Concepts associated with the equality symbol

This paper looks at recent research dealing with uses of the equal sign and underlying notions of equivalence or non-equivalence among preschoolers (their intuitive nitions of equality), elementary and secondary school children, and college students. The idea that the equal sign is a do something signal (an operator symbol) persists throughout elementary school and even into junior high school. High schoolers' use of the equal sign in algebraic equations as a symbol for equivalence may be concealing a fairly tenuous grasp of the underlying relationship between the equal sign and the notion of equivalence, as indicated by some of the shortcut errors they make when solving equations.This article is based on a paper presented at Fourth International Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Berkeley, California, August 1980.

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The Organization of Reactivated Memory in Infancy

The specificity of memory retrieval by 3-month-old infants was examined in 3 experiments. All infants were trained in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm to kick their feet to produce movement in an overhead crib mobile and were tested 2 weeks later. 24 hours prior to the test, subjects received a 3-min reminder treatment. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that only the moving training mobile alleviated forgetting after the 2-week retention interval; forgetting was not alleviated by exposure to the stationary training mobile or to the mobile stands and ribbon alone. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that, once retrieved, the reactivated memory was highly specific to the conditions of original training. Furthermore, the memory attributes that were the last to be forgotten (e.g., the general or global features) were the first to be retrieved following the reminder treatment. Conversely, those memory attributes that were forgotten first (e.g., the specific or local details) were the last to be retrieved. These findings have important implications for infant memory retrieval, reminiscence, and infantile amnesia.     

‘Wild’ girls? An exploration of ‘ladette’ cultures in secondary schools

‘Laddish’ attitudes and behaviours are central to current discourses on boys’ ‘underachievement’, as they are seen by many people to impede the progress of some boys in school. Whilst the vast majority of concern about ‘laddishness’ has, to date, focused upon boys, according to media reports there are now good reasons to worry about girls. Anecdotes from teachers and reports in the media suggest that some schoolgirls are now acting ‘laddishly’, that they are ‘ladettes’. This paper explores ‘ladette’ cultures in secondary schools, drawing upon interview data from100 pupils and 30 teachers. It tackles and discusses the following questions: (a) What does the term ‘ladette’ mean to pupils and teachers? (b) Do school‐aged ‘ladettes’ ‘exist’—and if so, what are they like inside and outside of school? (c) In what ways are ‘ladettes’ similar to, and different from, ‘lads’? (d) Are teachers concerned about ‘ladettes’? (e) Are ‘ladette’ behaviours on the increase?     

Seizing the Moment: Reflections on Play Opportunities for Disabled Children in the Early Years

Current policy in relation to special needs prioritises early intervention and inclusive education, at least as 'good intentions' This article argues for a paradigmatic shift away from individualist models of learning and disability. The social context of play is emphasised as the crucial arena for realising such good intentions, as long as it is geared to responding to, and developing, the self-determination, control, and identity of young disabled children becoming disabled adults in a disabling society.     

Manchester and the Emergence of an Association Football Culture, 1840–1880: An Alternative Viewpoint

This paper provides a critique of the article by Gary James and Dave Day on ‘The Emergence of an Association Football Culture in Manchester, 1840–1884', published in Sport in History. We suggest an alternative interpretation of Manchester's football history during this period, arguing that Association football was a minor form of football in a city largely dominated by the rugby code. Furthermore, by employing an artificial construct of Manchester the authors have produced the wrong answer to the wrong question. Rather than trying to prove that Manchester developed an important Association football culture, we suggest they ought to have addressed the question of why such a culture did not exist. The contribution to the development of Association football of three isolated ‘transitory’ clubs in a city as large as Manchester is certainly not ‘substantial’. Subsequently, James and Day also fail to exploit fully their evidence for early football in the Manchester area by omitting to relate this properly to the much wider ongoing debate surrounding the origins of football. Conversely, there is ample evidence that ‘substantial’ Association football developments actually occurred in East Lancashire, centred on Bolton, Blackburn and Darwen, developments that are scarcely noted in James and Day's account.     

The relative effects of university success courses and individualized interventions for students with learning disabilities

Little is known about the relative effects of post‐secondary learning services for students with learning disabilities. We compared outcomes for students with learning disabilities who selected to: (1) take an academic learning success course (course‐intervention), (2) have regular individual interventions (high‐intervention) or (3) use services only as needed (low‐intervention). Pre‐ and post‐test comparisons revealed improvements in academic self‐efficacy and academic resourcefulness for students in the course‐ and high‐intervention groups. The course‐intervention group also showed decreases in their failure attributions to bad luck and increases in their general repertoire of learned resourcefulness skills in comparison to the high‐intervention group and had significantly higher year‐end GPAs in comparison to the low‐intervention group. Here we find positive outcomes for students with learning disabilities taking a course that teaches post‐secondary learning and academic skills.