Peer‐mediated instruction: assisted performance in the primary classroom

Peer collaboration has been supported in research as an effective instructional strategy. However, education researchers lack a full understanding of the types of scaffolding that take place in peer groups. Little research is available that documents what happens during the small group interactions. This case study took place in one teacher’s multi‐age primary classroom in the southeastern region of the USA. It examined how elementary students provided scaffolding to one another during collaborative classroom activities. Specifically, this investigation explored the ways in which elementary students provide assistance to one another during academic tasks and examined the status of the children, in terms of more or less capabilities, during the collaborative events. Vygotsky asserts that for learning to occur, assistance must be provided by a more capable person. The research findings suggest that peers provide scaffolding for one another in various ways. In this investigation, these primary students utilized questioning, providing feedback, and instructing as the primary methods of scaffolding during the learning experiences. This study also supports assertions that when students are allowed to pose questions and provide feedback to one another during peer collaboration, they help to establish instruction in their zone of proximal development.     

The Good Working Mother: Managerial Women’s Sensemaking and Feelings About Work–Family Issues

We use a sensemaking lens to explore how women managers experience and articulate work–life concerns upon their return to paid work following maternity leaves. We focus on 11 women who held different types of managerial positions, including vice presidents, circulation managers, and human resources experts. We found that our participants re‐framed the good mother image into a good working mother role that fit their lifestyles and interests. To accomplish this reframing, participants engaged in three thematic processes supportive of the good working mother image: (a) good working mothers arrange quality child care; (b) good working mothers are (un)equal partners; and (c) good working mothers feel pleasure in their working mother role. These themes and image were both ironic and fragile constructions of working motherhood. Because these themes and images enable participants to make sense of and establish the worth of working motherhood to family members, friends, acquaintances, organizational members, and community members, they provide a reason why middle‐ or upper‐class working and stay‐at‐home mothers may be in conflict about work and family choices.     

Still Photographs,Dynamic Memories: A Study of the Visual Presentation of Israel s Past in Commemorative Newspaper Supplements

This article investigates the ways in which Israel s history was presented via photographs and texts in commemorative supplements of three Israeli newspapers marking the country s anniversaries.     

Television Entertainment

Robert Metz' The Today Show: An Inside Look at 25 Tumultuous Years...and the Colorful and Controversial People Behind the Scenes (New York: Playboy Press, 1977—$10.00)

Jeff Rovin's The Great Television Series (South Brunswick, N.J.: A.S. Barnes, 1977—$17.50)

Gregg Lewis, Telegarbage: What You Can do about Sex and Violence on TV (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1977—$2.95, paper)

Richard Meyers, Super TV Stars (160 pp.)

Richard Meyers, The Illustrated Soap Opera Companion (159 pp.)     

Book review

Copyright Questions and Answers for Information Professionals: From the Columns of Against the Grain Laura N. Gasaway West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press, 2013, 284pp. ISBN: 978‐1‐55753‐639‐6, £16.12, pbk     

The Centralizing Role of Terminology: A Consideration of Achievement Gap,NCLB, and School Turnaround

American educational policies over the last 40 years have represented an uninterrupted movement toward centralization. This article analyzes three terms that have become critical to the centralization of American education. More specifically, this article reviews the development, language, and source of the thematic terms and associated language of achievement gap, NCLB, and school turnaround. The author contends that the level of each term's entrenchment in American education varies but that their impacts have all grown from a top-down initiative, and although the terms represent separate concepts, they have been linked in meaningful ways to drive centralization.     

Item Position and Item Difficulty Change in an IRT-Based Common Item Equating Design

In operational testing programs using item response theory (IRT), item parameter invariance is threatened when an item appears in a different location on the live test than it did when it was field tested. This study utilizes data from a large state's assessments to model change in Rasch item difficulty (RID) as a function of item position change, test level, test content, and item format. As a follow-up to the real data analysis, a simulation study was performed to assess the effect of item position change on equating. Results from this study indicate that item position change significantly affects change in RID. In addition, although the test construction procedures used in the investigated state seem to somewhat mitigate the impact of item position change, equating results might be impacted in testing programs where other test construction practices or equating methods are utilized.     

High school students' use of meiosis when solving genetics problems

Researchers have pointed out the difficulties that high school students have in understanding meiosis and the infrequency with which they acknowledge the conceptual relationships between meiosis and classical genetics, particularly when solving genetics problems. The research described in this article paints a different picture of students' reasoning with meiosis as they solved complex, computergenerated genetics problems, some of which required them to revise their understanding of meiosis in response to anomalous data. Details are presented of the ways students used their knowledge of meiosis to recognize anomalous data, to generate hypotheses as part of the revision of explanatory models, and to assess these hypotheses. The findings from this research, contrary to most reports in the literature, suggest that students are able to develop rich understanding of meiosis and can utilize that knowledge to solve genetics problems.