Developing Children's Early Competencies to Engage With Science

Science educators have long been concerned with how formal schooling contributes to learners’ capacities to engage with science after school. This article frames productive engagement as fundamentally about the coordination of claims with evidence, but such coordination requires a number of reasoning capabilities to evaluate the strength of evidence, critique methods, and other factors upon which evidence evaluation rests, evaluating sources and potential biases, and so on. Although the general discourse on education commonly suggests students are bad at such things, we review cognitive development research that demonstrates children display a variety of capabilities, even at early ages, that can be productively built upon by formal science instruction. We use this research to suggest some possibilities for formal schooling to develop children's capacities for evaluating claims within the pursuit of personally meaningful goals. We conclude with observations of useful directions our analysis opens to research.     

Exploring Student Skill Learning: A Case for Investigating Subjective Experience

Doctoral dissertations reflect academic specialization in physical education in terms of both graduate programs and authors' future academic orientations. This research project examined specialization as reflected in virtually all of the dissertations written in physical education between 1964 and 1983. Through sequential matching of listings in Dissertation Abstracts Interntioml, Completed Research in Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, and American Doctoral Dissertations, abstracts of 5,344 physical education dissertations were identified and subsequently coded. Selected results included the following: (a) functional effects was the most common academic specialty, (b) the distribution of dissertations among specializations across time changed minimally, (c) the most common academic specialty for DA, EdD, and PED degrees was program development, but the most common specialty for PhD degrees was functional effects, and (d) there was no association between specialties and doctoral program prestige. The results are discussed within the context of the field of physical education in higher education.     

Latent scrutiny: personal archives as perpetual mementos of the official gaze

This article examines the significance, in the lives of those who experienced out-of-home care as children, of the archived records of their institutionalisation. The affective ramifications of accessing the records as adults are discussed, with especial focus on the records’ capacity to revive past suffering. Drawing on the work of Bruner (Crit Inq Autumn 1–21,1991, Consumption and everyday life, Sage, London, 1997) and MacIntyre (After virtue: a study in moral theory, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1981), a ‘narrative’ model of the self is utilised to account for the negative effect of systemic flaws in the records’ original composition. Such flaws, it is argued, have the potential to disrupt the individual’s sense of self. Both the authors, who experienced out-of-home care as children, present their own experiences of accessing the records, as case studies. The records’ manifold inaccuracies and inadequacies are interpreted in the light of prevailing welfare practices, in particular a highly damaging judgemental paradigm of gendered and moralistic assumptions of the inferior character of those in care. The authors conclude by arguing that research into the archives should involve the direct participation, as ‘insider researchers’, of those who experienced the matters contained in the records. Such participation is essential if the process of revealing and interpreting the archives is to maintain the dignity of the records’ subject individuals, and ensure the integrity of the research.     

美国的食品卫生与食品安全一体化

提供全世界最安全的食品,是美国社会一直引以为傲的。尽管中餐馆在全世界普遍存在食品卫生与安全的问题,而在美国已得到较稳定的控制,这与美国政府以及全社会高度重视食品卫生与安全问题密切相关。其关于食品的立法与监督体系已日臻完善,呈现出注重细节、标准量化、公开透明、监督有力、执行果断、全民参与等特点,文中谈到的相关细节与事例,值得中国政府、食品行业以及全社会的反思与借鉴。     

Didactics and professional practice in preservice teacher education: A comparison of the situations in France and Québec

The authors analyze the role and function of didactics in preservice teacher education as presented in official texts from the ministries of education of Québec and France. They identify the conceptions these texts convey about the ties between didactics and professional education and demonstrate the vulnerable and limited position of didactics in teacher education. In concluding, adopting a comparative approach, they highlight several convergent features of the two systems of teacher education as well as marked differences relating to training in didactics.     

Where Theories of Mind Meet Magic: The Development of Children's Beliefs about Wishing

In two studies, we probed children's beliefs about wishing. In Study 1, we gathered initial data on 50 3- to 6-year-old children's concepts of wishing and beliefs about its efficacy, with both a semistructured interview and a variety of tasks. Results revealed considerable knowledge about wishing in young children, along with an age-related decrease in beliefs about its efficacy. Parents were not found to encourage differently the beliefs of children at different ages, nor were they found to begin actively discouraging such beliefs at any particular age. A moderate relation was found between environmental supports for wishing and children's beliefs in its efficacy. In Study 2, we continued to probe these issues and also address the nature of the broader conceptual context in which children situate their beliefs about wishing. Participants were 92 3- to 6-year-old children. Results of this study suggest that children may reconcile beliefs in the efficacy of wishing with knowledge about everyday mental-physical relations by situating these beliefs more within their emerging beliefs about magic than within their theories of mind.