How Does Satellite Television Affect Small‐Linguistic Societies? Extracts from the Reykjavik Presentation

Abstract

The author, a senior Canadian bureaucrat concerned with government policy, outlines the problems in encouraging communities and industry to face the broadcasting needs of linguistic minorities. The paper looks at three options for providing these minorities with access to broadcasting services.     

Research report

The primary purpose was to investigate the efficacy of a full year of single‐sex (SS) teaching of science. The secondary aims were to locate any differentiation by set and gender, and to relate these to more proximal variables. Participants were 13 year olds. Higher set girls gave evidence of clear benefits overall, and higher set boys also, except in biology. Lower set pupils performed at or below expectations. Analyses of additional questionnaire and interview data pointed to further reasons for avoiding the making of unqualified generalizations about SS teaching. Pupil preferences for SS teaching were relevant, as were gender differences in attitudes to biology and physics. Qualitative data suggested higher set girls benefited from more learningrelated classroom interaction and less interference and exploitation of girls by boys in SS classes. Lower set pupils complained that SS teaching deprived them of social interaction with the other sex. The concluding suggestion was that SS teaching offers affordances of benefits when mixed‐sex teaching has specifiable disadvantages.     

Teaching Students with Moderate Intellectual Disability Who Are Emergent Readers to Comprehend Passages of Text

A modified system of least intrusive prompting was used to teach middle school students with moderate intellectual disability who were emergent readers to comprehend short passages of text. Text passages were summaries of the chapters of age-appropriate novels rewritten for a beginning reading level. Time delay was used to teach the participants to pair WH words to their definition. A modified system of least intrusive prompting was used to teach strategies for answering comprehension questions. All participants improved the number of correct responses for both rules definitions and comprehension responses from baseline to intervention. Additionally, probes collected during the session prior to the introduction of a new book indicated comprehension skills generalized to new untaught books.     

Using Constructivist Instructional Design Featured in Two Online Courses: Notes From the Field

Abstract

We thought that the close integration of theory and practice offered by constructivism promises unique opportunities to maximize learning in online courses using interactive software as the primary medium of communication. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to examine the ‘goodness of fit’ between principles drawn from constructivist theories and the design and implementation of the interactive online course.     

The Politics of Curriculum Development

Many free online tools exist to complement algebraic instruction at the middle school level. This article presents findings that analyzed the features of algebraic tools to support learning. The findings can help teachers select appropriate tools to facilitate specific topics.     

The explanation of practice: Why Chinese students copy assignments

Empirical research on copying and cheating in high school and university has typically employed quantitative survey methods. While these methods tell us about the conditions under which it is more and less likely to occur, they tell us less about the reasoning that leads students to copy the work of others. An alternative problem-based methodology (PBM) is presented which treats copying as a student'ssolution to the problem of how to complete an assignment, and investigates it by inquiry into the problem-solving processes that give rise to it. The methodology is employed in a study of copying among a small sample of Chinese university students. Intensive probing of their reasoning revealed the beliefs, motives and contextual conditions that led them to copy. Copying was a habitual strategy of both strong and weak students and was motivated by a wish to obtain the desired grade in the most efficient manner possible. The findings are discussed in terms of explanatory adequacy and implications for intervention.