Teaching children while they play: Cultivating emergent writing and reading

Effective teachers of young children include symbolic play in their early education curricula. They design and prepare play environments, knowing that children learn through play. Piaget's (1962) research contributed greatly to teachers' understanding of how such play functions as a medium for learning, as a vehicle for understanding and constructing knowledge. For example, the child who has experienced meal preparation and child care at home will use those experiences in the housekeeping center with available props and adultlike behavior and language. According to Piaget (1962), this symbolic representation is a way of abstracting elements from life experiences and manipulating them so the learner can facilitate his or her construction of knowledge.Carol Taylor Schrader is an assistant professor at The University of Maryland at College Park.     

Video databases: An emerging tool in business education

A video database of business–leader interviews has been implemented in the assignment work of students in a Bachelor of Business Administration program at a primarily-undergraduate liberal arts university. This action research study was designed to determine the most suitable assignment work to associate with the database in a Business Strategy course and to analyze how the nature of learning was impacted by this technology intervention. Three different assignment approaches to accessing the online database were considered with students. Based primarily on quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews and focus groups, the study determined that this sample of students (N?=?65) preferred self-contained case study approaches that accessed regular interaction with the instructor and provided textual materials to supplement the database content.     

Language experience changes language and cognitive ability

The sustained use of two languages by bilinguals has been shown to induce broad changes in language and cognitive abilities across the lifespan. The largest changes are seen as advantages in executive control, a set of processes responsible for controlled attention, inhibition, and shifting. Moreover, there is evidence that these executive control advantages mitigate cognitive decline in older age and contribute to cognitive reserve. In this paper, we examine some of the evidence for these findings and explain their relation to bilingual language use. These effects are considered in terms of their implications for our understanding of cognitive and brain plasticity. Some implications for social policy are discussed.     

Operating at the margins while seeking a space in the heart: the daily teaching reality of Japanese high school teachers experiencing workplace stress/anxiety

The esteem historically attributed to the teaching profession in Japan is eroding, and some Japanese teachers who identify with the ideal of being a ‘life educator’ are becoming disillusioned with teaching. While the stress and anxiety associated with teacher disillusionment have been researched from a Western perspective, little is known about the work-related stress and anxiety experiences of Japanese teachers. Thus, this grounded theory qualitatively details the teaching experiences of 14 Japanese high school teachers. The findings reveal that whereas only two teachers within the present study had actually achieved a ‘space in their heart’ where they were able to create a balance between the negative and positive forces operating within their teaching careers and home lives, this was a position that many other teachers strove toward.     

The Procedurally Directive Approach to Teaching Controversial Issues

Recent articles on teaching controversial topics in schools have employed Michael Hand's distinction between “directive teaching,” in which teachers attempt to persuade students of correct positions on topics that are not rationally controversial, and “nondirective teaching,” in which teachers avoid persuading students on topics that are rationally controversial. However, the four methods of directive teaching discussed in the literature — explicit directive teaching, “steering,” “soft‐directive teaching,” and “school ethos endorsement” — make rational persuasion problematic, if not self‐defeating. In this essay, Maughn Rollins Gregory argues that “procedurally directive teaching” offers an alternative to such approaches because it derives from the intention to guide inquiry rather than to persuade. He demonstrates that the conceptual frameworks of perfectionism and antiperfectionism, which have been proposed for directive teaching on same‐sex marriage, can instead be used to generate open questions for student inquiry, as can a third, civil rights framework. Given these considerations, Gregory maintains that pedagogical guidance on this topic should be procedurally directive rather than substantively directive. Further, the fact that legal, political, and ethics scholars disagree about which framework is more appropriate to the issue of same‐sex marriage indicates that such arguments cannot be dispositive of the pedagogical issue of how to frame classroom discussions about it. Rather, students should inquire into this meta‐level framing dispute for themselves.     

Ethnic and Racial Identity in Adolescence: Implications for Psychosocial,Academic, and Health Outcomes

The construction of an ethnic or racial identity is considered an important developmental milestone for youth of color. This review summarizes research on links between ethnic and racial identity (ERI) with psychosocial, academic, and health risk outcomes among ethnic minority adolescents. With notable exceptions, aspects of ERI are generally associated with adaptive outcomes. ERI are generally beneficial for African American adolescents' adjustment across all three domains, whereas the evidence is somewhat mixed for Latino and American Indian youth. There is a dearth of research for academic and health risk outcomes among Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents. The review concludes with suggestions for future research on ERI among minority youth.     

Feeling Good,Happy, and Proud: A Meta‐Analysis of Positive Ethnic–Racial Affect and Adjustment

One point of intersection in ethnic and racial identity research is the conceptual attention paid to how positively youth feel about their ethnicity or race, or positive ethnic–racial affect. This article reports results of a series of meta‐analyses based on 46 studies of this dimension and psychosocial, academic, and health risk outcomes among ethnic and racial minority youth. The overall pattern of results suggests that positive ethnic–racial affect exhibited small to medium associations (r range = |.11| to |.37|) with depressive symptoms, positive social functioning, self‐esteem, well‐being, internalizing, externalizing, academic achievement, academic attitudes, and health risk outcomes. Implications for theory and research about the role of positive ethnic–racial affect among youth growing up in an increasingly diverse society are discussed.     

Peer Victimization and Social Alienation: Predicting Deviant Peer Affiliation in Middle School

Two prospective studies examined a theoretical model wherein exposure to victimization, resulting from early behavioral risk, heightens children's social alienation and subsequent deviant peer affiliation (DPA). Across Study 1 (298 girls, 287 boys; K–7th grade; 5–12 years) and Study 2 (338 girls, 298 boys; 2nd–6th grade; 8–12 years), children, parents, peers, and teachers reported on children's externalizing behavior and internalizing symptoms, peer victimization, social alienation, and DPA. Path analyses supported the proposed pathway: Peer victimization predicted social alienation, which then predicted DPA. Early externalizing behavior set this path in motion and made an independent contribution to DPA. This research identifies an important pathway through which externalizing behavior and consequent peer victimization launch children onto a risky social trajectory.     

The Protective Role of Group Identity: Sectarian Antisocial Behavior and Adolescent Emotion Problems

The protective role of strength of group identity was examined for youth in a context of protracted political conflict. Participants included 814 adolescents (M_age = 13.61, SD = 1.99 at Time 1) participating in a longitudinal study in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling, the results show that the effect of exposure to sectarian antisocial behaviors has a stronger effect on youth emotion problems for older adolescents. The results also show that youth with higher strength of group identity reported fewer emotion problems in the face of sectarian antisocial behavior but that this buffering effect is stronger for Protestants compared to Catholics. Implications are discussed for understanding the role of social identity in postaccord societies.     

Developing Consistency in the Terminology and Display of Bar Graphs and Histograms

Students often are confused about the differences between bar graphs and histograms. The authors discuss some reasons behind this confusion and offer suggestions that help clarify thinking.