In Memoriam: Jerome Bruner (1915–2016). Polymath and pioneer in cognitive development and education / In Memoriam: Jerome Bruner (1915–2016). Erudito y pionero del desarrollo cognitivo y la educación

Jerome Seymour Bruner died on 5 June 2016 at the age of 100. Beginning as a standard experimental psychologist working with laboratory animals, he next ventured into the field of human social psychology, working in intelligence and public opinion polling during World War II. He then gained fame for his ‘New Look’ studies of perception. With A Study of Thinking Bruner took his place as a leader of the ‘Cognitive Revolution’, a movement that restored the mind to its traditional place at the core of psychology. Studies in Cognitive Growth was the developmental sequel to A Study of Thinking. It contained a number of path-breaking studies that, in essence, asked how the adult hypotheses and concept-attainment strategies documented in A Study of Thinking originated and developed in childhood. Unfortunately, these experiments on the developmental origins of adult concept attainment strategies largely got lost in the controversy over Bruner’s criticisms of Piaget. Bruner’s interest in educational experimentation, exemplified in The Process of Education, continued throughout his life. In later years he made annual pilgrimages to Reggio Emilia, a small city in northern Italy famous for its outstanding approach to early childhood education, much of it in the Brunerian tradition. Jerry Bruner’s passion for ideas and his optimistic belief that all problems were, if not actually solvable, at least attackable brought new excitement to the study of the mind of the child.     

Place versus response learning in rats

In previous research designed to test whether place learning or response learning proceeds more quickly and better in rats,place has not been defined unambiguously when direction has been controlled by moving an apparatus around in the test room (Blodgett, McCutchan, & Mathews, 1949; Skinner et al., 2003). In Experiment 1, we compared place and response learning while controlling direction in a static apparatus, thus making the meaning of place unambiguous. The performance of rats that had to make different turns to find food in a particular place and rats that had to always make the same turn to find food in two different places did not differ. In Experiment 2, visual cues were made equally discriminable for place and response learners in a static apparatus. Place learners still failed to outperform response learners, but there was evidence that response biases interfered more with place than with response learning. The results are discussed with reference to the historical debate that generated the original research and also in terms of more contemporary spatial-learning issues in rats.     

A tale of two worlds: the interstate system and world society in social science textbooks, 1950–2011

There is a great and longstanding divide in visions of the international arena. Some assert that states are the most relevant actors in international politics, and others emphasise the importance of non-state actors as vehicles through which shared ideas and identities are enacted. Typically, cross-national scholarship adopts one of these positions and seeks to support the attendant theoretical claims; our approach is entirely different. We treat these varied conceptions of the international arena not as antecedent explanatory frameworks, but rather as outcomes to be explained in their own right. To this end, we draw on data consisting of 539 high-school social science textbooks (history, civics, social studies, and geography) from 73 countries published between 1950 and 2011, coded to shed light on how the international arena is discussed in national education systems. We use multilevel modelling to determine how characteristics of textbooks and countries are linked to different visions of the international arena. Stronger national emphases in books promote a vision of the interstate system, as does a country’s level of democracy. Emphases on world society emerge particularly in recent decades and in books and countries most exposed to educational and social globalisation. Our findings provide initial support for arguments that world society and the interstate system are distinct, leading to multiple forms of inequality in the international arena.     

Educational non-philosophy

Abstract

The final lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? call for a non-philosophy to balance and act as a counterweight to the task of philosophy that had been described by them in terms of concept creation. In a footnote, Deleuze and Guattari mention François Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy, but dispute its efficacy in terms of the designated relationship between non-philosophy and science, as had been realised by Laruelle at the time. However, the mature non-philosophy of Laruelle could indicate a resolution to the problematic relationship between science and educational philosophy that we have inherited due to the poststructural theories of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Non-philosophy suggests a framework for thought that includes science in a non-positivist style and provides the means to view education as a performative practice. This article explores the non-philosophy of Laruelle in education as a means to view education under the conditions of strict immanence and in line with an anti-phenomenological metaphysics of non-representation. Laruelle is perhaps one of the most important critics of Deleuze in France, and as such, his insights into the Deleuzian oeuvre reveal a way forward for education as a practice that analyses science, philosophy and politics through non-philosophy.     

Firm foundations: the effectiveness of an educational psychologist developed intervention targeting early numeracy skills

This study evaluates the efficacy of a mathematics intervention devised by Essex Educational Psychology Service (EPS), UK. The intervention was designed to develop understanding and skills across four key domains within arithmetical development, by applying the principles of errorless learning, distributed practice and teaching to mastery. A quasi-experimental design was used to investigate the success of the intervention in raising the level of arithmetical skills of lower achieving pupils up to National Curriculum Level 2. The results indicated that children engaging with the intervention made significantly more progress than children not engaging with the intervention, with ratio gains of 2.51 in arithmetical skills. In addition, gains were made in mathematical reasoning.     

Critical psychologies of disability: boundaries,borders and bodies in the lives of disabled children

Attending to the ways in which bodies and subjectivities are constituted in social environments is not simply a concern of social geographers but an emerging interest in critical psychology, childhood and disability studies. Boundaries and borders are nothing if not the different relational and durational articulations of bodies and spaces. These entangled boundaries include borders between parent and child; culture and body; school, family and child. Through analysing the ways in which these borderlines are continually re-composed and re-constituted, we are able to reveal their relational and embodied articulations. In previous works, we have explored the ways in which disabled children disrupt normative orders associated with school, family and community. In this paper, we take up the concepts of boundaries and borders to explore their relational and embodied articulations with specific reference to stories collected as part of an ESRC project entitled ‘Does every child matter, Post-Blair: the interconnections of disabled childhoods’. We ask, how do disabled children negotiate space in their lives? In what ways do they challenge space through their borders and boundaries with others? How can we re-imagine, re-think and differently practice – that is revolutionise – key borders and boundaries of education in ways that affirm the lives of disabled children? We address these questions through reference to the narrative from the Derbyshire family, with particular focus on Hannah and her mother Linda, which we argue allow us to consider the ways in which disabled childhoods can be understood and reimagined. We explore two analytical considerations; ‘Being disabled: being mugged’ and ‘Becoming enabled: teacups, saucers and communities’.     

Item analysis of written expression scoring systems from the PIAT‐R and WIAT

The Peabody Individual Achievement Test–Revised (PIAT‐R) and Wechsler Individual Achievement Test (WIAT) contain measures of written expression. However, these subtests are not theory‐based and were assessed with inappropriate psychometric analyses. This study attempted to enhance the study of written expression by reexamining the reliability and validity of the PIAT‐R and WIAT Written Expression scoring systems, applying theory and more appropriate statistical analyses. First, items were identified that were the most and least reliable, determined by interrater agreement. Next, the most and least valid items were identified, based on item–total correlations. Subjects included 50 adolescents, men, and women aged 13 to 46 years; raters were three graduate students with experience and training similar to that of the typical test user. Results indicate that seven items were too easy, as virtually all subjects received the maximum score on these items—these items were eliminated. The remaining 24 items were classified as both reliable and valid (9 items), reliable but not valid (4 items), valid with limited reliability (5 items), and neither reliable nor valid (6 items). The WIAT written expression scoring system was found to have more items that were both reliable and valid compared to the PIAT‐R scoring system. Items measuring global, rather than specific, content were also found to be more reliable and valid. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Intelligent information retrieval: diagnosing information need. : Part I. The theoretical framework for developing an intelligent IR tool

The research examines the notion that the principles underlying the procedure used by doctors to diagnose a patient's disease are useful in the design of “intelligent” IR systems because the task of the doctor is conceptually similar to the computer (or human) intermediary's task in “intelligent information retrieval”: to draw out, through interaction with the IR system, the user's query/information need. The research is reported in two parts. In Part II, an information retrieval tool is described which is based on “intelligent information retrieval” assumptions about the information user. In Part I, presented here, the theoretical framework for the tool is set out. This framework is borrowed from the diagnostic procedure currently used in medicine, called “differential diagnosis”. Because of the severe consequences that attend misdiagnosis, the operating principle in differential diagnosis is (1) to expand the uncertainty in the diagnosis situation so that all possible hypotheses and evidence are considered, then (2) to contract the uncertainty in a step by step fashion (from an examination of the patient's symptoms, through the patient's history and a physical (signs), to laboratory tests). The IR theories of Taylor, Kuhlthau and Belkin are used to demonstrate that these medical diagnosis procedures are already present in IR and that it is a viable model with which to design “intelligent” IR tools and systems.     

Parental Structuring in Response to Toddler Negative Emotion Predicts Children’s Later Use of Distraction as a Self-Regulation Strategy for Waiting

Structuring is a parental response to young children’s behavior that may foster children’s attempts to use cognitive skills to engage in self-regulation. Using a rural, economically strained sample, parental structuring in response to 127 eighteen-month-olds’ negative emotion was observed during a home visit. Children’s distraction, a useful cognitive strategy when waiting for a reward, was assessed during a laboratory wait task at 18, 24, 36, and 48 months. More frequent parental structuring at child age 18 months predicted more developmental growth in children’s use of distraction between 18 and 48 months, in contrast with parental directives. Consistent with Kopp’s (1989) framework, parental structuring may capitalize on children’s cognitive development to play a unique role in fostering children’s self-regulation of negative emotion.