Behavior management in cognitive early education

Even though behavior management is a very high priority of teachers of young children, systems of behavior management receive less attention than do methods of teaching academic content. Even when there are well developed sytems of behavior management, they do not necessarily reflect the same philosophy and methods of teaching that are used to teach content. The authors report on “cognitive-mediational behavior management”, a system designed to be consistent with a cognitive early education program, the Cognitive Curriculum for Young Children. In both behavior management and all their other teaching, teachers use in this program a mediational teaching style. Teachers emphasize thinking processes rather than correct answers, take a problem-solving approach to learning, help children to acquire generalizable strategies of thinking and problem-solving rather than using trial-and-error learning, are optimistic about children’s abilities to learn, and facilitate children’s acquisition of fundamental thinking modes. This system is seen as basically incompatible with a behaviorist, contingent reinforcement system. Behavior sequences are suggested for working with unacceptable behavior so as to produce both behavior change and cognitive change.     

Relationship between R&D expenditures and publication output for U.S. colleges and universities

Two large independent sources of data, NSF's University Science Statistics Program Integrated Data Base and CHI Research's bibliometric data base, are brought together in a comprehensive study of the relationships among research resources, as measured by R&D expenditures, and research output, as measured by the quantity and visibility of scientific journal articles. The study is based on approximately 500 U.S. colleges and universities. For each of 11 fields of science, there is strong indication of a linear relationship between R&D expenditures and number of papers. The evidence also indicates a positive relationship between number of cites received per paper and number of papers published, but only for papers published in the basic research journals of the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology.