"东"写"西"说(二)

英语是我所在的跨国公司的共同工作语言。除了英国人和美国人外,公司的每位成员都用自己特有的风格书写英语。英国女王用简练树立了英语标准,而其他国家的人书写英语时却反映出其特有的民族背景:如法国人着重细节,德国人喜欢直爽,西班牙人爱好夸张,荷兰人表现倔强,日本人乐于重     

Friendship and Task Management in Children's Peer Tutoring

The role of friendship in mediating children's learning is poorly understood, and conflicting claims exist about the manner in which friendship may influence both the process and outcome of learning. Evidence from studies on peer tutoring suggests that children acting as tutors have difficulty co‐ordinating the physical, informational and social demands of a tutoring task, due to their limited cognitive resources. Eight‐ to nine‐year‐old boys and girls were allocated to friend or non‐friend pairs in one‐to‐one tutoring dyads for the purposes of examining the impact of friendship on the process and outcome of tutoring. Although tutoring dyads of friends might be expected to focus their resources on informational components of the task, because their pre‐established relationship would minimise the burden of managing the social demands of the task, the opposite was found. Child tutors who were friends allocated additional resources to the social management aspect of the task, including monitoring tutee progress, but allocated no additional resources to imparting information about the task necessary for improving learning. Far from reducing task demands upon the tutor, friendship appears to impose greater burdens on children's limited resources, consequential upon the need to re‐negotiate their new social relationship arising from unfamiliar and unequal roles into which tutoring has thrust them.     

On relations between science and religion

This article proposes an alternative way of looking at religion to that proposed by Mahner and Bunge, and challenges a claim they make about a presupposition of science. From the alternative perspective there are constructive tensions rather than incompatibilities between science and religion. The article concludes with a proposed set of criteria to be used in critical reflections on faiths, religious or secular. It suggests that education would be enhanced by introducing students to the reflections and dialogues where these criteria are applicable.     

Three dimensions of student-centred education: a framework for policy and practice

While the terms student-centred and learner-centred are used to describe a range of neo-liberal educational policies and practices around the world, the meaning is not clearly defined. This limits its utility as a concept in policy, research and practice. This article applies abductive reasoning to explore how student-centred education is theorised in academic literature and articulated within a sample of New Zealand school principals’ visions for their schools. The findings suggest that student-centred education can be synthesised into a conceptual framework that includes three overlapping dimensions; humanist, agentic and cognitive. The humanist dimension encompasses getting to know students as unique human beings, the agentic focuses on empowering students and the cognitive dimension considers each student’s learning progress. There was diverse understanding of what it meant to be student-centred by the principals with the humanist and agentic dimensions dominating. It is anticipated that educational outcomes for disadvantaged students would improve when the three dimensions are applied together. The proposed framework could be applied by policymakers, practitioners and researchers to enhance clarity of student-centred education policies and practices.     

Marketing to Their Needs: Utilizing Empathetic Marketing Techniques in Student Outreach

This article describes empathetic marketing, a new marketing approach that was created by Mark Ingwer and outlined in his 2012 book, Empathetic Marketing: How to Satisfy the 6 Core Emotional Needs of Your Customers. The authors discuss how this marketing theory can be used by academic librarians to transform their marketing endeavors by presenting library services and resources to students in a way that helps them meet core human emotional needs (control, self-expression, growth, recognition, belonging, and care). The authors also include examples of empathetic marketing from their libraries.     

Scientific Understanding and the Control of Nature

Modern science, for the most part, constrains the kind of theories that it entertains, and selects the kind of empirical data with which theories are related, to accord with materialist strategies. These strategies are adopted, I maintain, not because the objective of gaining understanding that manifests cognitive values highly always requires it, but because of an elective affinity (the elements of which I detail) between the materialist strategies and a certain outlook on the control of nature. A social value, thus, serves to ground the adoption of the materialist strategies. This, however, does not undermine the view that sound theory acceptance is based on impartial considerations, provided that the role of social values is kept properly distinct from that of cognitive values.     

The use of a dynamic screening of phonological awareness to predict risk for reading disabilities in kindergarten children

This study examined the usefulness and predictive validity of a dynamic screening of phonological awareness in two samples of kindergarten children. In one sample (n = 90), the predictive validity of the dynamic assessment was compared to a static version of the same screening measure. In the second sample (n = 96), the dynamic screening measure was compared to a commonly used screening tool, Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills Initial Sound Fluency. Results showed that the dynamic screening measure uniquely predicted end-of-year reading achievement and outcomes in both samples. These results provide preliminary support for the usefulness of a dynamic screening measure of phonological awareness for kindergarten students.     

The author as star

The rise of the “star” author and the cult of celebrity overwhelms publishing in the same way that it has movies and professional sports. Television creates the star system, agents nurture it. Publishers must find ways of surviving it. The Internet provides a means for star authors to reach their public without the intermediation of their publisher, but it is not yet a medium in which stars are born. Address for correspondence     

Issues of validity in science attitude measurement

This article explores the work that Moore and Foy (1997) did in revising and field testing the Scientific Attitude Instrument (SAI). I begin by showing that the empirical work with the revised instrument, the SAI II, raises doubts about the instrument's validity, and I suggest that these doubts seem to coincide rather remarkably with ones raised in an extensive study of science attitude instruments published in the early 1980s. I then consider the field testing of the SAI II in light of alternative approaches to validating instruments, and I show that the revisions made to the SAI leave its validity in question. I end by considering how we might develop guidelines for validating the instruments we use in science education research. J Res Sci Teach 34: 337–341, 1997.