Sixth Graders’ Co-construction of Explanations of a Disturbance in an Ecosystem: Exploring relationships between grouping,reflective scaffolding,and evidence-based explanations

We report on a study investigating the relationship between cognitive ability grouping, reflective inquiry scaffolding, and students’ collaborative explanations of an ecosystem disturbance which took place when a number of flamingo birds died in a salt lake because of nearby intensive human activities. Twenty-six pairs of students from two intact sixth-grade classes participated in the study. All students investigated scientific data relating to the ecosystem problem using a web-based learning environment. One class was provided with web-based reflective inquiry scaffolding (WorkSpace), while the other class used PowerPoint. The main data analyzed for this study consisted of each pair’s written explanation and task-related artifacts. Findings show that the web-based reflective scaffolding supported students in providing valid evidence in support of their explanations. The analyses of the students’ collaborative explanations showed no statistically significant differences that could be attributed to prior achievement between students in the WorkSpace condition, while differences were found between the different cognitive ability pairs in the PowerPoint class. These findings suggest that the WorkSpace scaffolding may have provided more influential support to lower cognitive ability pairs in creating evidence-based explanations.     

Sexual Justice Is Social Justice: An Activity to Expand Social Work Students Understanding of Sexual Rights and Injustices

Social work education could benefit from an explicit educational framework that combines social justice and sexuality: sexual justice. However, there is a paucity of literature in social work discussing this critical issue. This article helps equip social workers to challenge social injustice through a lens of sexuality and builds a conceptual framework by examining sexual justice through pillars of social work: human dignity, community and solidarity, rights and responsibilities, priority for the poor and vulnerable, and peace. An activity providing micro and macro case discussions is presented to help infuse sexual justice into social work programs.     

Examining the effects of home literacy and numeracy environment on early reading and math acquisition

The present study examined how the home literacy and numeracy environment in kindergarten influences reading and math acquisition in grade 1. Eighty-two Greek children from mainly middle socioeconomic backgrounds were followed from kindergarten to grade 1 and were assessed on measures of nonverbal intelligence, emergent literacy skills, early math concepts, verbal counting, reading, and math fluency. The parents of the children also responded to a questionnaire regarding the frequency of home literacy and numeracy activities. The results of path analyses indicated that parents’ teaching of literacy skills predicted reading fluency through the effects of letter knowledge and phonological awareness. Storybook exposure predicted reading fluency through the effects of vocabulary on phonological awareness. Finally, parents’ teaching of numeracy skills predicted math fluency through the effects of verbal counting. These findings suggest that both the home literacy and the home numeracy environments are important for early reading and math acquisition, but their effects are mediated by emergent literacy and numeracy skills.     

Book reviews and notes

CRISIS IN THE CLASSROOM by Charles E. Silberman. New York: Random House, 1970. vii +553 pp. $10.00.

CRISIS IN CHILD MENTAL HEALTH: CHALLENGE FOR THE 1970's, A Report of the Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. 578 pp. $10.00.

AMERICA'S OTHER CHILDREN edited by George Henderson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. xi + 430 pp. $8.95.

PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED by Paulo Freire. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. 186 pp. $5.95.

CHILDREN AND CIVIC AWARENESS by Charles F. Andrain. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co., 1971, vii + 214 pp. $3.95 paperback.

MENTAL RETARDATION: ITS SOCIAL CONTEXT AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES by Bernard Farber. Atlanta, Georgia: Houghton‐Mifflin Co., 1968. 271 pp. $6.95.

KINSHIP AND CLASS: A MIDWESTERN STUDY by Bernard Farber, New York: Basic Book Publishers, 1971. 210 pp. $7.95.

COMMUNITY KINSHIP AND COMPETENCE, Volume 3, Research and Development Program on Preschool Disadvantaged Children, Final Report, Project No. 5‐1181, Contract No. 0E6‐10‐235, Bureau of Research, Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Urbana: Univeristy of Illinois, May 1969. 300 pp.

THE SOCIAL ORDER OF THE SLUM: ETHNICITY AND TERRITORY IN THE INNER CITY by Gerald D. Suttles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. 243 pp. $8.95.

ANY PERSON, ANY STUDY by Eric Ashby. New York: McGraw‐Hill Book Company, 1971. 106 pp. $4.95.     

‘Bringing learning closer to home’: the value and impact of the Lisbon strategy for strengthening the role of local learning centres and partnerships in south‐eastern Europe

This paper presents a comparative examination of four local learning centres that provide learning opportunities throughout life in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. The paper aims to assess some of the strengths and weaknesses of different types of local learning centres and partnerships in South‐Eastern Europe—in line with the value and impact of the Lisbon strategy for developing multipurpose local learning centres for ‘brining learning closer to home’—in order to draw some conclusions on how to promote greater collaboration and a culture of co‐operation, in an area where a lifelong learning culture is still underdeveloped, compared with that in other parts of the European Union.     

Behaviour support in secondary schools

Student voice and pupil empowerment projects are common in many mainstream schools. However, such initiatives are more challenging to implement in provision for students experiencing (social), emotional and behavioural difficulties (SEBD). As a consequence, they are less frequently attempted. This article reports one such attempt at an SEBD special school, where a student research group was formed to evaluate the school's behaviour policy. The students' views remind professionals of the need for consistency, positive relationships and communication underpinning behaviour management strategies. The article also reflects on a number of issues to consider when implementing such projects in special education contexts.     

Comment on commissioner Loevinger's “limits of technology in broadcasting”

FCC Commissioner Loevinger's article appeared in the Fall, 1966 issue of the Journal of Broadcasting (Vol. X, No. 4, pp. 285–298)     

Hardwired for News: Affective Intelligence and Political Attention

Research on citizens’ inattentiveness to political news has built a theoretical base for understanding political judgment in the American electorate. The research, however, has a strong cognitive orientation with surprisingly little attention to the dynamic interaction between emotional and attentional factors. To broaden our understanding of these potential emotional influences, we assessed levels of enthusiasm, anger/aversion, and anxiety in response to brief summaries of 50 news stories of diverse character and provenance selected to be representative of quotidian news. The analysis reveals dramatic variation across news stories and across subjects responding to the same story on all 3 emotional dimensions. We also examine an unexpected inverse correlation between education and level of emotional response to news.     

Encountering the Ethics of Engaged Scholarship

This commentary offers reflections on the preceding articles and frames ethics of community engagment by (organizational) communication scholars in terms of broader issues about the enterprises of applied research. The brief essay considers how we approach and position ethics (writ large) in our work and then offers the following dialectics for consideration: openness versus protection, privilege versus equality, distance versus empathy, listening versus advising, and representation versus intervention.