Verbal and spatial encoding of text

Two experiments were conducted which examined conjoint retention of spatial and verbal information in memory. The first experiment examined processing of text with simultaneous active dual coding. With spatial and verbal information from experiment one, the second experiment examined the effects of introducing dual coding prior to text processing and keyed recall to what was encoded prior to reading. Recall of both concrete features and events referring to these features was keyed to constructive encoding processes. Even minimal cueing produced better recall than no cues. Spatial primers produced not only better recall of features, but subjects who encoded spatial primers demonstrated increased ability to recall those primers. Results were interpretet in terms of dual coding theory for encoding and retrieval.     

Educational Usage of Mobile Devices: Differences Between Postgraduate and Undergraduate Students

The rapid increase of smartphone usage in recent years has provided students the opportunity to participate in mobile learning (m-learning) anywhere, anytime. Academic institutions are also following this trend to launch many m-learning services. This article investigates the differences of the user needs between undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) students though an online survey with 140 Library Information Systems (LIS) subjects in a Japanese university in order to provide solid foundations for future m-learning studies. We find that UG and PG students do not show significant differences in adopting m-learning by smartphones despite the fact that they have different learning patterns. The m-learning frequencies of smartphones generally range from weekly to monthly, where using search engines is the most frequent, and reading academic resources is the least frequent. They tend to use these services for handling their daily routines (such as search engine, social networks) rather than their academic activities (such as using online databases to search for academic materials). Further, the results also show that content displaying issues (e.g., small display screen, text unable to enlarge) are barriers for most subjects in using these m-learning services.     

Situated Learning with Online Portfolios, Classroom Websites and Facebook

In this article we describe the evolution of an elective course designed specifically for undergraduate students in our pre-service teacher education program. This course is intended to prepare these undergraduate students as future teachers—helping them to make effective and creative uses of technology in learning settings. This course emphasizes learning to learn with and about technology, in the ever-changing context of educational technology. Generally speaking, we outline and describe three key goals of teaching young teachers to thoughtfully integrate technology into a real-world classroom. First, the course emphasizes learning to explore and learn proactively by engaging in learning by design activities. Second, students are given an opportunity to try a wide variety of innovative technologies through explorations of their own choosing. Finally, we attempt to leverage the power of online community building for learning by harnessing the ubiquity and convenience of tools like Facebook. We look into the future with great hope and enthusiasm that our preservice teachers will lead the way in integrating new technologies into their teaching in ways that will benefit their students, colleagues, and the greater education community.     

Educational accountability tests,social and legal inclusion approaches to discrimination for students with disability: a national case study from Australia

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability promotes equal and full participation by children in education. Equity of educational access for all students, including students with disability, free from discrimination, is the first-stated national goal of Australian education. Australian federal disability discrimination law, the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, follows the Convention, with the federal Disability Standards for Education 2005 enacting specific requirements for education. This article discusses equity of processes for inclusion of students with disability in Australian educational accountability testing, including international tests in which many countries participate. The conclusion drawn is that equitable inclusion of students with disability in current Australian educational accountability testing is not occurring from a social perspective and is not in principle compliant with law. However, given the reluctance of courts to intervene in education matters and the uncertainty of an outcome in any court consideration, the discussion shows that equitable inclusion in accountability systems is available through policy change rather than expensive, and possibly unsuccessful, legal challenges.     

Educational choice in secondary school in Flanders: the relative impact of occupational interests on option choice

The present study aims at unravelling the myriad of student-level (i.e., gender, socioeconomic status [SES], academic self-concept, achievement, ability, and occupational interests) and school-level (i.e., gender composition, maths composition, and SES composition) determinants of option choice in the academic track of secondary school in Flanders. We focused on 2 decisional thresholds in Flemish secondary education, namely, the transition from Grade 8 to Grade 9 (N = 2518) and from Grade 10 to Grade 11 (N = 2871). Data were analyzed through multinomial multilevel analysis. Our results strongly confirm Lent's (2005) jigsaw puzzle metaphor in that different factors go into a complex and dynamic interplay. Especially in the first grades, prior achievement is a major predictor of option choice in secondary education, whereas in the last years occupational interests become increasingly important. From a gender perspective, boys rather choose math/sciences-oriented options than girls. Option choice is mainly determined by student-level rather than school-level predictors.     

Photography

Photography Year: 1977 Edition (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1977—price not given)

Shirley Glubok's The Art of Photography (New York: Macmillan, 1977—$7.95)

Paul Dickson's Out of this World: American Space Photography (New York: Dell Books, Delta Special, 1977—E9.95, paper)

Garry Winogrand's Public Relations (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977—$9.95, paper)

Michael Emory's Windows (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1977—$25.00)

Donna-Lee Phillips and Lew Thomas, eds. Eros and Photography: An Exploration of Sexual Imagery and Photographic Practice (Camerawork/NFS Press, P.O. Box 31040, San Francisco, Calif. 94131—$l0.95, paper)     

Teaching physics: Students’ attitudes towards different learning activities

The decline in the popularity of physics over the period of secondary schooling and its consequent low uptake at A‐level and beyond continues to cause concern on educational and economic grounds. The aim of this study is to explore whether physics might be made more attractive to students by employing an extended range of classroom and laboratory activities to teach it. Specifically, the study scores the popularity of a range of activities, students’ perceptions about how often these activities are used to teach physics, and whether students consider them educationally useful. Students appear to think in terms of written activities, passive activities, social activities and constructive activities. Written activities are relatively unpopular and seen as educationally less effective, but students perceived them as used frequently. Social activities such as group work are more popular. The most popular activities are constructive activities, such as doing experiments; these are seen as educationally useful, but are perceived as being used less often than other activities. While there are legitimate limitations on the types of activities that can be used, these findings add to our appreciation of which teaching activities students like and value.     

Exploring children's perceptions of forgiveness at the interpersonal and political levels: emerging evidence in Cyprus

This small-scale study reports the findings from an investigation into non-verbal communication. It primarily seeks to analyse whether 9 and 13 year-olds can encode and decode non-verbal communication in the context of classroom behaviour management. This research showed that, in contrast to previous published research, there were no distinct differences between the ages, genders, or task types. One key finding was the frequency with which pupils misinterpreted the facial expression of anger, irrespective of the familiarity of the face, although accuracy of emotional interpretation improved with time. From observations, female staff consistently used more complementary non-verbal communication than conflicting, compared with the male staff.