Challenges to Cognitive Bases for an Especial Motor Skill at the Regulation Baseball Pitching Distance

We tested expert baseball pitchers for evidence of especial skills at the regulation pitching distance. Seven college pitchers threw indoors to a target placed at 60.5 feet (18.44 m) and four closer and four further distances away. Accuracy at the regulation distance was significantly better than predicted by regression on the nonregulation distances (p < .02), indicating an especial skill effect emerged despite the absence of normal contextual cues. Self-efficacy data failed to support confidence as a mediating factor in especial skill effect. We concluded that cognitive theories fail to fully account for the patterns of observed data, and therefore theoretical explanations of the especial skills must address noncognitive aspects of motor learning and control.     

Developing Children's Understanding of Fractions: An Intervention Study

Fractions constitute a stumbling block in mathematics education. To improve children's understanding of fractions, we designed an intervention based on learning‐by‐doing activities, which focused on the representation of the magnitude of fractions. Participants were 292 Grade 4 and 5 children. Half of the classes received experimental instruction, while the other half pursued their usual lessons. For 10 weeks, they played five different games using cards representing fractions (e.g., Memory and Blackjack). Wooden disks helped them represent and manipulate fractions while playing games. Our results showed an improvement in the conceptual understanding of fractions. The findings confirmed that the usual practice in teaching fractions is largely based on procedural knowledge and provides only minimal opportunities for children to conceptualize the meaning and magnitude of fractional notations. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that a short intervention inducing children to manipulate, compare, and evaluate fractions improves their ability to associate fractional notations with numerical magnitude.     

Cumulative Advantages and the Emergence of Social and Ethnic Inequality: Matthew Effects in Reading and Mathematics Development Within Elementary Schools?

This article examines the development of social and ethnic disparities in academic achievement in elementary schooling. It investigated whether reading and mathematics development in 136 mixed‐ability classes shows path‐dependent processes of cumulative advantage (Matthew effects) from Grades 4 to 6 (Grade 4 mean age = 10.62, SD = 0.57) resulting in growing inequality. Status‐dependent processes of cumulative advantage, their interaction with path‐dependent processes, and consequences for the degree of social and ethnic inequality are examined. Two complementary methods for analyzing multilevel data are used: growth curve and quasi‐simplex models. No evidence for a Matthew effect was found in either domain. A compensation effect emerged for reading, to the benefit of ethnic minorities. A fan‐spread effect was found for mathematics, partly attributable to status‐dependent processes of cumulative advantage.     

Positive Effects of Converting a Food and Bioprocessing Analysis Course to an Inquiry‐Guided Approach

Abstract: Food science laboratory courses are traditionally taught as a series of preplanned laboratories with known endpoints. In contrast, inquiry‐guided (IG) laboratories allow students to ask questions, think through problems, design experiments, then adapt and learn in response to unexpected results. This study examined the effects of converting the course, “Analytical Techniques in Food and Bioprocessing Sciences” from a traditional approach (2008 to 2010 data) to an IG approach (2011 data) by assigning teams of 2–3 students a food and a set of 5 analyses to conduct over the course of the semester. Students were required to choose and justify the use of specific methods for each analysis, as well as to develop a supply list and a budget for the semester‐long project. During the semester, students were required to post and discuss their weekly progress with the instructor, teaching assistants, and the rest of the class using an online discussion forum. At the end of the semester, students were required to present the results of their analysis in both oral and written formats. Overall course grades were significantly higher (P≤ 0.05) using IG in 2011 compared to 2010 and 2009, but not to 2008 grades. Numerical course evaluations for the instructor, overall course, and lab, as well as written course evaluations all significantly (P≤ 0.05) improved. This suggests that an IG approach may measurably improve student performance in terms of course grades and the ability to complete semester long projects. It may also increase student satisfaction with the course, as measured by numerical and written end of semester surveys.     

Communities in the making: Pedagogic explorations using oral history

This article discusses two projects supported by the Higher Education Active Community Fund, which involved student and staff volunteers in working with local communities and community-based organisations in two London boroughs. Oral history methods were used to investigate and represent the experiences of elderly people living in Borough A and young people who have been in foster care in Borough B and their carers. Both projects involved collecting detailed life stories on video and editing these for exhibition in the public domain. The video for Borough A was to form part of the Council's website, the older people's portal. The video for Borough B was to be used to train people providing professional services to young people in foster care and to involve the young people in filming, editing and producing a soundtrack. The article discusses the aims and context of the two projects and critically reviews the learning experiences involved. It analyses issues raised by volunteering, working with local communities, and attempting to represent marginalised experience. It reflects critically on notions of community and community development and discusses relations between oral history projects and community definition, higher education and society.     

Culture and equality in education

The advent of comprehensive education implies a search for a common culture, or a common treatment of culture, across the whole school population. This article reviews the present stage in this search, attempting to define a suitable treatment of culture by secondary schools. The history of schools’ treatment of cultural sources is briefly invoked, particularly the differences in treatment found in grammar and secondary modern schools. Purportedly progressive attitudes to ‘formal’ or ‘high’ culture are analysed and found to be too simplistic. Traditional education is shown not to have genuinely served its own’ supposed cultural aims, whilst progressives’ rejection to those aims is shown to be inadequate as a reaction to what traditional education actually did rather than claimed to do. It is proposed that a more engaged approach to formal culture, involving critical receptivity, is appropriate for all pupils, and would also require the nourishment of a more receptive attitude to pupils’ own creativity.

Since we have liberated the term ‘culture’ from meaning merely a rarified level of works of art, it has become so all‐embracing as to be almost unmanageable. Influenced by anthropology, we now tend to think of culture as extending to the most casual level of value and idea by which we live our daily lives. It even includes our most informal language habits.

The difficulty, of course, with such an all‐embracing notion is that it makes the subject almost impossible to talk about. Criteria of quality , and currency are blurred. Part of the same confusion is that the education system, formerly seen as the custodian of ‘culture’, now has no name for the special resources of knowledge which are ‐‐ or used to be ‐‐ its particular responsibility.

I will use culture here to mean those public works or activities which represent man to himself and are value laden. Thus literature, psychology, history, philosophy, politics, law, economics and sociology would all be included. They might have scientific elements but they still convey normative images of man.

If the concept of culture itself, even as so defined, has a blunt edge, we must discriminate elements within it in order to make the area susceptible to discussion. To get a picture of how schools, traditionally, have mediated culture, we must distinguish at least five broad elements:

1. formal, by which is meant that part in which academic and professional institutions specialize;

2. informal, meaning relatively spontaneous and non‐centralized activities, including ordinary conversation;

3. mass culture, such as films, television, popular music, advertising;

4. avant‐garde culture, arising out of a sense of crisis in the formal culture; and

5. ethnic, other than that which coincides with the content of previous categories.

These are pretty crude categories, but they are a little better than such common divisions as ‘high/low’, ‘popular/serious’ and ‘traditional/contemporary’, and they permit some analysis of relationships between different elements within our culture as a whole.