Liking to be liked: imitation,familiarity and pedagogy in the first years of life

This paper offers a review of the literature on the role of imitation in the earliest stages of social interaction between babies and familiar partners. The review focuses on the ways in which reciprocal imitation marks familiar relationships that provide special contexts for babies to engage actively and exuberantly in the construction of a shared culture. Because adults' perception of a baby's actions and intentions are filtered by the adult's experience of living within a particular culture, babies can obtain valuable information about this culture from the differences between what they do and how familiar adults respond to them. As they become increasingly interested in the social meaning of people's behaviour, infants also become more sensitive about how their own actions may be interpreted, showing pride and delight when their intentions are realised and embarrassed withdrawal when their efforts fail. When very young children are observed in unfamiliar contexts and when they are cared for and educated in professional settings, they may have relatively few opportunities for lively, joyful exchanges with reassuringly familiar partners and this can distort adults' perceptions of ‘normal’ infant behaviour. It is argued that adults' attentive interest in mutually enjoyable exchanges with young children is an important difference between humans and other apes and provides an essential foundation for pedagogy and for children's active participation in a shared culture.     

Comparison of correlates of classroom behavior problems in schools with and without a school‐wide character education program

System‐wide practices in schools should diminish the occurrence of children's problem behavior that is deleterious to academic achievement. The current study examined the relationship between variables that affect classroom behavior and observed behavior in schools with and without a theoretically based character education program. Observational data from 12 elementary schools compared control and treatment conditions on classroom disruption, and examined the influences of class size and percentage of students receiving a free or reduced price lunch (FRL). Results showed a weaker relationship between class size, FRL, and behavior problems within the character education schools than in control schools and that the character education program may have had a stronger influence in schools with a high percentage of students eligible for FRL. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Perinatal Risk Factors for Mild Motor Disability

The aetiology of mild motor disability (MMD) is a complex issue and as yet is poorly understood. The aim of this study was to identify the prevalence of perinatal risk factors in a cohort of 10‐year‐old boys and girls with (n = 362) and without (n = 1193) MMD. Among the males with MMD there was a higher prevalence of postpartum haemorrhage, caesarean section, low birth weight and stressful first year of life. Among the females with MMD, there was a higher prevalence of essential hypertension, anaemia and threatened pre‐term. Multivariable logistic regression revealed gender (male), anaemia, threatened pre‐term birth (if female) and hypertension (if female) weakly explained MMD at 10 years. These results underscore the importance of considering gender differences in order to better understand the multiple influences on motor development.     

Behavioral, Affective, and Social Correlates of Involvement in Cross-Sex Friendship in Elementary School

The purpose of this study was to compare children with and without cross-sex friends on measures of social and cognitive competence, endorsement of sex-role stereotypes, and family composition. Subjects were 723 third and fourth graders (377 girls, 346 boys) from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds; 35% were African American. Measures included sociometric assessments of peer acceptance, friendship, and behavioral reputation, as well as self-reports of perceived self-competence and endorsement of sex-role stereotypes. In addition, teachers completed ratings of children's social and cognitive competence. In all, 92 children, about 14% of the sample, had one or more reciprocal opposite-sex friends; for 21 of these children, their cross-sex friendships were their primary or only friendships. African American children were more likely than European American children to have opposite-sex friends. Involvement in cross-sex friendships was unrelated to the gender make-up of the classroom, but was related to family structure. Comparisons of the children who had primarily or only cross-sex friends to matched groups of children who had only same-sex friends and to children who had cross-sex friends secondarily to same-sex ones revealed a number of differences between the groups in social competence and relationships with peers. Overall, children with primarily opposite-sex friends had poorer social skills than other children with friends, although they were less stereotyped about sex roles than other children, and were better adjusted than children with no friends on most measures. In contrast, children involved in opposite-sex friendship secondarily to same-sex friendship were as well adjusted socially as children with only same-sex friendships. These results suggest that children with cross-sex friends differ among themselves, depending on the primacy of the cross-sex relationship.     

Virtual Professional Learning Communities: Teachers’ Perceptions of Virtual Versus Face-to-Face Professional Development

Research suggests that professional development that engages teachers in instructional inquiry over an extended time through collaborative professional learning communities (PLCs) is effective in improving instruction and student achievement. Still, most professional development is offered as short-duration workshops that are not effective in changing practice. Barriers to the implementation of PLCs include lack of shared meeting time and a shortage of teachers who share the same subject areas or common goals and interests. Convening teachers from multiple districts can alleviate this problem, but teachers are reluctant to travel for meetings due to time and cost restraints. Video-conferencing software offers a solution to these barriers while serving to foster the sense of community needed for PLCs to be effective. The researchers describe the use of Virtual PLCs in which two groups of teachers met monthly for one school year to collaboratively analyze evidence collected as part of their teacher inquiry plans. With help from a facilitator, these groups developed a relationship similar to other groups meeting face-to-face as part of the same professional development program. Analysis of the reflections of teacher-participants and facilitators revealed that teachers prefer face-to-face meetings, but that the virtual and face-to-face meetings provided teachers with similar social interactions in the PLC experience. The findings suggest that teachers perceive videoconferencing as an effective tool for facilitating PLCs when distance and time are practical barriers to face-to-face meetings. Practical considerations for developing and facilitating virtual PLCs are also discussed.     

Event duration memory: The effects of delay-interval illumination and instructional cuing

The effect of interference treatments on pigeons’ working memory for event duration was investigated, using a successive matching-to-sample procedure. In three experiments, birds were trained to match different keylight durations (2 or 6 sec) to different comparison colors (red or green) following delays of 0 to 12 sec. The interfering effect of delay-interval illumination and illumination change was assessed in Experiments 1 and 2. It was found that the absolute levels of houselight illumination influenced delayed matching accuracy. Birds trained with houselight illumination showed larger decrements in matching accuracy with increasing delays than did birds trained with darkened delay intervals. In addition, increases in delay-interval illumination relative to baseline produced greater interference with delayed matching accuracy than did decreases in houselight illumination relative to baseline. In Experiment 3, the effect of interpolated instructional cues to remember or forget was examined. As in other directed forgetting experiments employing conventional modality characteristics as the samples to be remembered, it was found that instructional cues to forget, presented during the delay interval, reduced matching accuracy compared to instructional cues to remember. It was concluded that these findings support models of temporal memory that assume temporal information is coded into categorical information onto some nontime dimension over models that assume temporal information is remembered amodally as specific time durations.     

Coptic Language and Identity in Ayyūbid Egypt1

Abstract

In the late Fā?imid and Ayyūbid periods of Egyptian history, Coptic Christians finally addressed the reality that most of their community no longer understood the Coptic language but were, in fact, losing their communal identity and “figures of memory” to Arabisation and even Islamisation. A Coptic-Arabic “Renaissance” ensued whereby Coptic liturgy, theology and history were translated into Arabic, the lingua franca by this time of the Coptic populace. This creative energy extended into the artistic realm – such as iconography and painting – and ultimately strengthened the identity of the Coptic community as their situation became increasingly more restricted.