Learning to Teach Science: The Curriculum of Student Teaching in Hiroshima "Attached" Schools

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Book reviews

Publishing Research Quarterly -     

The effect of activity type on the engagement and interaction of young children with disabilities in inclusive childcare settings

The engagement and adult and peer interaction of 37 young children with a range of disabilities was measured in free play, group, and meal-routine activities in inclusive childcare settings. A significant effect for activity type was found for total engagement, active engagement, and passive engagement, with the children being more engaged in free-play and meal-routine activities than group activities. Free-play and meal-routine activities provided better opportunities for active engagement than did group activities, but children were more actively engaged during meal-routine activities than during free play. Passive engagement was more commonly observed during group activities. Children interacted more with their peers during free play. When children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder were compared with children with other disabilities, they were found to be significantly less engaged during free play and interacted less with their peers. The implications of these findings for inclusive practice in childcare settings are discussed.     

Psycho-social characteristics of children and adolescents with siblings on the autistic spectrum

This study investigates the psycho-social characteristics of typically developing children who have siblings with autism and their sibling relationship. Children’s adjustment at school, their self-esteem and social relations, as well as their friends’ attitudes towards their autistic siblings were examined. Participants were 22 siblings of children with autism, aged 8–18?years, 22 mothers and 22 fathers. Parents provided demographic information, and completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire and the Sibling Inventory of Behaviour. Data from siblings of children with autism were based on a semi-structured interview, the Self-Perception Profile for Children and Adolescents and the Siblings Problems Questionnaire. Only few typically developing siblings of children with autism exhibit emotional and behavioural difficulties. The majority of them have a good relationship with their autistic brother or sister, although they mentioned changes in their daily routines. They also seem not to be satisfied in terms of peer acceptance skills and friendships. In addition, the results of the present study provide evidence for positive parental views on their typically developing children’s emotional and behavioural adjustment. These findings are important and need to be taken into account in order to assess functioning of all family members in families with autism spectrum children.     

Children’s spelling of base, inflected, and derived words: Links with morphological awareness

Two studies examined whether young children use their knowledge of the spelling of base words to spell inflected and derived forms. In Study 1, 5- to 9-year-olds wrote the correct letter (s or z) more often to represent the medial /z/ sound of words derived from base forms (e.g., noisy, from noise) than to represent the medial /z/ sound of one-morpheme control words (e.g., busy). In Study 2, 7- to 9-year-olds preserved the spelling of /z/ in pseudoword base forms when writing ostensibly related inflected and derived forms (e.g., kaise-kaisy). In both studies, the children’s tendency to preserve the spelling of /z/ between base and inflected/derived words was related to their performance on analogy tasks of morphological awareness. These findings add to the growing body of evidence that children recognise and represent links of meaning between words from relatively early in their writing experience, and that morphological awareness facilitates the spelling of morphologically complex words.     

Translation Studies and the History of Science: The Greek Textbooks of the 18th Century

The process of translation has been studied extensively from a philological point of view, and has been lately regarded as a creative activity, during which the translated text is not treated in isolation from the circumstances of its reception. Current research has related communicational and functional approaches with concepts such as authorship, textual transmission and cultural factors. Very few historians of science, however, have looked systematically at the issue of translation as worth studying in its own right. Yet the history of translation of philosophical and scientific texts calls, in particular, on the transfer of knowledge from ‘centres’ to ‘peripheries’ and could make serious inroads into reception studies.     

The social geography of childcare: making up a middle‐class child

Childcare is a condensate of disparate social forces and social processes. It is gendered and classed. It is subject to an excess of policy and political discourse. It is increasingly a focus for commercial exploitation. This is a paper reporting on work in progress in an ESRC funded research project (R000239232) on the choice and provision of pre‐school childcare by middle‐class (service class) families in two contrasting London locations. Drawing on recent work in class analysis the paper examines the relationships between childcare choice, middle‐class fractions and locality. It suggests that on the evidence of the findings to date, there is some evidence of systematic differences between fractions in terms of values, perspectives and preferences for childcare, but a more powerful case for intra‐class similarities, particularly when it comes to putting preferences into practice in the ‘making up of a middle‐class child’ through care and education.     

Use of predictive text in text messaging over the course of a year and its relationship with spelling,orthographic processing and grammar

An investigation into the impact of predictive text use upon the literacy skills of primary school, secondary school and university cohorts was conducted over the course of a year. No differences in use of text abbreviations (‘textisms’) were found between predictive text users and nonusers. However, secondary school children who used predictive text made more genuine spelling errors than nonusers. Predictive text was related to use of some specific grammatical violations in school‐age children's text messages but was not related overall to the tendency to make grammatical errors when texting. University students, however, made significantly fewer grammatical errors in their text messages when they used predictive text. Over the course of a year, predictive text use was variable for all age groups. Consistency of predictive text use was unrelated to grammatical understanding, spelling or orthographic processing for primary and secondary school cohorts. Predictive text use was negatively related to morphological awareness for adult participants.