Children's and Adolescents' Accounts of Helping and Hurting Others: Lessons About the Development of Moral Agency

This study examined children's and adolescents' narrative accounts of everyday experiences when they harmed and helped a friend. The sample included 100 participants divided into three age groups (7‐, 11‐, and 16‐year‐olds). Help narratives focused on the helping acts themselves and reasons for helping, whereas harm narratives included more references to consequences of acts and psychological conflicts. With age, however, youth increasingly described the consequences of helping. Reasons for harming others focused especially on the narrator's perspective whereas reasons for helping others were centered on others' perspectives. With age, youth increasingly drew self‐related insights from their helpful, but not their harmful, actions. Results illuminate how reflections on prosocial and transgressive experiences may provide distinct opportunities for constructing moral agency.     

Children's thinking about diversity of belief in the early school years: judgments of relativism, tolerance, and disagreeing persons

Children's thinking about diversity of belief in 4 realms--morality, taste, facts, and ambiguous facts--was examined. Ninety-six participants (ages 5, 7, and 9) were interviewed about beliefs different from their own that were endorsed by characters with different status; their judgments of relativism, tolerance, and disagreeing persons were assessed. Five-year-olds made fewer relative and tolerant judgments than 7- and 9-year-olds. Nevertheless, participants of all ages organized their judgments according to the realm of diversity, thought that some beliefs are relative and some are nonrelative, and made tolerant judgments of some divergent beliefs (and their proponents) but not of others. The findings suggest that, in the early school years, children have multiple and well-differentiated perspectives on belief diversity.     

Opportunities to Learn and Achievement in Mathematics in a Sample of Sixth Grade Students in Lima, Peru

In recent years, the mathematics achievement of Peruvian students has been evaluated in three national and two international studies. The results in all cases suggest very poor learning. A similar situation is found in many developing countries. In this study, we analyzed the opportunities to learn (OTL) mathematics of sixth grade students from 22 public schools in Lima, Peru. OTL were defined in this study as curriculum coverage, cognitive demand of the tasks posed to the students, percent of mathematical exercises that were correct and quality of feedback. These variables were coded in the workbooks and notebooks of the students, which were gathered at the end of the school year (at the same time, the mathematics achievement test was administered). The results show that: (a) regarding OTL, less than half of the exercises available in the workbooks were solved, teachers overemphasize some topics of the national curriculum ({i.e.} related to Number and Number Sense), they pose tasks that are at very low levels of cognitive demand, and it is common to find mistakes in the students' answers to problems that have no feedback (or even worse, the feedback is wrong); (b) students in relatively poorer, multigrade classrooms have less OTL; (c) OTL, as defined earlier, is positively associated with achievement.A preliminary version of this paper received the Research Medal in the category Knowledge, Education andTechnology at the Annual Meeting of the Global Development Network (GDN) in Cairo, in January 2003.     

Disciplinary differences and implications for the development of generic skills: a study of engineering and business students’ perceptions of generic skills

Although previous research has examined how generic skills and disciplinary contexts are related, such investigation has not been conducted from students’ perspectives. Implications of disciplinary differences for the design of a generic skills curriculum have also remained unexplored. In this study, a questionnaire was administered to 502 first-year engineering and business students from a Hong Kong university which explored their perceived importance and competence level of their generic skills, as well as their motivation towards developing these skills. The results of engineering and business students were compared which revealed some disciplinary differences. Substantial differences were found in the importance and competency ratings on IT skills and business students gave significantly higher importance ratings on most generic skills than engineering students. This study will help guide curriculum design that leverages the benefits of interdisciplinary programmes and incorporates generic skills as part of learning outcomes within disciplinary contexts.