Response to a multi-media system

Several physics classes followed an integrated multi-media, multi-modal teaching-learning system or schedule, and completed a number of evaluation instruments designed to collect data on both affective and cognitive variables, as well as on the resulting behaviors of teachers and students. The data lead to some tentative conclusions about reactions of students to different media in such a system, effects of media on learning, and the impact of the system on teacher self-concept. Conclusions relate to the future of such integrated systems and their effects on motivation and learning.     

Individual differences in cognitive synthesis: An M-capacity analysis

Individual differences in children's propensity to demonstrate cognitive synthesis were evaluated using an artificial reading task. Six-year-olds were asked to demonstrate the meaning of various sentences constructed of logographs, or whole-word symbols, which were arranged in either a meaningful (i.e., grammatical) or scrambled (i.e., ungrammatical) order. Some children demonstrated the sentences in a synthesized mode (expressing a single idea unit), while others used a nonsynthesized mode (expressing the meanings of individual logographs). Overall, synthesizers had a larger attentional reserve, or M-capacity, than nonsynthesizers. The two groups did not differ significantly in age, intellectual level, or reading achievement. As predicted by their larger M-capacity, synthesizers demonstrated from memory significantly more items from meaningful sentences than nonsynthesizers. However, when synthesizers attempted to integrate the scrambled sentences, the excessive operative schemes needed to reorganize the items reduced their recall performance to the level of nonsynthesizers.     

Dealing with “induced migration” in university impact studies

The migration-inducing effect of an institution of higher education is often overlooked in university impact studies. This paper deals with estimating the local economic impacts of a university accounting for the fact that students and staff induced to the area by the presence of the university are unlikely to remain in its absence. It is argued that this is an important aspect of the correct identification of the counterfactual position and a vital component in accurate impact analysis. A case study is presented relating to the short-term impacts of the Northwestern University campus in the city of Evanston, Illinois. The tendency to overstate this impact through the incorrect treatment of induced migration is illustrated. It is also shown that the estimated income and output impacts attributed to the university are very sensitive to changes in the local consumption patterns of migrants.     

Evolving strategies for using interactive video resources in mathematics classrooms

In order to understand the role of interactive video (IV) in mathematics classrooms, teachers were given a set of IV resources which were very mixed in character and style, and from which they could freely select. These were used in lessons over an extended period, in some cases two years or longer. By interviewing and by observing lessons, it has been possible to draw some tentative conclusions about the relative merits of different styles of IV in mathematics classrooms. IV resources are often managed in a similar way to computers and this similarity seems to have influenced teachers' opinions and choices. However, the affective impact of video was also evident in teachers' choices. A complex picture emerges with no one style dominating.     

Rhetoric and the origins of the human sciences: A Foucauldian tale untold

Michel Foucault’s famous history of the human sciences focused on “the order of things” and in doing so it overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: pedagogy, politics, and psychology. If we revisit Foucault from a rhetorical perspective there are consequences: (1) at the level of architectonic, we rediscover rhetoric’s role at the inception of the human sciences, and (2) at the level of thematic, we can make better sense of rhetorical phenomena such as the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century sacred arts of listening, which feature a “public ear.” Foucault’s late interest in the pastoral picks up this rhetorical thread, although he never was able to revise the disciplinary and biopolitical history implicated therein. This article initiates just such a revision, paying particular attention to historiographic questions, and to recent discussions of biopower that wind up looking very different from this rhetorical perspective.     

Mapping the moral assumptions of multi-faith religious education

ABSTRACT

When Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales transitioned from Christian confessionalism to a multi-faith approach in the latter half of the twentieth century, the subject’s moral aims were reasserted. In this article, we explore the moral assumptions of this transformation and map some of their connections to other theological and ethical ideas. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of a rhizome, we make two novel contributions to scholarship in this regard. First, through some salient examples we show the connections between the moral aims of multi-faith RE and the assumptions of Kantian moral religion. The second contribution, building on this analysis, identifies three moral justifications of multi-faith RE: universalist (founded on assumptions of moral universals across religions), vicarious (the support of a religious worldview by using other religions’ moral teachings) and instrumentalist (a moral justification based on the supposed extrinsic benefits of studying religions). We then go onto consider how these assumptions may differ from the moral commitments of the religions they appropriate, suggesting they disrupt and recombine theocentric concepts into pedagogic ones.