Exploring the experience of ten Australian Honours students

Honours study is viewed as a transition from undergraduate to postgraduate study and/or to enhanced career prospects. In Australia, Honours is usually an adjunct to the standard undergraduate degree. This paper provides an ethnographic study of 10 Australian Honours students. Seeing their experience through their reflections, in their own voices, reveals that Honours may be more than transitional – these students were transformed personally. Such emotionally charged transformations require academics to reflect on the best forms of support for Honours students.     

Asynchronous and synchronous online teaching: Perspectives of Canadian high school distance education teachers

This paper presents the results of an inductive, interpretive analysis of the perspectives of 42 Canadian high school distance education (DE) teachers on asynchronous and synchronous online teaching. The paper includes a conceptual overview of the affordances and constraints of each form of teaching. Findings provided insight into the following aspects of asynchronous and synchronous online teaching: degree of use; the tools used; the contexts in which each occur; students' preferences; and limitations. Pedagogy emerged as more important than media for both asynchronous and synchronous online teaching. Synchronous online teaching relied on teacher‐ rather than student‐centred approaches. Asynchronous online teaching provided support for self‐paced, highly independent forms of secondary DE supplemented by synchronous online teaching for answering questions and troubleshooting.     

Mother–child joint writing in Chinese kindergarteners: metalinguistic awareness,maternal mediation and literacy acquisition

The present study examined the relations of Chinese word reading and writing to both maternal mediation of writing and a number of metalinguistic and cognitive skills in 63 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners. The whole process of maternal mediation of writing, in which mothers individually facilitated their children's writing of 12 two‐character words in their own ways, was videotaped. This study replicated and extended previous work on the cognitive strategies mothers use to help children in writing Chinese words. Mothers' typical mediation strategies were positively and significantly associated with both children's independent word reading and writing. In addition, maternal mediation of writing was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading, but not word writing, even with metalinguistic and cognitive skills, including phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing and visual knowledge, statistically controlled. Findings underscore the importance of mothers' early scaffolding in facilitating children's literacy acquisition.     

Comparing the use of the empty number line in England and the Netherlands

Efforts to meet the needs of children's learning in arithmetic has led to an increased emphasis on the teaching of mental calculation strategies in England. This has included the adoption of didactical tools such as the empty number line (ENL) that was developed as part of the realistic mathematics movement in the Netherlands. It has been claimed that the English use of the ENL differs from that of the Dutch. In this study curriculum guidance materials are examined to investigate these differences. Two examples of teaching sequences are provided to illustrate them further. It is proposed that the different uses stem from different pedagogical principles. The implications of the English use are discussed in relation to the presentation of mental calculation strategies in an algorithmic way.     

Individualism-collectivism among Americans, Turks and Turkish immigrants to the U.S.

Whether immigrants to the U.S. from collectivist cultures will adopt American individualist values is an important question at the intersection of theories on acculturation and individualism/collectivism. According to the assimilation hypothesis, Turkish immigrants to the U.S. should become more individualistic with increasing length of stay. Alternatively, the immigrant interdependence hypothesis proposes that the exigencies of immigration require retaining or increasing collectivist values and behaviors, especially the willingness to rely on others. Measures of individualism and collectivism were obtained from Turkish immigrants to the U.S., Turks residing in Istanbul, and residents of Boston. Bostonians and Istanbul residents differed primarily on vertical collectivism, which is the tendency to subordinate ones own goals to those of in-group authority figures. Immigrants’ values did not change with increasing length of stay in the U.S., refuting the assimilation hypothesis. When immigrants were compared to non-immigrants, immigrants endorsed stronger horizontal and vertical collectivism and more desire to both give and receive, consistent with the immigrant interdependence hypothesis. However, this hypothesis was not uniformly supported. Compared to non-immigrants, immigrants reported more self-reliance with competition, and more internal locus of control, indicating a sense of agency and responsibility. Findings are consistent with the view that immigrants adjust in complex ways to their new society, and may have different temperaments than non-immigrants.     

论艺术教育的意义与价值

社会上存在很多对艺术教育的迷思,比如,艺术与教育的关系是什么?艺术是否可教?艺术完全是灵感的产物吗?艺术是否值得被教?艺术教育的作用是什么?符号理论可以表明艺术教育的可行性及价值。我们不应该将艺术仅仅视为达成某一具体目的的手段,而应该将其既看作目的,又视为手段。艺术完全是灵感的产物这一假设是没有根据的,学生的感觉回应和情感反应可以被教育,艺术教育是可能的,也是有价值的。     

A known group analysis validity study of the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education in US elementary and secondary schools

The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) provides educators with a tool for principal evaluation based on principal, teacher, and supervisor reports of principals’ learning-centered leadership. In this study, we conduct a known group analysis as part of a larger argument for the validity of the VAL-ED in US elementary and secondary schools. We asked superintendents to select the principals in their district who they believe in performance of their duties are in the top 20 % and the bottom 20 %. We ask how accurately VAL-ED scores can identify membership of the two known groups. Using a discriminant analysis, the VAL-ED places principals in the superintendent groups, on average, 70 % of the time for both elementary and secondary schools. Placement accuracy is greater for the top group than the bottom group.     

Fictitious Academic Expertise and Processing Resources

A previous study showed that pairs of students interacting in a second language produced more words when they were assigned a fictitious expert position in a specific competence dimension than when they were assigned a nonexpert position. It has also been shown that the usual level of expertise has an impact on the assigned fictitious expertise effect. The present study was designed to determine whether the processing capacity allotted to the current task could partly determine performance. A given position of expertise may demand a large or small attentional capacity. Two experiments were conducted using a dual-task paradigm. As expected, the different expertise positions led to different reaction times on the secondary task. The second experiment showed that the impact of assigning a position of expertise to students depends on their usual academic standing. This study supports the idea that in interactive situations, performance variations as a function of the expertise position can be partially explained by differences in the processing resources allocated to the task. Implications for teaching are discussed.