Effects of Traditional Versus Montessori Schooling on 4‐ to 15‐Year Old children's Performance Monitoring

Through performance monitoring individuals detect and learn from unexpected outcomes, indexed by post‐error slowing and post‐error improvement in accuracy. Although performance monitoring is essential for academic learning and improves across childhood, its susceptibility to educational influences has not been studied. Here we compared performance monitoring on a flanker task in 234 children aged 4 through 15, from traditional or Montessori classrooms. While traditional classrooms emphasize that students learn from teachers' feedback, Montessori classrooms encourage students to work independently with materials specially designed to support learners discovering errors for themselves. We found that Montessori students paused longer post‐error in early childhood and, by adolescence, were more likely to self‐correct. We also found that a developmental shift from longer to shorter pauses post‐error being associated with self‐correction happened younger in the Montessori group. Our findings provide preliminary evidence that educational experience influences performance monitoring, with implications for neural development, learning, and pedagogy.     

A cross-cultural study of parents' perceptions of early childhood programs

Cross-cultural studies in early childhood education assist in expanding perspectives and gaining increased understanding and appreciation of programs in other countries. Because both Sweden and the United States are interested in parent involvement in early childhood programs, a survey was conducted to assess parent's perceptions of these programs. Following a review of family life and early childhood education in Sweden and the United States are the specific components of the cross-cultural study. A stratified random sample of parents whose children were involved in early childhood programs was done in St. Louis County, MN, United States, and Kronobergs Lan, Småland, Sweden. In the first section of the five-part survey, parents indicated the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with statements about such areas as governmental support of children and families. Parents in Sweden felt more support of the government, whereas parents in the United States used early childhood programs as a support mechanism to increase their confidence. In the other four sections of the survey, parents rated the importance of various types of parental involvement and the importance of various materials, activities, and caregiver actions in their children's programs. In general, parents in Sweden valued informal contact and inner-directed creative materials and activities. Parents in the United States valued more confining activities such as rote counting, community-based experiences, and compliance with adult expectations. The influence of the macro-society on parents' perceptions as well as microsystem interactions and environments is evident in this study. As early childhood educators learn about and adapt new ideas to their own programs, the potential of cross-cultural studies becomes realized in improved opportunities for young children and their families.     

钓鱼的艺术--《大河之恋》观感

Norman,the hero of the movie,is the son of apriest.He was born in a middle—class fami-ly.He and his families live in a town,not farfrom a clear stream and a waterfall.His father is apious(虔诚的),who takes belief to the hearts andsouls.Norman is good at learning,and going to be-come a professor in the University of Chicago.Theonly libertine(浪子)of the family is his little broth-er,Paul,who is a journalist in a newspaper inMontana.Though the two brothers and their fa-ther are quite different persons,they like fishing     

Shaping the field: the role of academic journal editors in the construction of education as a field of study

In a previous British Journal of Sociology of Education article (Nixon & Wellington, 2005 Nixon, J. and Wellington, J. 2005. ‘Good books’: is there a future for academic writing within the educational publishing industry?. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(1): 91–103. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]) we examined current trends in book publishing and how these have influenced and will influence the construction of the field of educational studies. (The latter study was a follow‐up to an earlier study reported in Nixon [1999 Nixon, J. 1999. Teachers, writers and professionals. Is there anybody out there?. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2): 207–221. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]].) The present article focuses on journals and their editors and, to a lesser extent, the role that the peer review process plays in shaping the field of educational studies. We use (critically rather than deferentially) notions drawn from the work of Bourdieu (1996 Bourdieu, P. 1996. The rules of art: genesis and the structure of the literary field, Cambridge: Polity Press. (Trans. S. Emanuel) [Google Scholar])—the ‘field of power’, defining boundaries, systems of dispositions, right of entry and the ‘illusio’—to consider and conceptualise data from interviews with 12 journal editors. Our own position in writing this article is as academic practitioners involved in reading, peer‐reviewing and editing academic journals within the field of educational studies.

The plea is to recognise that the pen is a mighty sword. We are of course embedded in practices and constrained by them. But these practices owe their dominance in part to the power of a normative language to hold them in place, and it is always open to us to employ the resources of our language to undermine as well as to underpin the practices. We may be freer than we sometimes suppose. (Skinner, 2002 Skinner, Q. 2002. Visions of politics. Volume 1: regarding method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar], p. 7)     

‘Just a Minute ...’—managing interruptions in the junior school classroom

This study uses a continuum to exemplify the range of interruptions experienced by teachers in junior schools. Further clarification is supplied by the matrix, showing sources and types of interruptions.

Reasons for the transformation of ‘interruptions’ into ‘disruptions’ are also discussed, substantiated where possible by selection from the available literature. Further illustrative material is taken from interviews with 12 head teachers and 13 class teachers. Non‐participant observations of 16 of these teachers, working in 11 schools, over a period of six months, provide the data about actual interruptions.

Analyses of these data provide information about the types and frequency of interruptions and evidence of how teachers manage them. Teachers’ ‘coping strategies’ are thus identified and ways of minimising interruptions are examined. The differences between ‘proactive’ and ‘reactive’ class management are considered and the effects of both upon teachers’ effectiveness is debated.     

Diffractive pedagogies: dancing across new materialist imaginaries

ABSTRACT

We theorise an interdisciplinary arts practice university course and consider the forms of educational imaginary challenged by our curriculum. We argue for the disruptive and generative potential of what we call diffractive pedagogy as an example of the type of learning that can take place when materiality and entanglement are considered as vital constituents. Through self-expression and interweaving across disciplinary boundaries, the potential to produce, embody and theorise simultaneously can be realised. Student bodies do not exist in isolation from one another, or from the environment. It is indeed impossible to separate the dancer from the dance, the teacher from the student, and the bodies from the environments and objects to which they relate. This being true, our student body reproduced our teaching bodies as abject, as messy and peripheral to their imaginings of university education. Materially, student bodies remade the limits to which their consciousness was imaginatively drawn. Through our embodied work, unconscious change began the processes of affecting students’ imaginaries of university education.     

Information access and retrieval with hypermedia information systems

Students' success with interactive information systems (IIS) such as those found in many CD-ROM applications depends to large degree on their capacity accurately to choose and apply search strategies in response to information needs. IIS systems provide many ways to retrieve information, with some methods being more efficient and effective than others. The purpose of this study was to investigate the search strategies employed by novice users of an IIS system and to analyse the problems and issues that were impediments to successful use. A class of 12 year old students was instructed in the use of an electronic encyclopaedia. The students used the encyclopaedia as an information source for individual projects and on completion their information skills tested and analysed. The study found that students tended to employ inefficient search strategies and experienced difficulty in creating search requests for information related problems.     

Autistic Children''s Talk about Psychological States: Deficits in the Early Acquisition of a Theory of Mind

Spontaneous speech samples collected from 6 autistic and 6 age- and language-matched Down syndrome controls over the course of 1-2 years were analyzed for the presence of language referring to different psychological states. Utterances containing lexical terms for desire, perception, emotion, and cognition were functionally coded to distinguish conversation uses of such terms from actual reference to mental states, and for perception terms to distinguish reference to perception from calls for joint attention. The main findings were that autistic children were comparable to the Down syndrome control subjects in their talk about desire, perception and emotion. However, they used significantly less language to call for attention and to refer to cognitive mental states. These results are discussed in relation to current theories about the nature of the psychological deficit in autism.     

The emerging role of CD-ROMs in teaching chemistry

Learning chemistry requires students to relate chemical equations and other symbolic notation both to molecular or atomic events and to macroscopic laboratory observations and data. Traditionally, textbooks have provided symbolic notation with minimal pictures of either microscopic events or macroscopic events leaving the teacher and student to conjure these pictures from words. This paper describes the design of several CD-ROMs with very different strategies and focus for teaching general chemistry with large databases of visual information. Teacher tools for preparation facilitate the planning of more hands-on laboratory experiences and live demonstrations to develop laboratory observation skills. Presentation materials provide animations of abstract microscopic events and concepts to help teachers explain these molecular and atomic events. Students improve observation skills in laboratories with supplemental computer tutorials that mimic the decision making required for laboratory tasks in a virtual laboratory, but students reinforce the experience and learn techniques with practice in a real laboratory. New college textbooks on CD-ROM, that integrate the molecular animations and laboratory experiments with the introduction of new terms and symbolic representations, portend large changes in all textbooks.     

An Analysis of the Presentation of Art in the British Primary School Curriculum and its Implications for Teaching

This article presents an analysis of the way art is conceptualised in the British primary school curriculum and provides an historical framework that maps an evolution of ideas that have shaped the way art is presented in the modern day primary curriculum. In order to achieve this a Foucauldian style genealogical analysis is utilised to trace the discourses (systems of meaning) surrounding the nature of children's artistic development and how these discourses are used in the present day British primary curriculum to construe art in different ways. The analysis in this article is threefold. It explores the presentation of art in the curriculum as (1) an expressive subject, (2) a skills based subject, (3) a subject which focuses on art history and art appreciation. Second, the teaching positions associated with each approach are identified as follows (a) the facilitator, (b) the expert and (c) the philosopher; as well as the issues teachers face when adopting these positions. Third, attention is given to how these theoretical principles might be linked to practice. In so doing this article contributes to the debate surrounding the value of art in the primary curriculum and the way in which the curriculum serves to shape teaching practice.