Are Prompts Provided by Electronic Books as Effective for Teaching Preschoolers a Biological Concept as Those Provided by Adults?

Research Findings: Prior research indicates that shared book reading is an effective method for teaching biological concepts to young children. Adult questioning during reading enhances children’s comprehension. We investigated whether adult prompting during the reading of an electronic book enhanced children’s understanding of a biological concept. Ninety-one 4-year-olds read about camouflage in 3 conditions. We varied how prompts were provided: (a) read by the book, (b) read by a researcher, or (c) given face to face by the researcher. There was an interaction between children’s initial vocabulary level and condition. Children with low vocabulary scores gave fewer camouflage responses than their high-vocabulary peers, and this effect was particularly pronounced in the book-read condition. Children’s executive function was also measured and discussed. Practice or Policy: Our findings indicate that under some circumstances electronic prompts built into touchscreen books can be as effective at supporting conceptual development as the same prompts provided by a coreading adult. However, children with low vocabulary skills may be particularly supported by adult-led prompting. We suggest that adult prompting be used to motivate children to test and revise their own biological theories. Once children have learned strategies for updating their concepts, electronic prompting may be useful for scaffolding children’s transition to using the strategies when reading alone.     

Infants' Ability to Draw Inferences about Nonobvious Object Properties: Evidence from Exploratory Play

Generalizing knowledge about nonobvious object properties often involves inductive inference. For example, having discovered that a particular object can float, we may infer that other objects of similar appearance likewise float. In this research, exploratory play served as a window on early inductive capability. In the first study, 48 infants between 9 and 16 months explored pairs of novel toys in 2 test conditions: violated expectation (two similar toys were presented in sequence, the first toy produced an interesting nonobvious property, such as a distinctive sound or movement, while the second toy was invisibly altered such that it failed to produce the nonobvious property available in the first toy), and interest control (two similar-looking toys were presented in sequence, neither of which produced the interesting property). Infants quickly and persistently attempted to reproduce the interesting property when exploring the second toy of the violated expectation condition relative to the first toy of the interest control condition (a baseline estimate) or the second toy of the interest control condition (an estimate of simple disinterest). The second study, with 40 9–16-month-olds, confirmed these results and also indicated a degree of discrimination on infants' part: Infants seldom expected toys of radically different appearance to possess the same nonobvious property. The findings indicate that infants as young as 9 months can draw simple inferences about nonobvious object properties after only brief experience with just 1 exemplar.     

Do teachers’ knowledge and behaviour reflect their qualifications and training?

It is easier to collect data on teachers’ qualifications, experience, or training than to get a precise idea of their command of subject matter or their classroom behaviour. However, research consistently shows that “class effect” (the impact on a student of being in one class rather than another) on pupil performance is relatively high, especially in Africa, whereas the impact of qualifications, experience, or training on pupil learning is generally low. The purpose of this paper is to compare teacher academic qualifications and professional training on the one hand, with teacher test scores and behaviour on the other, showing the weak links between the former and the latter. What also emerges is the importance of certain external management-related factors such as the vastly reduced hours of effective learning time due to high rates of absenteeism and delayed term starts. Despite the importance of what really happens in the classroom, it remains difficult to measure the classroom dynamic reliably and accurately.

Between Silence and Salience: A Multimethod Model to Study Frame Building From a Journalistic Perspective

Research into frame building, which aims to investigate the development of news framing in the journalistic realm, is on the rise. While most frame-building studies focus on the relative contribution of journalists or sources to news frames, this article presents and evaluates an integrated methodological model. The model is based on constructionist premises with the purpose of examining how frames are created as part of the interaction among reporters, editors, and sources. Based on a review of the methodologies used in earlier frame-building studies, we propose an ethnographic four-phase model in which multiple methods are interwoven: newsroom observations, reconstruction interviews, and frame analyses of news products (which illustrate what is made salient) as well as production documents (which also reveal what is silenced). The model is illustrated with two multisited studies in newspaper newsrooms: an interview-based study of the news reports of preselected journalists and an observation-based study for which the news reports to be analyzed were selected based on their salience in newsroom meetings. Through this multimethod model, this paper offers some guidelines for the study of frame building from a journalistic perspective.     

Examining the impact of an online social media challenge on participant physical activity and body weight in the United States

This study examined use of an online social media physical activity (PA) challenge to encourage participants to complete at least 13 races in the year 2013. Following the challenge, researchers recruited participants through the Facebook group. Using the #13in2013 Twitter hashtag, participants completed an online survey. Survey participants reported completing a significantly greater mean total number of races during the challenge (17.5 ± 6.9 races) than the previous year (8.6 ± 7.4 races, p = .001) and 93% (n = 56) reported completing at least 13 races. Participants completed a mean of 1.4 ± 2.1 virtual races. Mean reported number of total miles ran/walked during the challenge was significantly greater (718.4 ± 465.0 miles) than the previous year (462.1 ± 436.5 miles, p = .002). Mean reported participant body weight post-challenge (68.2 ± 13.1 kg) was significantly lower than reported weight pre-challenge (69.7 ± 14.4 kg, p = .012). This study demonstrated that a social media PA challenge has the potential to present a scalable way to motivate individuals to participate in PA and decrease body weight.     

Teaching in Australian Higher Education: Possible Effects of Commonwealth Government Policies

In this essay, I review the main elements of the Dawkins program for change in Australian higher education ‐ very rapid expansion of enrolments, amalgamations, the designation of “priority areas”, the equity plan which aims to increase the participation of disadvantaged groups, the re‐organisation of distance education, the requirement for staff appraisal and the development of performance indicators ‐ and explore, in a speculative and personal way, some possible effects on the nature and quality of teaching in higher education institutions. Both positive and negative scenarios for future development are presented and I argue that the outcome is still in the balance, while acknowledging that the financial situation created by the steady erosion of per capita funding and recent patterns of over‐enrolment may be tipping the balance decisively towards decline.     

Passage independence within standardized reading comprehension tests

In tests used to measure reading comprehension, validity is important in obtaining accurate results. Unfortunately, studies have shown that people can correctly answer some questions of these tests without reading the related passage. These findings bring forth the need to address whether this phenomenon is observed in multiple-choice only tests or in those that employ open-ended questions. Three common standardized reading comprehension tests were examined: the WIAT-III, the CAAT, and the Nelson–Denny. The WIAT-III is composed of open-ended questions, while the other two tests utilize multiple-choice questions. All participants were instructed to answer the questions to the best of their ability, without access to the related passage. The results revealed that participants correctly answered the questions at a significantly higher rate than by chance for the multiple-choice, which supports the independency issue. For the open-ended questions, participants still answered with 18% accuracy, without the passages.     

Destination unknown: An exploratory study of full-time faculty off the tenure track

The source of data in this study is the 1989 National Survey of Faculty by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.     

Language‐in‐education across the Baltic: policies,practices and challenges

Since their political reorientation that started in the late 1980s, the Baltic states have experienced profound social reforms to rebuild their democratizing societies. Education has featured as a key vehicle to this transformation process of overcoming the limitations of the Soviet past. National legislative frameworks were therefore soon provided to restructure educational systems and allow for ‘liberal’ approaches to schooling. The process of policy‐making for a new concept of education, however, entailed numerous challenges, and it has resulted in a diverse tapestry of educational provision across the Baltic. With specific focus on minority education, this paper presents a comparative analysis of education policies and practices in contemporary Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in response to emerging language needs in these intensely multiethnic settings.