Reviews classroom materials for the gifted

Easy ears. A Scholastic Audio/Visual Program 50 W. 44th St. New York, New York 10036

Grimm's tales for young and old translated by Ralph Manheim, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1977

The uses of enchantment. Bruno Bettelhelm, New York: Random House, 1977 400 Hahn Rd. Westminster, MO 21157.

Capitalization and punctuation by Jennifer Price published by Curriculum Associates, 1977 6 Henshaw St. Woburn, Mass. 01801

Things that are red. Bowmar Artworlds Bowmar/Noble Publishers, Inc. 4563 Colorado Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90039     

Torey Hayden’s teacher lore: classroom behavior management of children with emotional and behavioral disorders

Torey Hayden’s portrayal of classroom behavior management in her teacher lore, autobiographical writings about teaching children with emotional and behavioral disorders, is examined. Five of her books were sampled: One child, Somebody else’s kids, Just another kid, Ghost girl and Beautiful child. Each of these books unfolds within the space of an elementary age, self‐contained classroom for children with emotional and behavioral disorders. Each technique Hayden used to respond to her students’ problem behaviors in the five books was categorized according to Fritz Redl’s theory on managing behavior problems. Redl identified five strategies educators can use to handle their students’ behavior problems: changing, managing, tolerating, preventing and accommodating. The methodology used to categorize Hayden’s techniques was analogous to constant comparative analysis of documents. Hayden is portrayed through Redl’s strategies as a teacher who relies on managing without consequences and changing techniques. Narrative passages illustrating these techniques are presented. The roles of altruism and student empowerment in Hayden’s storied model of classroom management are presented. Implications for Hayden as a role model for teachers of children with emotional and behavioral disorders are discussed.     

Political instability, pro-business market reforms and their impacts on national systems of innovation

We investigate the impacts of political instability and pro-business market reforms on national systems of innovation (NSI) across a range of developing and developed countries. Evidence suggests that national systems of innovation are most likely to flourish in developed, politically stable countries and less likely to prosper in historically unstable countries. While research has shown that pro-business market reforms can be a valuable policy instrument to boost economic development in less developed countries, the extent to which these reforms affect a country's innovativeness has been neglected in the literature. In particular, the degree to which pro-business market reforms may compensate for political instability when it comes to fostering national systems of innovation remains under-researched. Our findings support established arguments concerning the strong influence of political instability on inputs to national innovation systems. We find, however, mixed effects for pro-business market reforms. While results indicate a negative direct influence on NSI, they consistently show a strong moderating effect that counterbalances the negative impact of political instability, especially in those developing country environments where science and technology are lagging. These results provide important implications for policymakers as well as for our understanding of emerging and transition economies and national technological capability.     

Public memories and private tastes: The shifting definitions of museums and their visitors in the UK

There is no doubt that museums now operate in a distinctly different market to those of the past. Rottenberg [Rottenberg, B. (2002). Museums, information and the public sphere. Museum International, 54(4), 21-28] identifies the two major trends in museums in the latter years of the 20th century as being ‘the prevalence of a new market-orientated ideology that stressed the importance of revenue generation’ and ‘the introduction of new technologies that transfixed not only the museum profession, but also the world’. The main impact, which these and other changes have had is the revision of the museum into a setting for recreational experiences [Foley, M. and McPherson, G. (2000). Museums as leisure. International Journal of Heritage Studies 16(2), 161-174; Stephen, A. (2001). The contemporary museum and leisure: Recreation as a museum function. MuseumManagement and Curatorship 19(3), 297-308], rather than an educative one. This paper attempts to address some of these shifts in ideology and purpose.The main concern that museums face as they become more ‘recreation-focused’ is that they will lose what has long been believed to be their ‘integrity’, and thus stray from their original missions to preserve and educate, with critics suggesting that they may simply become arenas for pleasure rather than education.This paper concludes that in future, it seems inevitable that museums will become ‘hybrid places, combining recreation and learning, allowing visitors diversions from the intense stimuli of strolling through galleries and viewing multitudinous objects’ [Kotler, N. (2004). New ways of experiencing culture: the role of museums and marketing implications. Museum Management and Curatorship, 19(4), 417-425], with entertainment and education working together to fulfil the museum's mission. Museums need not be afraid of using entertainment, but should embrace it as a tool for learning, potentially attracting a wider and more diversified public.     

Framing evolution discussion intellectually

This study examines how a first‐year biology teacher facilitates a series of whole‐class discussions about evolution during the implementation of a problem‐based unit. A communicative theoretical perspective is adopted wherein evolution discussions are viewed as social events that the teacher can frame intellectually (i.e., present or organize as exchanges of an intellectual nature). Furthermore, we characterize teacher framing of evolution discussion in terms of five communicative components: focus, orientation, social structure, mood, and participatory nature. Our video‐based analyses revealed that the teacher paid little attention to the conceptual contents and history of evolutionary theory, framing evolution discussions as moderately playful and partially mandatory events focused mainly on student sharing of ideas (i.e., personal opinions) and polite communication of evolution. Within this framing, the teacher adopted the role of a neutral (though admittedly biased) facilitator with an intermediary expert status (less knowledgeable than evolutionary biologists) and who was legally required (though also inclined) to discuss evolution. The main significance of this study is that it provides new and useful insights into social phenomena such as respect, politeness, and humor in the context of evolution discussion as well as a robust theoretical framework for analyzing evolution discussion from a social perspective. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 257–280, 2011     

Educational Assessment via a Web-Based Intelligent System

Effective assessment is vital in educational activities. We propose IWAS （intelligent Web-based assessment system）, an intelligent, generalized and real-time system to assess both learning and teaching. IWAS provides a foundation for more efficiency in instructional activities and, ultimately, students＇ performances. Our contributions are summarized as （1） Given the causes （student knowledge levels and learning styles）, BN （Bayesian Networks） technique is utilized to automatically reason on the probabilities of the presence of the effects （learning outcomes）; （2） The absence of teaching practice assessments is addressed via the feedbacks from three different levels, aiming to correlate the teaching assessment with the learning assessments for the improved effectiveness in instructional activities; （3） Under a client/server architecture, IWAS is decomposed into a set of independent modules; through the standard inter-module interfaces, the flexibility of easy maintenance makes IWAS a generalized system adaptable to different domains; and （4） Web technologies are integrated to deliver the formative feedbacks to users in a timely manner     

Mother-child bookreading in low-income families: correlates and outcomes during the first three years of life

About half of 2,581 low-income mothers reported reading daily to their children. At 14 months, the odds of reading daily increased by the child being firstborn or female. At 24 and 36 months, these odds increased by maternal verbal ability or education and by the child being firstborn or of Early Head Start status. White mothers read more than did Hispanic or African American mothers. For English-speaking children, concurrent reading was associated with vocabulary and comprehension at 14 months, and with vocabulary and cognitive development at 24 months. A pattern of daily reading over the 3 data points for English-speaking children and daily reading at any 1 data point for Spanish-speaking children predicted children's language and cognition at 36 months. Path analyses suggest reciprocal and snowballing relations between maternal bookreading and children's vocabulary.     

Preparing Teachers to Make the Formative Assessment Process Integral to Science Teaching and Learning

Formative assessment provides a means to successfully scaffold learning. Unfortunately, few teachers understand the pedagogical implications of such scaffolding or their role in utilizing formative assessments. The purpose of our study was to develop an understanding of the experience of being a teacher that is seeking to improve learning through formative assessment and using that understanding to improve our practices in teacher education. Three categories emerged from the data analysis: (1) questioning the validity of tacit pedagogical understandings, (2) understanding the experiences of the students, and (3) exploring the need to develop a more reflexive classroom. The findings from this study are useful for persons seeking to prepare teachers to guide science learning.