Like Father, Like Son: Young Children's Understanding of How and Why Offspring Resemble Their Parents

4 studies investigated the broad claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. In Study 1, 4–7-year-old children were told a story in which a boy was born to one man and adopted by another. The biological father was described as having one set of features (e.g., green eyes) and the adoptive father as having another (e.g., brown eyes). Subjects were asked which man the boy would resemble when he grew up. Preschoolers showed little understanding that selective chains of processes mediate resemblance to parents. It was not until age 7 that children substantially associated the boy with his biological father on physical features and his adoptive father on beliefs. That is, it was not until age 7 that children demonstrated that they understood birth as part of a process selectively mediating the acquisition of physical traits and learning or nurturance as mediating the acquisition of beliefs. In Study 2, subjects were asked whether, as a boy grew up, various of his features could change. Children generally shared our adult intuitions, indicating that their failure in Study 1 was not due to their having a different sense of what features can change. Studies 3 and 4 replicated Study 1, with stories involving mothers instead of fathers and with lessened task demands. Taken together, the results of the 4 studies refute the claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. The findings are discussed in terms of whether children understand biology as an autonomous cognitive domain.     

Doing to being: farming actions in a community coalesce into pro-environment motivations and values

A key mandate of environment education (EE) is to motivate people to engage in environmentally responsible actions. However, school-based EE has not been successful in nurturing environmentally responsible actions in students. This is partly because of the information-oriented structure of current EE, which assumes that symbol-based knowledge directly leads to motivation and action. In contrast, educational initiatives based on practices and actions in the world, with farming as an important component, have been successful in creating transformative changes in behavior. To develop similar transformative interventions that motivate school students, it is necessary to understand the general psychological principles that make such participatory designs successful. Here we report a year-long observation study that seeks to contribute to such a general model, analyzing how farming actions changed the motivation of volunteers working in an urban community farm. We take an analysis approach inspired by recent embodied cognition models, where volunteers’ lived experiences and interactions with material entities are analyzed, to understand how motivation and values develop through such interactions. Based on this data, we propose a spiral model of motivation and action, where specific farming actions coalesce together to form motivation and values, which then seed wider environment-oriented actions in the world.     

How Stake Holder Groups Define Quality in Child Care

This paper presents definitions of child care quality from focus groups conducted to develop a research design to assess the quality of Minnesota's regulated child care system. Eleven individual interviews and 38 focus groups involving 333 people were held in communities throughout Minnesota between 1-11-00 and 6-14-00. The focus groups represented the various stake holders interested in child care quality including parents, legislators, child care staff and administrators, licensed and unlicensed family child care providers, family and center based child care licensors, child care resource and referral staff, and teacher educators. Beginning first with the traditional definition of child care quality (what is good for the child) and related quality indicators, the author presents Katz's (Multiple perspectives on the quality of early childhood programs) four dimensional definition of child care quality and the associated research investigating these dimensions. The similarities and differences in various stake holder groups' definitions of child care quality are then presented and compared with Love, Schocket, & Meckstroth's review of child care research. The paper ends with a discussion how stake holders' definitions of child care quality may inform researchers and policymakers about child care quality.     

Ethics in field work research: A case study

Most field work studies report findings but fail to deal with ethical problems encountered during their execution. This paper concentrates on four ethical problems which arose during the conduct of a field work investigation of the life experiences of three student teachers. The four problems were: acquiring permission to begin the study; how far to dig into personal lives to extract necessary information; the pitfalls of doing collaborative research; the more a participant tells, the worse he/she looks. A major implication is that ethical problems given the current bureaucratic and interpersonal climate in urban institutions (universities and city school districts) may be unresolvable, rather than simply a minor hindrance to the researchers and participants.     

A constructivist approach to change in elementary science teaching and learning

Constructivism is a set of beliefs that can be used by teachers to think about learning and teaching and to plan and enact a science curriculum. This paper is a fictional account of an elementary science teacher and her use of constructivism as a referent for her various roles as a science teacher. The paper also describes how the teacher came to teach in this manner, describing her involvement in staff development activities and an evolution in her thinking from an ojectivist to a constructivist system of semantics. Implications are presented for the reform of science education.     

Reconstructing science teacher education within communities of learners

This article is based on a paper which received the “Innovation in Teaching Science Teachers” Award at the 1993 annual meeting of the Association for the Education of Teachers in Science.     

Conversations about head start salaries: A feminist analysis

This qualitative interview study investigates the Hoover Community Action Agency's Head Start salary policies as described by 3 program administrators and 10 teachers. Feminist theories explain how teachers' and administrators' interpretations of salaries reflect societal beliefs about the value of Head Start teaching. Head Start teachers acknowledge both their low wages and their deep commitment to the Head Start mission. Low- and middle-income teachers differ in how they describe current salary levels: low-income teachers are proactive in salary enhancement efforts and middle-income teachers view salaries as supplemental family income. Agency administrators, while acknowledging the low teacher wages, argue that Head Start employment is more financially lucrative than day care teaching. Administrators cite teacher commitment, not salary, as the best predictor of teacher tenure.     

The River of Learning: building relationships in a university,school and community Indigenous widening participation collaboration

In this article, findings of a qualitative study of an Indigenous widening participation program are presented. The program, River of Learning, has been in existence since 2010 and represents a powerful collaboration between a rural high school in New South Wales (NSW) Australia, a metropolitan university, Indigenous Elders and non-Indigenous community members. An analysis of the narrative data generated through individual and group interviews with stakeholders provided findings with respect to the program including how it has contributed to the building and strengthening of university and community relationships and how important the interaction with Indigenous Elders and school and university staff is in development of confidence to engage in higher education in the Indigenous students. These findings are discussed and the article concludes with reflections on the learnings generated through such university, school and community collaborations and what these may mean in ensuring greater Indigenous representation in higher education in Australia in the future.     

An appreciative exploration of how schools create a sense of belonging to facilitate the successful transition to a new school for pupils involved in a managed move

Much of the current guidance on managed moves focuses on the benefits of the ‘fresh start’ provided. This paper describes an appreciative inquiry to explore how schools in one local authority create a sense of belonging to facilitate a fresh start for pupils involved in a managed move to a new school. Six deputy head teachers with pastoral responsibility took part in a focus group using an appreciative inquiry (Ai) 4-D cycle. The discovery, dream and design phases sought to build on the current practice and identify the improvements to practice. Thematic analysis of the data identified many aspects of belonging, which are in line with those identified in the literature such as creating a school identity, developing partnerships and specific activities such as inter-form competitions and family assemblies. Generating school identity and home-school-pupil partnerships were also identified in relation to managed moves. In the destiny stage, themes were fed back and discussed with a wider Deputy Head Group and Good Practice Guidance to facilitate the successful transition to a new school for pupils involved in a managed move that was produced and circulated across the LA. The importance of empathising with the potential challenges of changing school and forming and maintaining new relationships for pupils engaging in a managed move is highlighted and the Good Practice Guidance illustrates how transition, induction and ongoing support plans can take this into account.     

Teacher and technologist beliefs about educational technology

This study investigated perceptions of teachers and educational technologists about the following areas: instructional design, cooperative learning, learner control, school reform, computers and media, and implementation of a key practice in each area in their teaching. Subjects were 477 individuals representing four respondent groups: educational technology faculty, educational technology graduate students, K-8 teachers, and 9–12 teachers. Data were collected using a 30-item, five-choice Likert-type questionnaire containing five items per topic area. Significant differences between groups were found on 16 items, with an overall total of 32 significant between-group differences. Nineteen of the 32 differences were between K-8 teachers and either the educational technology faculty or the graduate students. K-8 teachers had significantly more positive perceptions than one or both of the educational technology groups on all five of the cooperative learning items and on three of the five learner control items. The results suggest approaches that educational technologists can use in teaching instructional design courses and in designing instructional programs for the schools. Deborah L. Lowther is Program Evaluator for the Phoenix Urban Systemic Initiative which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Maricopa Community Colleges. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of the following people to this study: Gayle Davidson, Thomas Duffy, Nick Eastmond, Donald Ely, Michael Hannafin, Simon Hooper, James Klein, Kyle Peck, Robert Reiser, Lloyd Rieber, and Steven Ross.