The Development of Implicit Memory From Infancy to Childhood: On Average Performance Levels and Interindividual Differences

The present multimethod longitudinal study aimed at investigating development and stability of implicit memory during infancy and early childhood. A total of 134 children were followed longitudinally from 3 months to 3 years of life assessing different age‐appropriate measures of implicit memory. Results from structural equation modeling give further evidence that implicit memory is stable from 9 months of life on, with earlier performance predicting later performance. Second, it was found that implicit memory is present from early on, and no age‐related improvements are found from 3 months on. Results are discussed with respect to the basic brain structures implicit memory builds on, as well as methodological issues.     

The Mentoring Profile Inventory: an online professional development resource for cooperating teachers

We report on the origins, development and refinement of an online inventory to help cooperating teachers focus on selected dimensions of their practice. The Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI) helps quantify important features of both the motivating and challenging aspects of mentoring student teachers and provides results to respondents in a graphic, easy-to-understand and immediate feedback report (14 sub-scales and 3 summary charts). Psychometric properties of the MPI are shown to be robust. Results can be used individually or collectively to facilitate cooperating teacher professional development by providing the opportunity for dialog around a set of common issues.     

Content analysis as a means of exploring research opportunities from a conference programme

Background: Health librarians should keep up-to-date in a dynamic environment and accept the importance of continuing personal development (CPD) and growth in their critical reflection and creative thinking skills. They also need to acknowledge the potential value of research activity and the challenges of ongoing improvement and development. Conference programmes may prove a useful source of stimulation, especially if supplemented by creativity techniques, action research and the ideal of 'finding flow'. Objectives: The article analyses the themes and papers presented at the 10th International Conference on International Medical Librarianship (ICML) to identify opportunities for further research, literature reviews, assessment of practices and services, etc. Methods: Content analysis approach to conference papers and suggestions for further action including supplementing with techniques of creativity and group input. Results: A fairly extensive list of further actions (although not intended to be exhaustive) is suggested for the sixteen conference themes. Although subjective, the list might help to stimulate growth in research on health librarianship and demonstrate how one source of stimulation - conference programmes (regularly presented to medical library communities) - can be used. Conclusions: Content analysis has proven a constructive means of generating research questions from a conference programme. Content analysis and other methods aimed at stimulating creative and progressive thinking, including brainstorming, force field analysis, De Bono's 6 hats, creative swiping and creative visualisation, may prove equally useful and require further investigation. To ensure an ongoing cycle, these can be linked to action research.     

Using “Slowmation” to Enable Preservice Primary Teachers to Create Multimodal Representations of Science Concepts

Research has identified the value of students constructing their own representations of science concepts using modes such as writing, diagrams, 2-D and 3-D models, images or speech to communicate meaning. ??Slowmation?? (abbreviated from ??Slow Animation??) is a simplified way for students, such as preservice teachers, to make a narrated animation using a combination of modes. In this study, 13 preservice primary teachers learned how to create a slowmation during a two-hour class in a science methods course and then created one about an allocated science topic as an assignment. The research question that guided this study was, ??What are the preservice teachers?? perceptions of making a slowmation and how was the science concept represented in the animation??? Data included pre and post individual interviews, concept maps constructed during the interviews and the animations as artifacts. Three case studies provide a window into the perceptions of preservice teachers making a slowmation and show how they represented their concept. Slowmation is a new form of student-generated representation which enables them to use their own technology to construct a narrated animation as a multimodal representation to explain a science concept.     

The impact of concept mapping and visualization on the learning of secondary school chemistry students

The aim of this study was to examine whether the construction of integrated knowledge structures by students can be stimulated by concept mapping and by better visualization of concepts and their interrelationships. The investigation was carried out in regular teaching settings: chemistry courses in secondary schools in Flanders, in the domain of electrochemistry. A significant positive effect of extra attention to visualization on the learning achievement of students was found. However, significant effects of concept mapping as an instruction method could not be detected under the given research conditions.     

SKOLEBYGGERI I PÆDAGOGISK BELYSNING.

Skjelf jord, V. J. 1975. Problems of Validity in Connection with the Concept of Auditory Discrimination between Speech Sounds. Scand. J. educ. Res. 19,153—173. Reading problems and articulatory defects are both said to derive from difficulties in discriminating between speech sounds. This hypothesis rests on the assumption that phonemes are sounds functioning in the production and perception of speech. An important theoretical consequence of the assumption is that correct pronunciation precludes discrimination difficulties. An attempt is made to show that the connection repeatedly found between reading scores and scores on tests for auditive discrimination between speech sounds in children with no articulatory defects, results from the fact that the tests really measure a special skill in phonemic segmentation, a skill which is promoted by the instruction in reading. The acquisition of this skill also explains the decrease in articulatory defects in this period.     

Aspects of a Practical Understanding: Heidegger at the workplace

This article aims to clarify some of our pre‐conceived assumptions when we address issues of learning in practice. It argues that we need to develop an understanding of practice based on its own premises. For this purpose the German philosopher Martin Heidegger's (1889–1976) understanding of practice and learning is introduced. Heidegger emphasises the use of equipment as crucial for a practical understanding. This perspective is contrasted with an intellectualistic approach to learning in practice exemplified by the work of Donald Schön. Heidegger and Schön's perspectives on learning in practice are evaluated and discussed throughout the article. Examples from studies of apprenticeship are used to illustrate Heidegger's comprehension of learning in practice. Especially learning through the use of tools and equipment, learning in context, learning as a consequence of making mistakes and learning as a matter of developing a sense of familiarity are types of learning emphasised in this article.     

Different Schools as Narrative Communities: Identity Narratives in Threefold

The last decade identity is often and very fruitfully conceptualized as “narrative identity.” Neither for individuals nor for groups is identity a given beforehand anymore. On the contrary, identity has to be constructed in an inductive way continuously. Three qualitative research methods are applied to explore in an inductive way the school's narrative identity, combining the individual and the group processes of narrative identity construction. Our data reveal a close relationship between autobiographical critical incidents in teachers' and principals' commitment to the school's identity.     

Students' Knowledge About Environmental Matters and Their Belief in Their Own Action Possibilities–A Danish Study

Abstract

Drawing chiefly from Paul Shepard's (1982) Nature and Madness and David Abram's (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous, this essay draws attention to two underlying foundations of educational thought: the process of human social development and the emergence of language and literacy. A reading of Shepard and Abram implies that the meaning of human social development and the meaning of literacy must be recovered from our shared human heritage in which human beings developed a sense of interconnection with nonhuman others. This perspective suggests many challenges to environmental educators including (a) the need to take a more philosophical (and less instrumental) approach to our work, (b) the need for a working theory of development and literacy in education that takes nonhuman otherness seriously, (c) the need to advocate for more regular and extended experiences in the natural world in order to nurture relationship with otherness, (d) the need to reinvent “accountability” in education, (e) and the need to develop in all learners, including ourselves, a sense of at-homeness.