Making Learning Visible

Almost two million children in more than 40 countries around the world have received a One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO netbook computer. These netbooks represent the commitment of politicians, community leaders, and educators to implement disruptive, large‐scale education reform initiatives that will advance their countries into the 21st century and prepare their children for interconnected, global, creative, and knowledge economies. Expectations for the success of these initiatives are high, and local stakeholders as well as numerous international organizations look to these experiments with cautious optimism. These programs hold the promise to expand the learning and creative potentials of broad populations. As such, arguably, one of the greatest challenges facing these initiatives is designing and implementing mechanisms that help make the outcomes visible, understandable, and actionable by all audiences. In this article, we discuss initiatives being developed by OLPC at different levels of scale: at the meta level to understand impact across nations and learn about the emerging developments in the different programs; at the mezzo level to allow stakeholders to understand the development of the program in their countries and their schools; and at the micro level to help teachers and students understand emerging learning by children over a given period of time. We present some examples of student work to illustrate how some children are making creative contributions to OLPC. Inspired in the collaboration and work by Project Zero and Reggio Children, this article was given the name “Making Learning Visible.” Beyond the title, the work presented in this article recognizes the child both as an individual and a group learner; recognizes the acts as well as the products of learning; and above all, values the children's reflections and approaches to make their learning visible.     

History of education in Brazil: the construction of a knowledge field

This article analyses the general characteristics of the construction of the field of history of education in Brazil. To do so, it highlights the existing historiography and aims to describe the process of institutionalisation of this knowledge field, which, in general terms, has been focused on the area of teacher training. Since the nineteenth century, however, it has also been possible to identify systematic historiographical efforts in Brazil that are not directly related to the school system, but rather to the teaching of and research into the history of education within Brazilian universities. The article addresses the organisation of the field, the ways in which it has been structured and the strategies of academic legitimisation employed to achieve this. These include the regular production of dissertations and doctoral theses, the publication of books and journals, academic events and the creation of research groups and scientific associations, through which research findings have found national and international circulation. This set of indicators creates conditions for an understanding of the expansion and reconfiguration of the field of history of education that began in the 1980s, as well as of the challenges this phenomenon presents to current historiography and teacher training in Brazil.     

Personal belief in a just world, experience of teacher justice, and school distress in different class contexts

The study examined the meaning of personal belief in a just world and students’ experience of their teachers’ behavior toward them personally for school distress in different class contexts. The study involved 827 secondary school students from 61 classes (grades 9 to 11). Analyses revealed that the more the students believed in a personal just world, the more they felt their teachers’ behavior toward them personally to be just, and the less school distress they experienced; the association between belief in a just world (BJW) and school distress was partly mediated by students’ personal experience of teacher justice. These associations were stable across school tracks, schools, and classes. According to these results and the just world theory, a strong BJW seems to function as a rather context-independent personal resource for students, explaining their individual experience of teacher justice and school distress. Moreover, teacher justice seems to be a key feature of schools explaining students’ well-being at school.     

Strangers and Orphans: Knowledge and mutuality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

Paulo Freire consistently upheld humanization and mutuality as educational ideals. This article argues that conceptualizations of knowledge and how knowledge is sought and produced play a role in fostering humanization and mutuality in educational contexts. Drawing on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, this article focuses on the two central characters who ‘ardently’ pursue knowledge at all costs. It will be argued that the text suggests two possible outcomes from the pursuit of knowledge. One is mutuality; the other is social disconnectedness.     

基于Divisia分解模型的中国能源密度变化特性及产业路径研究

Divisia指数分解是研究指标变化的重要方法.本文依据1997年至2005年间中国和11个OECD国家的主要工业产业样本数据,运用对数平均Divisia指数的分解方法,实证分析了这些国家的能源密度变化特性,解释推动能源密度变化的主要因素,并在此基础上,针对中国六个产出效果和密度效果最显著的产业,同OECD国家进行横向比较,从而确定了中国进一步降低能源密度的潜力和最佳产业路径.     

Unraveling the impact of the Big Five personality traits on academic performance: The moderating and mediating effects of self-efficacy and academic motivation

The main purpose of this study is to unravel the impact of the Big Five personality factors on academic performance. We propose a theoretical model with conditional indirect effects of the Big Five personality factors on academic performance through their impact upon academic motivation. To clarify the mixed results of previous studies concerning the impact of neuroticism, we suggest a moderating role of self-efficacy. Hierarchical, moderated mediation and mediated moderation regression analyses were performed on longitudinal data collected from 375 students of a University college in Belgium. The findings revealed a positive indirect effect of neuroticism on academic performance at higher levels of self-efficacy, complemented by a positive direct effect of neuroticism at lower levels of self-efficacy. Finally, this study showed that conscientiousness positively affected academic performance indirectly through academic motivation, but also that it is a condition for the indirect impact of extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness.     

The conflict between on-task and off-task actions in the classroom and its consequences for motivation and achievement

The relations between students’ value orientations, decisions in conflicts between on-task and off-task actions in the classroom, and experiences of motivational interference following these conflicts were investigated. It was expected that well-being value orientation was positively linked and achievement value orientation was negatively linked to decision for off-task behavior in such conflicts and that the higher students’ well-being value orientation, the higher their motivational impairment when deciding for the on-task behavior and the lower when deciding for the off-task behavior. For achievement orientation, the relationships were predicted to be reversed. The experience of motivational interference while performing on-task behavior was, in turn, expected to be related to worse grades. Data from 817 students (mean age 13.44) from 35 classrooms were collected using self-report questionnaires and analyzed in a series of hierarchical linear models. Analyses showed the relationships as predicted. All relationships found were comparable to the relationships found for a conflict between school and leisure actions after class. Results point out that even if students resist the off-task temptation in class, the mere possibility of off-task behavior can impair motivation and achievement.     

Executive functioning, metacognition, and self-perceived competence in elementary school children: an explorative study on their interrelations and their role for school achievement

In the present study, associations between executive functioning, metacognition, and self-perceived competence in the context of early academic outcomes were examined. A total of 209 children attending first grade were initially assessed in terms of their executive functioning and academic self-concept. One year later, children??s executive functioning, academic self-concept, metacognitive monitoring and control, as well as their achievement in mathematics and literacy were evaluated. Structural equation modeling revealed that executive functioning was significantly related to metacognitive control, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and that self-concept was substantially associated with metacognitive monitoring, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Individual differences in executive functioning and metacognitive control were significantly related to academic outcomes, with metacognitive control appearing to yield a more circumscribed influence on academic outcomes (only literacy) compared to executive functioning (literacy and mathematics).     

Visualizing the politics of innocence in the age of AIDS

We are concerned with the ways in which social constructions of age can contribute to reducing or exacerbating the vulnerability of young people, and for this reason we refer to the issue as one of ‘the politics of innocence’. The focus of this paper is on gender, youth and HIV prevention/AIDS awareness in the context of South Africa and investigates the uses (and abuses) of images of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ in the age of AIDS. Notwithstanding the particular case of South Africa where the incidence of new cases of HIV infection amongst young people is at crisis proportions, the impetus for our work on the visual representations of youth, gender and AIDS comes out of a recognition of the increasing risk of youth to sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, and within that the particular vulnerability, worldwide, of young women.