Research perspectives in beginning literacy. Methodological and epistemic dichotomies / Prospectivas en investigación sobre alfabetización inicial. Dicotomías metodológicas y epistemológicas

This text presents an epistemological option for beginning literacy which departs from traditional options in several respects: (1) objectivity is not assumed as a starting point but as an ending fact (as an aspiration more than a reality); (2) all research communities adopt certain paradigms as their unquestioned ‘epistemic framework’ which serve to validate methodological and theoretical approaches without discussion; (3) situating oneself at the boundaries of this ‘unquestioned scientificity’ reveals useful data worth bearing in mind in the specific field discussed here: the early stages of the cognitive approach to the object of ‘written language’. This text defends the empirical interest of Jean Piaget’s theory to incorporate a theoretical object not thematized by this researcher: written language. It debates the irrelevance of interpretations inspired by Piaget yet based on a purely applicationist vision of the theory. Constructivism is constructed by testing new hypotheses on new objects. That is the persistent message of this text, which provides data to support each claim about development.     

Telling a tale: pieces of SMEC in my wind of memories

This article is a personal history of the Science and Mathematics Education Center (SMEC) in Perth, Australia, during my time there as a student. I make use of narratives to express what I see as the impact on my professional practice of having attended SMEC. I am grateful to SMEC, but what is being grateful really? In this paper I try to illustrate it, agreeing that while it is easy to start a thanksgiving text, I feel handicapped to capture all the greatness I am full of.     

Reading and Reinterpreting Picture Books on Children’s Television: Implications for Young Children’s Narrative Literacy

Bookaboo is a television programme aiming to promote literacy and reading among young children. In each episode, a celebrity reads a book to Bookaboo, a dog who plays the drums in a rock band, in order to help him overcome stage fright. Using the episode featuring the picture book (Cowell and Layton in That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, 2006) as a case study, this article explores how this type of adaptation of picture books transforms the original narrative, with implications for children’s developing narrative literacy. Taking a multimodal social semiotic perspective, this study investigates the changes in meaning which result from the employment of semiotic resources such as animation, sound, and camera movement in the representation of the book on the television show. We argue that the deployment of such resources can subtly reshape the meanings expressed through the modes of language and images in the original picture book, potentially affecting the child viewer’s engagement with the narrative. Examining the use of these resources in the picture book’s televisual representation is thus an important first step towards developing frameworks for evaluating the ability of television programmes that incorporate picture book reading to support children’s literacy.     

Learning and teaching with social network sites: A decade of research in K-12 related education

The increasingly widespread use of social network sites to expand and deepen one’s social connections is a relatively new but potentially important phenomenon that has implications for teaching and learning and teacher education in the 21st century. This paper surveys the educational research literature to examine: How such technologies are perceived and used by K-12 learners and teachers with what impacts on pedagogy or students' learning. Selected studies were summarized and categorized according to the four types introduced by Roblyer (2005) as studies most needed to move the educational technology field forward. These include studies that establish the technology’s effectiveness at improving student learning; investigate implementation strategies; monitor social impact; and report on common uses to shape the direction of the field. We found the most prevalent type of study conducted related to our focal topic was research on common uses. The least common type of study conducted was research that established the technology’s effectiveness at improving student learning. Implications for the design of future research and teacher education initiatives are discussed.     

Predicting the Grades of Low-Income–Ethnic-Minority Students From Teacher-Student Discrepancies in Reported Motivation

The aims of this study were to investigate the effects of discrepancies between teachers' perceptions of students' motivation and students' reports of their motivation on math and English grades and to identify possible gender and ethnic differences. Participants included 215 low-income, ethnic-minority students and their teachers in academically struggling schools. Discrepancy in motivation ratings accounted for a significant amount of variation in final grades. This teacher-student discrepancy effect was larger than both the effect of students' recent standardized test scores and the effect of self-efficacy in both subjects. Girls were found to attract positive teacher bias, but their grades were not differentially affected. Differences in teacher-student discrepancy effects between African American and Latino students were not found.     

Learning biology and mathematics outdoors: effects and attitudes in a Swedish high school context

This research suggests that learning biology in an outdoor environment has a positive cognitive and affective impact on 13–15-year-old, Swedish high school pupils. Eighty-five pupils in four classes participated in a quasi-experimental design. Half the pupils, taking a biology course in ecology or diversity of life, had several lessons outdoors and the other half were taught indoors. All of the classes, but one, also had mathematics lessons outdoors once a week. Twenty-one pupils were interviewed five months after the course and all were positive towards the new learning environment they had experienced outdoors in biology and/or mathematics. They also valued the higher degree of interaction among the pupils. Other findings from the interviews were that the pupils from the outdoor classes showed a higher degree of long-term knowledge retention. They remembered both activities and contents better than the pupils in the indoor classes. An essay-type question assessing their biological understanding qualitatively according to the Structure of Observed Learning Outcome taxonomy revealed no differences between the groups. The results are discussed in the light of neurocognitive models of long-term memory.     

Capitalism and socialism: How 7th graders understand and misunderstand the information presented in their geography textbooks

In the last few years an increasing number of researchers has started to investigate children’s conceptions of the economic world. However, complex notions, such as those concerning the overall functioning of an economic system, have hardly been considered. In post-elementary schools children encounter some of these notions in history, geography or social studies. An investigation on this topic should therefore consider both children’s conceptions and misconceptions and the relevant information furnished at school. The present study examines how 7th graders understand two complex economic notions: capitalism and socialism. Two groups of children (N =40) were interviewed, one who had studied a geography textbook containing a large quantity of relevant information, the other one a more traditional book in which these notions were only touched on. The interview was about:

1. the characteristics of capitalist and socialist system;
2. how it is decided what to produce, and at what prices to sell goods in each of these systems.

It was found that, on the whole, children’s knowledge of capitalism and socialism was rather poor. Those who had studied the look containing more information showed some advantages over the other group; however, these did not appear substantial: the children mentioned the words «market» and «plan» more often, but failed to explain what a plan is and how the market works, and their replies to the other questions were similar to those given by the second group.