Reading and young gifted children

The authors analyze issues such as appropriate programming, identification, and instructional approaches for teaching reading to young gifted children.     

Hip-hop as a resource for understanding the urban context A review of Christopher Edmin’s: Science education for the hip-hop generation, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010

This review explores Edmin’s “Science education for the hip-hop generation” by documenting how he frames hip-hop as a means to access urban student culture. He argues that hip-hop is more than a mere music genre, but rather a culture that provides young people with ways of connecting to the world. Two primary ideas emerged as central to his work. First, he contends that students develop communal relationships and collective identities based on the common experiences expressed in hip-hop. Second, he identifies how the conscious recognition of institutional oppression serves a central feature in urban schools. Emdin’s rich, and personal call for a greater understanding of hip-hop culture provides the text with an unmatched strength. He skillfully uses personal narratives from his own experience as well as quotes and references from hip-hop songs to make the nuances of hip hop transparent to science educators. Conversely, the limitation of this text is found in its unfulfilled promise to provide pragmatic examples of how to engage in a hip-hop based science education. Emdin’s work is ultimately valuable as it extends our current knowledge about urban students and hip-hop in meaningful ways.     

Doing relevant,funded mass media research

Motivations for conducting relevant communication research are discussed and examples provided of advantages and pitfalls of seeking funding from government and media institutions.     

Arts enrichment and school readiness for children at risk

Arts enrichment provides varied channels for acquiring school readiness skills and may offer important educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds and with diverse needs. Study 1 examined achievement within an arts enrichment preschool that served low-income children. Results indicated that students practiced school readiness skills through early learning, music, creative movement, and visual arts classes. Students who attended the preschool for 2 years demonstrated higher achievement than those who attended for 1 year, suggesting that maturation alone did not account for achievement gains. Across 2 years of program attendance and four time points of assessment, students improved in school readiness skills, and there were no significant effects of race/ethnicity or developmental level on achievement growth. Study 2 compared students attending the arts enrichment preschool to those attending a nearby alternative on a measure of receptive vocabulary that has been found to predict school success. At the end of 1 year of attendance, students in the arts program showed greater receptive vocabulary than those at the comparison preschool. Results suggest that arts enrichment may advance educational outcomes for children at risk.     

Teachers' conceptions of excellent teaching and its relationships to self-reported teaching practices

This study surveyed Chinese middle school (n = 951) teachers' conceptions of excellent teaching and examined the relationship of those conceptions to their self-reported teaching practices. Responses were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. These teachers identified one examination-oriented dimension and four interactive, pedagogical dimensions of excellent teaching and four dimensions of teaching practice. The structural model indicated a high consistency rate (83%) between teachers' conceptions of excellent teaching and the corresponding self-reported practices. Implications for teaching standards, teacher professional development, and examination system are discussed.     

Secondary school students' conceptions of learning and their relationship to achievement

Conceptions of learning were investigated in three studies. Study 1 piloted a modified version of Purdie and Hattie's (2002) Conceptions of Learning Inventory (COLI-I) with 236 secondary students. Multilog analysis was used to remove items with poor measurement characteristics. Study 2 used a nationally representative sample of 701 New Zealand secondary school students who completed the COLI-II. The measurement model had marginally acceptable fit. Study 3 consisted of 608 secondary students who completed a slightly revised COLI-III and provided standardised academic reading and mathematics achievement data. The Study 2 and 3 samples were found to have configural invariance and the structural model mapping students' conceptions of learning onto their academic achievement had acceptable fit. The conception that learning is a duty predicted lower achievement and the conception of learning as continuous predicted higher achievement. This is the first study to empirically demonstrate a direct relationship between learning conceptions and academic outcomes in the secondary sector.