“Blockers” do not block recall during tip-of-the-tongue states

Tip-of-the-Tongue experiences (TOTs) are often accompanied by incorrect answers (blockers) that come to mind persistently and seem to block recall. According to the blocking hypothesis, blockers cause retrieval difficulty during TOTs. We predicted that delay would allow participants to forget their blockers, and thereby enhance TOT resolution. In Experiment 1 participants were asked trivia questions and then retested on the ones that elicited TOTs, either immediately or after a delay. There was an incubation effect overall, with greater TOT resolution after a delay than on an immediate test. Contrary to the blocking hypothesis, however, delay did not enhance resolution of blocked TOTs more than non-blocked TOTs. In Experiment 2, during the retest, participants were reminded of their previous blockers on some questions, but the reminders did not affect TOT resolution. These findings suggest that blockers may be a side effect, not a cause, of retrieval difficulty during TOTs. This paper is based on the first author’s Master’s thesis.     

Boarding schools: A longitudinal examination of Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous boarders’ and non-boarders’ wellbeing

Improving educational outcomes for Indigenous Australian students is a key strategy to helping Indigenous people reach their full potential. This has resulted in well-intentioned efforts by Australian educators and governments to ensure Indigenous children have positive school experiences. However, Indigenous students still lag behind their non-Indigenous counterparts in educational outcomes. This is particularly so for Indigenous students living in rural and remote parts of Australia where educational opportunities are limited, especially in high school. One solution to this problem has been to enrol these students in boarding schools in urban and metropolitan centres. While research on the success of boarding schools for Indigenous students is scarce, what little that does exist is not encouraging. The focus of this research was to examine the effects of boarding for Indigenous (n = 11) and non-Indigenous students’ (n = 158) wellbeing (N = 1423) in two large private boys’ schools. Participating students aged 12–18 years old completed a survey measuring wellbeing constructs on two occasions, 12 months apart. Non-Indigenous boys were generally higher in wellbeing compared with Indigenous boys. There was also evidence of improved social wellbeing beyond that of non-Indigenous boarders over time. Overall, while evidence of merit was weak, boarding schools may benefit their Indigenous students’ development in social wellbeing.     

Rediscovering the political dimension of the personal life story: results from an intergenerational narrative learning project with older adults in South Westphalia

Using qualitative interviews, focus groups, storytelling and collective journaling, the life experiences of people in a local village community, in South Westphalia, Germany, born between 1930 and 1945, were analysed collaboratively. The research intention was to give the younger generations in that region access to these experiences and insights, within the context of democratic learning and civic education. The focus of this narrative learning project was on the politically relevant issues and themes they contained, above all: the significance of free information and thought, a free cultural life, access to education for all children and youth, a self-determined life for women and girls, as well as cohesion and self-help structures in the social community. Many tales were shared from the Third Reich, making references to Wilhelmine Germany and the Republic of Weimar, including how these times had been narrated to them through their forebearers and families’ archives.     

Sustainability as a cross-curricular priority in the Australian Curriculum: a Tasmanian investigation

In this paper, we report on an investigation into sustainability education in schools in the Australian state of Tasmania following the implementation of the Australian Curriculum. Sustainability is one of three cross-curriculum priorities in the new national curriculum and is the focus of this research (sustainability cross-curriculum priority (CCP)). Principals and Curriculum Leaders (PCLs) from all schools in Tasmania were invited to complete a survey that asked them about their understanding of various aspects of sustainability and how the sustainability CCP was integrated across learning areas. Sixty-eight PCLs (24%) responded to the survey. They reported generally good understandings of sustainability and education for sustainability, but lesser understandings of the sustainability CCP and the nine organising ideas. Respondents’ understandings of sustainability were dominated by an environmental focus. The PCLs’ responses in relation to sustainability implementation across learning areas gave insights into ways that the sustainability CCP can serve as a pivot for cross-curricular teaching and learning, which is strongly advocated for achieving transformative sustainability education. We conclude this paper with a discussion of how the sustainability CCP is an important asset in the necessary reorientation of the Australian formal education system for a more sustainable future. We note the importance of professional support so that educators may better understand sustainability and its complexity as a cross-curricular priority and envision ways in which the sustainability CCP can be realised within education.     

‘I’m just not that comfortable with technology’: student perceptions of and preferences for Web 2.0 technologies in reflective journals

Encouraging reflective practice and developing reflective practitioners is a goal of many disciplines in higher education. A variety of pedagogical techniques have been used to promote critical reflection including portfolios, narratives and reflective journals. Over the past decade, the use of Web 2.0 technologies with students has been increasingly adopted in higher education settings and many educators have integrated these technologies into reflective assignments. These educators assume that students, who are members of the Net Generation, are technologically savvy and have the ability to integrate the use of Web 2.0 technologies into learning. However, while there have been studies examining the outputs of reflective assignments using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, e-portfolios and wikis, there has been little research examining whether or not students actually use technology for these types of assignment if given the choice. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore if technology was appropriated or rejected by students for a reflective journaling assignment. Results are based on a content analysis of 42 student journaling assignments and interviews with eight students. Findings suggest that (1) students are not as technologically competent as assumed; (2) students chose to use basic/fundamental technologies (e.g. word processing) because they viewed it as the easiest way to complete the reflective journaling assignment; (3) student perceptions of what makes an assignment ‘good’ influenced their choice to use Web 2.0 technologies; and (4) overarching student perceptions of higher education and learning impacted their appropriation of technology. Implications are discussed and recommendations for both research and practice are made.     

Child Readers and the Worlds of the Picture Book

Children as readers of picture books and the ways they respond to, and make meaning from, such texts are the focus of this article, which reports on a small-scale study undertaken in Norway and Wales, UK. The theoretical framing of the research draws on concepts of the multimodal ensemble in picture books and of the reading event as part of a social practice. The research design was developed from the team’s analysis of two texts, Pappa by Svein Nyhus (1998) and What does Daddy Do? by Rachel Bright (2009). Twenty-four children, who were 7 and 8 years old, took part in the study. This was built around two reading events for each book, staged as an immediate response and as a guided response. The data subsequently collected were analysed according to three overarching organisational principles, as book world, real world and play world. For both Daddy and Pappa, the first reading event showed the children’s responses were mainly directed towards exploring the book world. On the second reading event, references to the real world predominated for Daddy, while for Pappa the book world was again dominant. Across both reading events and for both books, the playworld revealed those occasions when the children expanded the meaning of the story, demonstrating an inventive ability to play with the text. Overall, the children’s responses moved fluidly across the three worlds, showing them to be energetically making connections between the reading, their experience of books and their own lives.     

‘Family comes in all forms,blood or not’: disrupting dominant narratives around the patriarchal nuclear family

ABSTRACT

After nearly 25 years of democracy, lives of young South Africans are still profoundly shaped by the legacies of apartheid. This paper considers how these differences are produced, maintained and disrupted through an exploration of changing narratives developed by a small group of South African pre-service teachers, with a particular focus on the narratives developed around discourses of fatherhood generally and absent fathers in particular. We draw on interviews conducted with three students in which we discussed their digital stories and literature reviews. In this paper, we draw attention to the limitations of digital storytelling and the risks such autobiographical storytelling presents of perpetuating dominant narratives that maintain and reproduce historical inequalities. At the same time, in highlighting ways in which this risk might be confronted, the paper also aims to show the possibilities in which these dominant narratives may be challenged.     

Using Natural Language Processing to Predict Item Response Times and Improve Test Construction

In this article, it is shown how item text can be represented by (a) 113 features quantifying the text's linguistic characteristics, (b) 16 measures of the extent to which an information‐retrieval‐based automatic question‐answering system finds an item challenging, and (c) through dense word representations (word embeddings). Using a random forests algorithm, these data then are used to train a prediction model for item response times and predicted response times then are used to assemble test forms. Using empirical data from the United States Medical Licensing Examination, we show that timing demands are more consistent across these specially assembled forms than across forms comprising randomly‐selected items. Because an exam's timing conditions affect examinee performance, this result has implications for exam fairness whenever examinees are compared with each other or against a common standard.     

Empathetic-Reflective-Dialogical Restorying for decolonisation: an emancipatory teaching-learning strategy for Religion Education

ABSTRACT

This article argues for the inclusion of Empathetic-Reflective-Dialogical Restorying as a teaching-learning strategy for Religion Education. This strategy, employed in three small-scale research projects in a South African Higher Education Institution, addresses decolonisation of the Religion Education curriculum in the following ways: changing how teaching-learning takes place; transdisciplinary engagement; empowering students as agents of their own learning; depatriarchisation; and dispelling the myth of African inferiority. Both self-dialogue and self-narrative were used to create open space stories when approaching content that is relevant to the lived experience of gender (in)equality and patriarchy. Engaging in a safe space in Communities in Conversation, Communities in Dialogue, and Communities for Transformation, students troubled entrenched beliefs and worldviews and co-constructed (restoried) understandings. They expressed the view that this emancipatory teaching-learning strategy has the potential to facilitate classroom praxis that is both reflective and reflexive. This can be transformative for the greater society.