‘Technological me’: young children’s use of technology across their home and school contexts

Research into children’s learning with digital technologies is represented by a growing body of literature examining the relationship between home–school technological practices. A focus of this work is on the notion of a ‘digital-disconnect’ between home and school. This argument suggests that children are such native users of technologies they struggle to connect with commonly used technologies in school. This paper examines how the ‘digital-disconnect’ is experienced in children’s lives. Drawing on a data set investigating the digital experiences of 12 children aged 2–12 years, we consider the experiences of one family attending the same school. Three siblings aged 5–12 years recorded their home and school technology use for one week. The findings suggested some difference in use across both settings, but also similarities associated with information retrieval, rote learning and entertainment. We use Bulfin and North’s and Dyson’s ideas about the permeability of social boundaries to explain why technology use might be more similar than disconnected in each context. We consider the extent to which each setting influences the other as the basis for moving away from binary conceptualisations of the digital-disconnect informed by generational assumptions about children and technologies.     

Lessons from professional identity development literature: A qualitative content analysis

The development of a professional identity as a counselor is the result of training, practice, and integration into a community of professional counselors and is defined as the synthesis of personal and professional behaviors, values, ethics, and worldview. The research on this topic has been plentiful, but this systemic and systematic review of the research literature provides a comprehensive overview of this important concept for counselor training and supervision.     

Family and classroom correlates of head start children's developmental outcomes

Program quality is an important theme for Head Start. Even staunch supporters of Head Start are concerned that too few Head Start classes are of the quality that is needed to best promote children's growth and development. This study examined relationships between classroom quality and child outcomes among 145 Head Start children from poor quality to more stimulating home environments. Results indicated that children in higher quality Head Start classrooms performed better on measures of achievement and preacademic skills, regardless of the quality of their home environment. Children from better home environments seemed to benefit more from classroom quality in the area of problem solving and reasoning than did children from less stimulating homes. Teacher characteristics such as education, experience, and attitudes were not associated with classroom quality in this group of 32 Head Start classrooms. On the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, no classroom received a rating of inadequate, but only 9% met or exceeded the score that would be considered developmentally appropriate.     

Student disclosures of fraudulent practice in school laboratories

The debate about the inclusion of laboratory practicals in the school curriculum is continued in this paper which reports on fraudulent practice by students. One of the widely accepted goals of school laboratory practicals is to teach students about the nature of scientific inquiry. This paper reports how student disclosures of their actual practice in school laboratories is at odds with such a goal. We identify and define the student practice of “fudging” which involves faking, fabricating, or stealing data. Five types of fudging behaviour are described. The factors contributing to and the motivations for such behaviour are also identified.     

Feeding ecology and laboratory predatory behavior toward live and artificial moving prey in seven rodent species

The present research related the feeding ecology of seven rodent species to the reactions of laboratory-reared and prey-inexperienced members of each species both to live prey and to an artificial moving stimulus predicting food pellets. Feeding ecology was determined by the degree of carnivory, based on reported stomach contents and observations of feeding. Experiment 1 assessed predatory reactions to a live cricket placed in each animal’s home cage. Killing and latency of eating the cricket were directly related to the degree of reported carnivory on moderately fast-moving arthropods. Experiment 2 examined behavior toward a rolling ball bearing that predicted delivery of food. Average percentages of trials with approach or contact of the bearing, and the conditional probability of a mouth contact were all positively related to the degree of reported carnivory and to cricket predation in Experiment 1. In addition, the topography of ball bearing contact for a species often resembled its topography of cricket contact. We conclude that (1) rodent predatory behavior can be studied in the laboratory using appropriate artificial stimuli and prey-inexperienced subjects, and (2) the predatory behavior of a species is based on underlying appetitive organization related to carnivory, including differential sensitivity to stimulus movement, motor preorganization, and susceptibility to conditioning. This appetitive organization appears to influence responding to both live and artificial prey.     

Student experiences of NAPLAN: sharing insights from two school sites

This paper provides insight into middle school students’ perceptions and reactions to their participation in the Australian National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). A case study was conducted over 10 months at two Queensland schools with different approaches to NAPLAN implementation. Student voice was elicited via focus groups and 35 students provided drawings and words describing their experience in four stages: preparing, sitting, completing and receiving their results. Thematic content analysis of the textual data and trait and holistic coding of the visual data revealed five themes and suggests that the approach adopted by the school may impact on students’ NAPLAN experiences. This study privileges student voice and enables access to student experiences as they participate in a testing regime which is now a feature of the Australian school assessment landscape.