Imitation and social facilitation in the pigeon

The sight of another pigeon pecking a response key for grain resulted in similar pecking by more pigeons than did the sight of another pigeon eating or the sight of another pigeon (neither pecking nor eating). But more pigeons pecked the response key when they could see another pigeon that was neither pecking nor eating than when no other pigeon was there (whether or not key-light/grain pairings were observable in the adjacent compartment). Finally, observation of another pigeon pecking but not eating produced pecking comparable to observation of both pecking and eating. The presence of both imitation and social facilitation of keypecking were demonstrated. Observation of the consummatory response contributed little to keypecking.     

Language‐in‐education across the Baltic: policies,practices and challenges

Since their political reorientation that started in the late 1980s, the Baltic states have experienced profound social reforms to rebuild their democratizing societies. Education has featured as a key vehicle to this transformation process of overcoming the limitations of the Soviet past. National legislative frameworks were therefore soon provided to restructure educational systems and allow for ‘liberal’ approaches to schooling. The process of policy‐making for a new concept of education, however, entailed numerous challenges, and it has resulted in a diverse tapestry of educational provision across the Baltic. With specific focus on minority education, this paper presents a comparative analysis of education policies and practices in contemporary Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in response to emerging language needs in these intensely multiethnic settings.     

Multisensory and unisensory approaches to communicating with deaf children

The history of and current controversy in education of the hearing impaired between advocates of unisensory (audition only) and multisensory (audition, vision and touch) approaches to communication for learning and socialisation for hearing-impaired children is described. Arguments from developmental and perceptual theory, information processing, early intervention pedagogy and an examination of the evidence claimed to support the superiority of unisensory approaches is presented from which the authors conclude that the superiority of multisensory approaches is well established and these should be the methods of choice in communicating with hearing-impaired children.     

Small groups' ecological reasoning while making an environmental management decision

The objective of this study was to explore the ideas and reasoning students use to make a collaborative environmental management decision. Eight groups of 8th‐grade students (n = 24) considered ecological and economic information about an invasive aquatic species to make a management recommendation. In addition to discussing the exact information they were given, the groups made a variety of interpretations, elaborations, and inferences concerning ecological structure and dynamics and practical aspects of the management scenario. Value judgments and concerns with uncertainty also appeared in students' discussions, to differing degrees. The students' discussions were compared with scientists' guidelines for making environmental management decisions, and with one expert's analysis of the particular management scenario the students considered. A major finding was that whereas across groups students touched on all of the themes that scientists consider to be important for making environmental management decisions, within most groups students focused more narrowly on particular themes, giving cursory treatment to other dimensions of the problem. The results point to a need to foster students' ecological background knowledge and integrative, systems thinking skills for making principled decisions about complex environmental issues. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 341–368, 2002     

Sociocognitive roles in science group discourse

The purpose of this study was to examine students' roles during a long-term collaborative task that required them to master complex sets of cognitive, regulatory and social skills needed for building knowledge largely from their own and their peers' ideas and observations. Samples of discourse were collected from 24 8th grade students in eight groups within four classrooms throughout a 12-week unit on constructing and testing mental models of the nature of matter. Eight prominent sociocognitive roles that served socio-emotional, conceptual and metacognitive functions are described. The roles are related to individual students' perspectives on learning, and to the levels of reasoning each group achieved. The results can be used to raise students' and teachers' awareness of the personal resources, interactive processes and norms that can support or derail knowledge construction in collaborative groups.