The Effects of a Comprehensive Early Literacy Project on Preschoolers’ Language and Literacy Skills

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a federally funded early literacy project that aimed to promote the school readiness skills of preschool-age children from low income families. Through daily, explicit, and systematic instruction, the project targeted to improve preschoolers’ oral language skills, phonological awareness, print awareness, and alphabet knowledge that aligned with the existing curriculum of the local school district. Data were collected through multiple sources at the individual child level, classroom level, and from the family/home environment. Significant gains were found between pre- and post-tests in child outcomes, classroom environments, instructional practices, parent attitudes toward early literacy, and family involvement in literacy activities. Additionally, classroom organization was identified as a significant predictor for children’s receptive language skills. Limitations of the current study and implications for future research as well as instructional practices were discussed.     

National Assessment of New Standards for Mathematics in Elementary Education in Flanders

A baseline assessment of the new curriculum standards of mathematics for elementary education in Flanders is presented and discussed. A total of 24 measurement scales, each representing a cluster of standards, covered the whole mathematics curriculum. A total of 5,763 6th-grade students participated in the study. Performance on each scale was summarized by estimating the proportion of students who were nonmasters, intermediate, and good masters. Overall, the more innovative curriculum standards were mastered worse. Few gender differences in performance were observed.     

Three Levels of Goal Orientation in Learning

Sixteen adult volunteers provided thinking-aloud protocols while undergoing a 10-hr individually administered course in BASIC (beginner's all-purpose symbolic instruction code) programming. Three levels of goals were identified as operative in the learning situation: task-completion goals, instructional goals, and personal knowledge-building goals. Although protocol statements indicating knowledge-building goals were infrequent, students exhibiting a relatively high proportion of them were distinctive in several ways. They did significantly better on a posttest. Their performance in goal cue selections differed from that of other participants in ways consistent with their orientation: They responded more often to learning goal cues than to task goal cues. They actively related new learning to prior knowledge and they posed and tried to solve problems and questions. Students oriented toward instructional goals tended to focus on what was explicitly taught. Students oriented toward task-completion goals tended to equate learning with successful completion of assigned tasks. Level of goal orientation and posttest performance were unrelated to level of education and prior computer experience but were positively related to previous experience of independent learning.     

“Back to the Backlash?” Primary Practitioner Discourses of Resistance to Gender-inclusive Policies

In this article I discuss how observed discourses of resistance indicate the exclusion of the standpoint of primary school practitioners from feminist theorization, as well as the exclusion of feminist perspectives from primary school practice. I do so from a feminist position which sees the modernist policy framework of the gender-inclusive curriculum as still having transformative potential in the postmodern era, whilst also perceiving the need for much more specific analysis of the varied discourses of resistance. The data is selected from a wider longitudinal case study that investigated the conceptualization and enactment of a gender-inclusive curriculum policy in the state of Victoria in Australia since 1975. I focus this discussion on interviewed “exemplars” who observed primary practitioner resistance to gender inclusive curriculum policy. I conclude that this case study empirically demonstrates the failure of “backlash” in accounting for the significant specificities of primary practitioner discourses of resistance.     

Advising time inventory: Consequences of the general college individualized baccalaureate degree program on faculty advising,activities, and academic load

Faculty of the General College are assigned advising responsibilities in addition to their teaching load. Full-time members, for example, advise 35–40 students per year. When the College initiated an individualized baccalaureate degree program in 1971, little provision was made for consequent changes on the advising function and the academic load. As a result, advisers, faced with the complex and time-consuming matters that adhere to individualized learning programs, felt mounting pressure. Large numbers of evening school students were attracted to the program and sought advice and, upon admission, expected to be assigned a faculty adviser. The College made no formal acknowledgment of the addition of the non-day school advisees to advisers' loads. Strained by the overburden, faculty participated in this study to identify how much real time they spend in advising, with whom, and on what kinds of activities. Evidence from this study was used to support their request for recognition by the College of the changed nature and full scope of their advising work.The author wishes to acknowledge Drs. Paul J. Feltovich and Thomas Brothen for their help with the researching of this paper.     

Remembering in California sea lions: Using priming cues to facilitate language-like performance

Two sea lions(Zalophus californianus) were trained to respond to relational commands fey bringing the last designated object (transport item, or TI) to the earlier designated object (goal item, or GI). Most errors on this task involved forgetting of the GI due to interference from memory for the TI. We reasoned that instructing the animals to act directly on the same object several times in single-object commands immediately before a relational command that included the same object as the GI should make the GI associative episode less prone to interference by the TI associative episode. Results confirmed that prior cuing or prompting in this manner did enable the sea lions to perform significantly better on relational commands when no cuing was given.     

A Decade of Teacher Stress: the changing nature of the determinants of teacher stress, 1981 to 1991

This article describes a longitudinal comparative case study of teacher stress. Results of a series of eight questionnaires administered to practising teachers in suburban and inner urban settings are presented. School location emerged as a significant variable. Implications for teacher education are drawn.     

Faculty orientations toward institutional goals: A broken front with implications for planned change

The formulation of institutional goals in higher education often involves input from various campus constituencies including faculty. The faculty's viewpoint is typically treated as though it were a uniform perception. The research reported here tested the uniform nature of the faculty's goal orientations. Statistical comparisons were conducted on mean ratings of five discipline groups of 207 faculty from a major public university on the scales of the Institutional Goals Inventory. Although discipline groups shared common viewpoints on the importance of academic instruction, intellectual pursuits, and research, major differences among groups were found for goals involving university service, off-campus instruction, accountability, intercollegiate athletics, and humanistic values. Institutional planners desiring a change in one of these latter areas should expect different levels of faculty support and resistance from different discipline groups.