STEAM Designed and Enacted: Understanding the Process of Design and Implementation of STEAM Curriculum in an Elementary School

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Educators are now moving classroom instructional objectives away from what content do we need to know towards how can we support learners in the...     

隋"国计之富"与隋之速亡

隋朝素以“国计之富”艳称于中国历史，实际上隋的富庶，在某种程度上被夸大了，并不尽属实。隋代速亡，原因何在?或以为就在于其“国计之富”，也不符合史实，隋短祚而亡，原因主要在其内部离心因素过多。     

Pedagogy for partisanship: research training for Black graduate students in the Black intellectual tradition

Current and former students of two professors in a southern research university and a community educator, all participants in an African-centered research collaborative/apprenticeship, describe what and how we study together and our struggle to use our knowledge and research in service to our community. We uplift the works of key Pan-African/Black/Africana Studies/Nile Valley scholars to illustrate the African epistemic foundation of our collaborative/apprenticeship. We describe how we utilized the methodology of narrative inquiry to explore our experiences as participants in the HeKA (Heritage Knowledge in Action) research collaborative and how HeKA has provided ways of knowing and being centered in our culture and heritage. We present our findings, which include some of the dilemmas of Black doctoral students and emerging scholars engaged in HeKA and how this collaborative/apprenticeship serves as an emancipatory praxis to enable the next generation to realize their goals of partisan research and pedagogy in higher education.     

Sources of errors by capuchin monkeys on delayed response

Six capuchin monkeys were trained on a series of indirect, delayed response problems with delay intervals ranging from 0 to 60 sec. Data were analyzed by sequential state theory in order to quantify random and nonrandom components of the subjects’ response sequences. A tendency of the subjects to repeat responses to the position chosen on the previous trial was a significant source of proactive interference even when effective orienting responses were elicited by the predelay cue. Changes in random and nonrandom response components with increasing delays suggested a two-phase process: the first for delays up to 7 sec characterized by increases in random and nonrandom error-producing responses, and the second for delays greater than 7 sec characterized by increases in random responding only.     

Envisioning a Culturally Imaginative Educational Psychology

Culture has mostly been neglected in mainstream educational psychology research. In this paper, we argued for the need to cultivate a cultural imagination and provided seven key recommendations for conducting culturally imaginative research. We explained how these recommendations could prove useful in avoiding the two types of errors that trap cross-cultural researchers. The first type is the cultural attribution error which pertains to attributing any observed difference to culture even if culture is not the relevant factor. The second type is the cultural blind spot error which pertains to the failure to see how culture influences psycho-educational processes and outcomes. We proffered seven recommendations to avoid these twin pitfalls. We reviewed the papers published from 2006 to 2016 in four flagship educational psychology journals including the Journal of Educational Psychology, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Cognition and Instruction, and British Journal of Educational Psychology. Our review focused on how educational psychologists have studied culture over the past decade and how the published studies aligned with our seven recommendations. The content analysis indicated that only a small percentage of the articles dealt with culture, most of the studies drew on Western samples, and that almost all studies relied on an etic approach with very few studies using an emic bottom-up perspective. We ended with a justification for why a culturally imaginative educational psychology is urgently needed in an increasingly diverse world.     

The relationship between grit,self-control,and early grade reading: a trial measuring soft skills in rural Tanzania

Abstract

Soft skills such as grit, self-control, and self-confidence have been shown to predict outcomes in school and in life. As such, their valid and reliable measurement is of substantial interest in educational research and policy circles. However, the vast majority of this research originates in Western countries; relatively little is known regarding the measurement of soft skills in developing country contexts and whether similar types of instruments can provide evidence of these skills. This paper presents a novel means of assessing grit, self-control, and self-confidence in rural Tanzania: through the use of scenario-based self-report questionnaires. Survey instruments were administered in three regions in Tanzania to 961 Standard 2 pupils. We found that scenario-based items provided valid and, in most cases, reliable estimates of the three tested soft skills. When comparing self-reported soft skills and reading ability, we found that both grit and self-control were significant predictors of reading and mathematics performance. After controlling for sex, region, and age, grit was found to have a stronger association with reading performance than socioeconomic status.     

How does learning happen for people participating in adventure training?

Adventure training has become fashionable over the past few years in Hong Kong. Current Education Reform suggests learning should not be confined to the classroom, and adventure training is viewed as an alternative method to institutional routines for personal and group development. This paper reported a longitudinal study investigating how learning happened for four church members (out of twenty-five participants) purposively selected in an adventure team-building camp. Both quantitative and qualitative instruments were used. Results shed light on: (1) how the constructs of self-efficacy and organizational commitment helped to conceptualize what people meant by a team; (2) how qualitative findings revealed evidence of learning of the four members which could not be observed by quantitative findings; and (3) how participants experienced and learnt from adventure training.