2 studies, infants (15–20 months and 18–20 months in Studies 1 and 2, respectively) heard novel labels at a time when they were investigating a single novel object; in one case the label was uttered by a speaker seated within the infant's view and displaying concurrent attention to the novel toy (coupled condition), whereas in the other case the label emanated from a speaker seated out of the infant's view (decoupled condition). In both studies, subsequent comprehension questions indicated that infants of 18–20 months registered a stable link between label and object in the coupled condition, but not in the decoupled condition, despite the fact that covariation between label and object was equivalent in the 2 conditions. Thus, by 18–20 months children are inclined to establish a mapping between word and object only when a speaker displays signs of referring to that object.     

Project on scope,sequence, and coordination: A new synthesis for improving science education

The Project on Scope, Sequence, and Coordination of Secondary School Science (SS&C) is a major national project designed to reform science education, K-12. Based on research on learning science, the project includes provision for hands-on experience, sequencing over time at successively higher levels of abstraction, and taking account of student preconceptions. Associated with SS&C is a performance-based student assessment project which incorporates compact-disc interactive (CD-I) technology. The SS&C project and its assessment component were initiated by the author and have become projects of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. Projects are underway in California, North Carolina, Iowa, Puerto Rico, Texas, and Alaska.     

Some evidence of growth and change in speech education in Illinois public high schools since 1919

Since the early part of this century, speech education in secondary schools has steadily increased. The evidence of such growth in Illinois is presented here.