“Whoa. You Speak Mexican?”: Latina/o High School Students’ Sense of Belonging in Advanced Placement and Honors Classes

This qualitative study explored Latina/o students’ sense of belonging in majority White and Asian Advanced Placement (AP) and honors classes in a diverse suburban high school. Using self-determination theory as a framework, I focused on three aspects of sense of belonging: social belonging, teacher–student relationships, and academic belonging. Ten Latina/o tenth- and eleventh-grade students participated in classroom observations, guided journaling sessions, and interviews to capture their sense of belonging in AP and honors classes. Although all of the participants expressed a lack of sense of belonging, they reported that they leveraged their experiences to motivate themselves, increase their engagement, and build resilience.     

The Biologizing of Cognition, Development, and Education: Approach with Cautious Enthusiasm

In our commentary, we propose the current research from the field of developmental neuroscience can be incorporated within the theoretical perspectives advocated by evolutionary psychologists and advocates of the developmental systems approach. We then describe research on memory and the relationship between spatial-temporal reasoning and mathematical abilities as examples of literatures that have benefitted from the neuroscience approach. We conclude by expressing enthusiasm for the recent neuroscience findings, but caution that developmental neuroscience's focus on infancy and preschool children should not result in an overemphasis on early development and education at the expense of later development and education.     

Training School Leaders in Sweden

The article analyses the identified needs of school leader training in Sweden against the background of declared aims and a general policy of decentralisation. Strategies designed to meet these needs are described, together with evaluative comments.

Dans le contexte d'une politique générale de décentralisation et en tenant compte des objectifs définis pour le système scolaire suédois, l'article analyse les besoins reconnus de la formation des responsables. Des stratégies prévues pour répondre à ces besoins sont décrites avec des remarques sur l'évolution.     

Child development and evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary developmental psychology involves the expression of evolved, epigenetic programs, as described by the developmental systems approach, over the course of ontogeny. There have been different selection pressures on organisms at different times in ontogeny, and some characteristics of infants and children were selected in evolution to serve an adaptive function at that time in their life history rather than to prepare individuals for later adulthood. Examples of such adaptive functions of immaturity are provided from infancy, play, and cognitive development. Most evolved psychological mechanisms are proposed to be domain specific in nature and have been identified for various aspects of children's cognitive and social development, most notably for the acquisition of language and for theory of mind. Differences in the quality and quantity of parental investment affect children's development and influence their subsequent reproductive and childcare strategies. Some sex differences observed in childhood, particularly as expressed during play, are seen as antecedents and preparations for adult sex differences. Because evolved mechanisms were adaptive to ancestral environments, they are not always adaptive for contemporary people, and this mismatch of evolved mechanisms with modern environments is seen in children's maladjustment to some aspects of formal schooling. We argue that an evolutionary perspective can be valuable for developing a better understanding of human ontogeny in contemporary society and that a developmental perspective is important for a better understanding of evolutionary psychology.     

International assessments of student achievement and public confidence in education: evidence from a cross-national study

One of the overarching goals of international large-scale assessments (ILSA) is to inform public discourse about the quality of education in different countries. To fulfil this function, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), for example, raises awareness of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results through different forms of traditional and social media (e.g. press releases and other activities under the slogan PISA Day). Scholars have responded to the rapid growth of ILSA by examining public discourse through newspaper articles, policy documents, and other outlets. However, we know very little about whether and to what extent the general public is actually affected by PISA results. In order to address this gap, this study uses data regarding public trust in education from the 2011 wave of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Drawing on survey data from 30 countries and Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM), the study shows that PISA rankings have a significant effect on public perceptions. We find that in high performing countries the general public expresses higher levels of confidence in the education system. We discuss these patterns in the context of growing politicisation of education policy making and the use of ILSA as evidence.     

Giftedness and variability in strategic processing on a multitrial memory task: Evidence for stability in gifted cognition

This study examined strategic variability and variability-performance relations in intellectually gifted (mean IQ = 142.31; n = 85) and non-gifted (mean IQ = 112.44; n = 81) children who received five trials on an organizational memory task. Children were presented with different sets of categorizable words (e.g., boat, bus, car, banana, apple, orange) on each trial and were asked to remember the words for later recall. Four strategies were coded on each trial: sorting at study, rehearsal, category naming, and clustering at recall. Strategic variability was assessed in terms of fluctuations in the use of single strategies over trials, use of different combinations of multiple strategies over trials, and trial-bytrial switches in strategy use. In general, gifted children showed lower levels of variability (or higher levels of stability) in strategy use and higher levels of recall than non-gifted children. In addition, stability in strategy use was consistently associated with relatively high levels of recall for gifted but not non-gifted children. These findings confirm and extend research on non-strategic elementary cognitive tasks showing that cognitive stability is a prominent characteristic of gifted cognition.     

The evolved child: Applying evolutionary developmental psychology to modern schooling

Evolutionary developmental psychology, an emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary approaches to human behavior and cognition, focuses on the adaptive nature of psychological mechanisms built into the brains of juveniles, some of which may serve immediate demands at different stages of development, and some of which serve preparatory roles for maturity. The current article reviews some of the central ideas of evolutionary developmental psychology and investigates how human educability, which is qualitatively different from the learning capacity of other species, is governed by specific adaptations of Homo sapiens' childhood that serve to orient the young child to his or her cultural environment. Evolutionary developmental psychology, we argue, can be especially informative to educational policy makers who wish to take children's natural limitations, as well as their intellectual pliability, into account when planning curricula.