Verbal reasoning test scores and their stability over time

As part of an extended study into school assessment practices the use of verbal reasoning tests and their possible contribution to measuring pupil progress is being investigated. One phase of the study has involved testing the stability of individual verbal reasoning scores over time. The findings of this phase are presented here and located within the broader context of intelligence testing. The discussion concludes with a number of questions relating to the use of pupils’ academic achievements as appropriate measures of school success. The ongoing work considers how pupil success could be measured fairly, taking into account individual pupil differences, including both genetic and socio-economic factors. The work being developed has potential for both formative and summative assessment procedures and also as a tool for reporting the achievements of individual pupils and educational establishments. The full work will be published in due course.     

Innovating for a cause: the work and learning required to create a new approach to healthcare for homeless people

Innovation occupies a pivotal place in our understanding of knowledge-based economies, and this is raising questions about sources of innovation, how it originates, and the role played by employees, work practices and learning. This paper explores these issues through case study research into a new approach to providing healthcare for homeless people in England, and by bringing together conceptual insights from the employee-driven innovation literature, and more broadly from social and practice-based learning theory and organisational theory. Applying these perspectives to our case enables illumination of the innovation as a process – not an event – and as an ongoing set of organisational practices that transcend their origins. Through our analysis we argue that the notion of ‘a cause’ is helpful in elucidating the impetus and the commitment to making the innovation happen (and go on happening). Our findings are presented under three themes: ‘establishing a cause’, ‘organising for innovation’, and ‘innovative capability in practice’. Building on these, we have identified five key inter-related dimensions which help conceptualise the work and learning that it took to create and (re-)enact the innovation and that we suggest may have relevance for understanding and characterising other employee-led innovations in and perhaps beyond healthcare.     

Active engagement,emotional impact and changes in practice arising from a residential field trip

This study focused on the learning experiences of 50 undergraduate students undertaking a residential field trip (RFT) to Sweden as part of their Early Childhood Studies degree. Three dimensions were examined: the physical and emotional value afforded to the students from the active learning context; how this was interpreted and reflected in their knowledge, understanding and personal practice once they had left university; and the influence of factors such as age, and professional status on students' practice. The methodology was interpretive, and both deductive and inductive approaches were employed to analyse qualitative, narrative data sets derived from semi-structured questionnaires, interviews and written essays. The findings suggested that the physiological effects of hands on engagement influenced both the students' perceptions of the learning experience and their confidence to become agents of change. Subsequent changes directly attributed to the RFT experience, involved the re-evaluation of both the stereotypical pedagogic role and the way in which they related to children; students re-conceptualised their practices to reflect a more child-centred approach and increased their use of outdoor play and sustainable resources. The RFT was a catalyst that promoted empowerment, and informed both personal and professional transformations.     

Visualizing Social Justice: Using Controversial Images in Social Studies Classrooms

In this article, we promote the use of controversial images to enhance the discussion of social justice issues in schools. Controversial images provide rich opportunities for students to question what is occurring currently in society as well as what has occurred in the past. We provide an example set of activities to be used in teacher education that can help future teachers explore engaging methods for teaching with controversial images, discuss tensions involved with the use of controversial images, and to develop connections between using controversial images and teaching for social justice.     

An attention-modulated associative network

We present an elemental model of associative learning that describes interactions between stimulus elements as a process of competitive normalization. Building on the assumptions laid out in Harris (2006), stimuli are represented as an array of elements that compete for attention according to the strength of their input. Elements form associations among each other according to temporal correlations in their activation but restricted by their connectivity. The model moves beyond its predecessor by specifying excitatory, inhibitory, and attention processes for each element in real time and describing their interaction as a form of suppressive gain control. Attention is formalized in this model as a network of mutually inhibitory units that moderate the activation of stimulus elements by controlling the level to which the elements are suppressed by their own inhibitory processes. The model is applied to a range of complex discriminations and related phenomena that have been taken as evidence for configural-learning processes.     

Do important inventions benefit from knowledge originating in other technological domains?

A frequently made claim in the innovation literature is that important inventions involve the transfer of new knowledge from one technological domain to another. This study uses U.S. patents granted from 1976 to 2006 to identify the role of knowledge acquired from outside each patent's technological domain. Our results do not seem to support the claim above. Increasing citations to external prior art is a significantly less important predictor of forward citation frequency than citing prior art that is technologically closer. This result is robust across several model specifications and ways of defining whether each flow of knowledge is external. The result is even stronger in the most highly cited technology categories. We discuss possible explanations for this apparently negative impact of external knowledge—including both measurement issues and challenges associated with assimilating disparate knowledge.     

Race salience and essentialist thinking in racial stereotype development

The authors explored the emergence and antecedents of racial stereotyping in 89 children ages 3-10 years. Children completed a number of matching and sorting tasks, including a measure designed to assess their knowledge and application of both positive and negative in-group and out-group stereotypes. Results indicate that children start to apply stereotypes to the out-group starting around 6 years of age. Controlling for a number of factors, 2 predictors contributed significantly toward uniquely explaining the use of these stereotypes: race salience (i.e., seeing and organizing by race) and essentialist thinking (i.e., believing that race cannot change). These results provide insight into how and when real-world interventions aimed at altering the acquisition of racial stereotypes may be implemented.     

The Longitudinal Relationship Between Conversational Turn-Taking and Vocabulary Growth in Early Language Development

Children acquire language embedded within the rich social context of interaction. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating the developmental relationship between conversational turn-taking and vocabulary growth in English-acquiring children (N = 122) followed between 9 and 24 months. Daylong audio recordings obtained every 3 months provided several indices of the language environment, including the number of adult words children heard in their environment and their number of conversational turns. Vocabulary was measured independently via parental report. Growth curve analyses revealed a bidirectional relationship between conversational turns and vocabulary growth, controlling for the amount of words in children’s environments. The results are consistent with theoretical approaches that identify social interaction as a core component of early language acquisition.     

Factors and Interactions Influencing Technology Integration During Situated Professional Development in an Elementary School

This study examined factors that influence K–5 teachers’ technology integration efforts during a semester-long Collaborative Apprenticeship. Results suggest that shared planning time, shared curriculum, connection to an individual, expertise, physical proximity, and comfort level influenced interactions across the community of practice. Posing and responding to task-based questions, giving and seeking advice, and sharing ideas composed more than 70% of interactions between teachers. However, the nature of interactions changed as teachers assumed increased responsibility for designing technology-enhanced lessons. Teacher-leaders initially modeled exemplar applications of technology-enhanced lessons and gave advice on their classroom use. Subsequently, the community of teachers brainstormed ideas collaboratively as teacher-leaders supported peers to develop original lessons independently. Implications for collaborative apprenticeships and learning in professional environments are provided.