Children's skill in making predictions and their understanding of what predicting means: A developmental study

The purpose of this study was to describe the development of elementary students' skill in making predictions and of their understanding of what predicting means. The study involved observing and assessing the performance of 167 children on the Physical Manipulation Test (PMT), a test involving the manipulation of science materials and equipment. Children were interviewed about what they understand predicting to mean, how they use it at school and at home, and why they think it is important. For each of the seven topics tested, even the youngest children were able to offer predictions. Accuracy varied with the topic, increasing between Grades 1 and 4 and leveling off after that. The increase in skill involved children's growing ability to attend to patterns discerned through their own observations. Four levels in the development of predicting skill, as it relates to particular topics, are described. Children's understanding of predicting showed steady improvement through Grade 6. Children's awareness of their use of predicting at school and at home, and their ability to explain the importance of predicting, also increased through Grades 1 to 6, with a spurt at Grade 4. Children understood predicting to be an internal process in which one uses knowledge to anticipate a future event; they regarded predicting as an important way of being intellectually involved with the world.     

International co-production of distance-teaching courses

Co-production occurs when two or more institutions contribute funds and labour to the processes of making course components for distance teaching. The author summarises reasons for international co-production of multimedia distance-teaching courses and provides a checklist of questions that should be considered before entering upon such co-production.
The second half of the article consists of a composite case study based on the UK's Open University experience of international co-production. The paper ends with three questions: Is international co-production of this kind worth trying? Can the chances of success be made high enough by careful planning to justify risking capital in such ventures? Are other forms of collaboration more likely to be cost-effective?     

Children are not Meant to be Studied …

The project of studying children in order to understand them, which lies at the heart of contemporary thinking about children and their education, is misconceived. It rests, jrst of all, upon a false belief that we can only come to know something properly by deliberately and systematically pursuing knowledge of it. Secondly, it offers a paradigm of knowing children which justifies parents and teachers in not giving themselves to children. By re-interpreting the problems that adults experience with children as technical, as arising from lack of information about them, it ignores the personal and moral dimension of adults' relations with children and thus further alienates them from one another.     

"新科棋后"许昱华

她是世界上惟一一位集奥赛、世界杯和世锦赛三项冠军于一身的棋手,也是继谢军、诸宸之后的第三位世界“棋后”,她的名字叫许昱华。     

What Assessment and Research Say About the Condition of Education

Do students today know less than their parents or grandparents did as students? Are they being academically outclassed by students of other nations? Or have ideologically driven policy makers painted an unnecessarily negative picture of student achievement?     

Chaos theory, informational needs, and natural disasters

This study applies chaos theory to a system-wide analysis of crisis communication in a natural disaster. Specifically, we analyze crisis communication during the 1997 Red River Valley flood in Minnesota and North Dakota. This flood, among the worst in modern American history, consumed entire metropolitan areas, displacing thousands of people. The conditions and decisions leading to the disaster, and the subsequent reactions are retraced. Communication related to river crest predictions (fractals), the shock at the magnitude of the crisis (cosmology episode), novel forms of reorganizing (self-organization), and agencies that aided in establishing a renewed order (strange attractors) are evaluated. Ultimately, we argue that preexisting sensemaking structures favoring rationalized, traditional views of a complex system led officials to make inappropriately unequivocal predictions and ultimately diminished the effectiveness of the region's crisis communication and planning.     

Determining the Value of Cultural Goods: How Much (or How Little) Does Contingent Valuation Tell Us?

Contingent valuation methods (CVM) are now well established as a means of measuring the nonmarket demand for cultural goods and services. When combined with valuations provided through market processes (where relevant), an overall assessment of the economic value of cultural commodities can be obtained. Within a neoclassical framework, such assessments are thought to provide a complete picture of the value of cultural goods. But are there aspects of the value of cultural goods which are not fully captured, or not captured at all, within such a model? This paper argues that CVM provides an incomplete view of the nonmarket value of cultural goods, and that alternative measures need to be developed to provide a fuller account.     

The experience of professional autonomy among psychotherapists in Korea and the United States

This study investigates professional autonomy as experienced by psychotherapists in Korea and in the United States using data collected as part of a collaborative international study of the development of psychotherapists (Orlinsky et al. (1999). Psychotherapy Research, 9(2), 127–153; Orlinsky & Rønnestad, (2005). How psychotherapists develop: A study of therapeutic work and professional growth. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association). The major aims are: to compare the extent of professional autonomy experienced by psychotherapists in Korea and by their counterparts in the USA; and to explore the professional and social correlates of the professional autonomy experienced by Korean therapists and compare these with the correlates of autonomy experienced by American therapists. These aims are pursued through analyses of a database of questionnaire responses. Results indicate that Korean therapists, compared to American therapists in our sample experience significantly lower levels of professional autonomy. For Korean therapists, whether they have a salient theoretical orientation in their practice is the single most important influence in their experience of work autonomy. Seniority and work setting are also significant correlates of autonomy for the Korean therapists. Similar to Korean therapists, seniority and having a salient orientation are also important influences on the way American therapists experience professional autonomy. American therapists, who work in independent practice experience higher work autonomy, whereas American social workers tend to experience lower professional autonomy.