Acquiring Color Names via Linguistic Contrast: The Influence of Contrasting Terms

Linguistic contrast of the form "It's not X; it's Y" is often used by adults to correct children's naming errors. The present studies examined whether such linguistic contrast could help preschoolers learn a novel color name. In Experiment 1, a novel color term was contrasted only once with 1 or 2 familiar color names. Contrasting a new color term with children's own label for the stimulus color helped 5-year-olds learn the new term, but contrasting the new term with randomly chosen familiar color terms did not. For 4-year-olds, neither kind of contrast helped much. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that when the contrastive information was presented more than once, even 3- and 4-year-olds performed much like the 5-year-olds in Experiment 1. Together, these findings suggest that contrasting a new term with a child's own term facilitates the acquisition of the new term, perhaps because it gives the child specific information about how two terms are related in meaning.     

Contents of Volume 3

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 3     

Reflecting Socially on Social Issues in a Social Studies Methods Course

The purpose of this study was to investigate how student teaching experiences impact the sense of teaching efficacy and feelings of preparedness of pre-service teachers in a nearly and elementary teacher education program (EC-6). The study used an action research, mixed-methods design. Seventy-one pre-service teachers at a large public university in the southwest completed surveys about their preparedness to teach and teaching efficacy pre and post the student teaching semester. Findings indicate that pre-service teachers’ perceptions of preparedness and sense of teaching efficacy both increased significantly (p < .5) from pre-student teaching to post-student teaching. In addition, three themes emerged from the answers to open-ended questions on learning components of student teaching experiences: opportunity for hands-on teaching, the opportunity to observe experienced teachers, and the relationship with their cooperating teacher.     

Reading and writing to learn science: Achieving scientific literacy

A key step in helping students to achieve scientific literacy is to ensure that each school's curriculum supports students' efforts to learn science meaningfully. Educational researchers play a vital role in this step by providing teachers, teacher educators, administrators, and policy makers with information about the creation of a curriculum that supports scientific literacy. In a scientific literacy curriculum, reading and writing can serve as dynamic vehicles for learning science meaningfully. The task of educational researchers is to show how reading and writing can be used most effectively to support science learning. Much of what is done now in schools is based on teacher intuition—good intuition—but intuition nonetheless. What is needed is school-based research to validate and build upon these intuitions. This article is intended to stimulate research on reading and writing to learn science.     

The internet rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan: A case study in web site community building run amok

Many scholars have praised the Internet as a locale where positive community building takes place. Conversely, this study examines 23 KKK web sites as an exemplar of how groups may engage in community building of a most egregious sort. Through appeals to white masculinity and, on some web sites, segmented appeals to women and to youth and children, Klan web sites attempt to create community that is unified by its opposition to minority groups, particularly Jews. The angry style of Klan discourse, which is compatible with the rhetorical conventions of the Web, discourages dissenting points of view while inflaming potential supporters. Moreover, Klan rhetoric on the Web encourages odious political activity, including acts of violence, at the same time that Klan web sites disavow responsibility for the consequences of their messages.     

A Technology Integration Education (TIE) Model for Millennial Preservice Teachers: Exploring the Canonical Correlation Relationships Among Attitudes,Subjective Norms,Perceived Behavioral Controls,Motivation, and Technological,Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) Competencies

Intellectual goods can follow the same pattern as physical goods with the product life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and decline. For the intellectual good of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK), its birth began with Shulman (1986 Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 1987 Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1–22.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) was used to test the relationships among five of the 12 constructs in the technology integration education (TIE) model developed by Holland and Piper (2014 Holland, D. D., &; Piper, R. T. (2014). Technology integration education (TIE) model: Millennial preservice teachers' motivations about technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) competencies. Journal of Education Computing Research, 51(3), 257–294.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Based on the patterns of cross-loading correlations, this study found that there were limited correlational relationships between the set of independent variables and the set of dependent TPACK variables. For this pilot study, the sample consisted of 90 elementary education majors and 51 secondary education majors.