UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF THERMAL PHYSICS IN EVERYDAY CONTEXTS

Thermal physics is in the realm of everyday experience, underlies current environmental concerns, and underpins studies in sciences, health and engineering. In the state of NSW in Australia, the coverage of thermal topics in high school is minimal, and, hence, so is the conceptual understanding of students. This study takes a new approach at exploring conceptions of students with a qualitative analysis facilitated by NVivo complemented with reference to sociocultural ideas of learning. A 2-part pen and paper question was given to 598 first year university students of different educational backgrounds (and therefore physics expertise). ‘The Question’ was based on 2 familiar scenarios and required the selection of a concept first, followed by an explanation. The results showed that concepts were favoured based on a student’s everyday experience and their curriculum through high school, and some were more effective than others in making scientifically congruent responses. The reported thermal physics alternative conceptions were also examined in our sample, and students’ reasoning behind such conceptions indicate that some conceptions do not inhibit scientifically congruent responses whilst others do. The results implicate language and the everyday experiences of the student in the teaching and learning of thermal physics.     

Developing ecological literacy in a forest garden: children’s perspectives

Today, cities become more dense, green spaces disappear and children spend less time outdoors. Research suggests that these conditions create health problems and lack of ecological literacy. To reverse such trends, localities are creating urban green spaces for children to visit during school time. Drawing on ideas in ecological literacy, this study investigates school children’s perspectives on a forest garden, a type of outdoor educational setting previously only scarcely researched. Data were collected through walk-and-talk conversations and informal interviews with 28 children aged 7 to 9. Many children in the study expressed strong positive feelings about the forest garden, the organized and spontaneous activities there, and caring for the organisms living there. We observed three aspects of learning in the data, potentially beneficial for the development of children’s ecological literacy: practical competence, learning how to co-exist and care, and biological knowledge and ecological understanding.     

Beyond Plumbing and Prevention: feminist approaches to sex education

This article offers a feminist critique of existing sex education policies and programmes in Canada, as well as examining common right‐wing arguments against more progressive approaches. Two major forces shaping adolescent girls’ developing sexuality—male sexual violence and compulsory heterosexuality—are discussed, and recent initiatives in Ontario to introduce these issues into sex education programmes evaluated. Toronto Board of Education's new policy on sexual orientation and the Ontario Ministry of Education AIDS Education Curriculum are assessed and strategies for anti‐sexist, anti‐heterosexist sex education developed.     

Labels and Labelling in the Field of Educational Leadership

This paper reports on theorising based on developing histories of the field of educational leadership in higher education in the UK. These histories are being constructed through the collection of professional biographies of field members, reading the outputs of the field in the form of journals and books, and analysing the papers from the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society. In this paper I focus on how the field has changed its label over the last forty years from “educational administration” to “educational management”, and more recently “educational leadership”, and the link between labels and knowledge claims. In particular I argue that while there is a continuity of knowledge underpinning this relabelling process there is also a mutation in the form of management in education that has become performance leadership in schools. The latter is official government policy and practitioners are being located in an all‐embracing training framework. The paper argues that knowing about knowledge claims and field labels is an important means by which we can control our practice and identities. Through Bourdieu's theory of practice I describe and explain the development of the field and the struggle to be located and to stay located within higher education. By putting Bourdieu to work in this way I also seek to analyse how habitus and field can contribute to the development of explanatory frameworks regarding the power structures underpinning knowledge production.     

Writing and writers: the perceptions of young children and their parents

Over the past three decades early writing research has focused on the processes involved as children learn to write. There is now a powerful evidence base to show that children’s earliest discoveries about written language are learned through active engagement with their social and cultural worlds. In addition, the idea of writing development as an emergent process is well established. The study reported in this paper adopted case study methodology combined with an age-appropriate data collection technique in order to explore children’s perceptions of themselves as writers. A focused task using a hand puppet called Baby Bear was used to elicit children’s perceptions. The children’s parents were interviewed to elicit their perceptions of their children as writers. This small-scale exploratory study found that the children had clear perceptions about themselves as writers. There were important links between parents’ perceptions of their children as writers and the ethos for writing they created in the home. It was found that, overall, more positive parental perceptions were linked with more attention to the meaning of children’s writing. It is concluded that early years settings could usefully identify and compare children’s and parents’ perceptions of writing in order to enhance children’s writing development.     

Pretraining and discrimination reversal learning by rhesus monkeys

Groups of five to seven macaques were trained on repeated reversals of a visual (or spatial) discrimination habit after no pretraining, extended discrimination training, or repeated reversal training on spatial (or visual) cues. Neither sort of pretraining had a significant effect on reversal learning on the second cue. These results indicate that monkeys’ capacity to develop generalized “win-stay, lose-shift” hypotheses may have been exaggerated in previous experiments.