A Perspective on Individual Growth and Classroom Management

I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de‐escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized. ¹ 1. Ginott, Haim. Teacher and Child. New York: MacMillan, 1972. View all notes     

Effects of Differing Prepuberty Exercise Programs on the Emotionality of Male Albino Rats

Abstract

The problem under investigation in this study was to determine if differing programs of prepuberty exercise had any effect upon the emotionality of male albino rats at puberty. The subjects were 48 male albino rats of the Sprague-Dawley strain who were subjected to a 35-day training program under conditions of sedentary existence, voluntary exercise, or forced exercise. At the end of the experimental period the animals were tested in an open field marked into 49 consecutively numbered 7 1/2-in. squares.

Emotionality in the open field was determined by two methods: (a) the total number of squares traversed by an animal in 5 min., and (b) the total number of squares traversed by an animal toward the center of the field. The relationship between exploratory behavior and emotionality is considered to be an inverse one, that is, the more exploratory the behavior, the less emotionality the animal exhibits.

The results indicated that the animals which had been subjected to the forced exercise regimen traversed significantly more squares under both testing conditions and therefore evidenced more exploratory behavior and therefore less emotionality than the animals in the voluntary exercise and sedentary groups. There were no significant differences on either measure of exploratory behavior between the voluntary exercise and sedentary groups.     

Effects of Forced Exercise on Spontaneous Activity and Body Weight of Adult Rats

Abstract

Adult male Wistar rats (N = 47) were divided at random into four groups for a 9-week experimental period. The 11 animals in Group I were permitted spontaneous activity in addition to swimming 15 minutes per day, 5 days per week. The 10 animals in Group II ran on a treadmill for 15 minutes per day, 5 days per week in addition to spontaneous activity. The 12 animals in Group III were permitted spontaneous activity but engaged in no forced exercise, and the 14 animals in Group IV were restricted to their cages during the entire experimental period. Results indicated that Group I engaged in more spontaneous activity than did Groups II and III, and Group II was more active than Group III. Group IV was significantly heavier than Groups I, II, and III, but the latter groups did not differ in body weight.     

Is the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) a good predictor of academic achievement? Examining the mediating role of achievement-related classroom behaviours

Studies have shown that the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ)—which provides a measure of student approaches to learning—is a relatively weak predictor of academic achievement. The present study sought to explore whether students’ achievement-related classroom behaviours, as observed by teachers, can be used as a mediator between student approaches to learning and academic achievement. The SPQ was administered to 1,608 students enrolled in six different diploma programmes offered by a polytechnic in Singapore. Data were analysed by means of correlation and path analysis. In line with existing studies, the results revealed that student approaches to learning was a weak predictor of academic achievement. However, achievement-related classroom behaviours turned out to be a significant mediator between student approaches to learning and academic achievement, effectively doubling the explained variance in academic achievement. Implications of these findings for using the SPQ are discussed.     

Instructional and School Effects on Students' Longitudinal Reading and Mathematics Achievements

For this study, Prospects, a data set on schools and students in the United States collected during the early 1990s, was used to examine the effects of instructional and school organizational characteristics on the longitudinal mathematics and reading achievements of students from either a first- or third-grade cohort. Three schooling models were tested using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) while controlling for parental socioeconomic (SES) status. Factors and variables that represented instructional and school features were derived from teacher and principal responses to survey items. These features had direct and interactive effects on mathematics achievement, supporting both an environmental and interactive model of schooling. Further, schools characterized by teacher collegiality, support for innovation, principal leadership, goal agreement, and community support contained teachers who employed important instructional strategies more effectively, and students who had the highest mathematics gains over the observed period.     

Disconnecting knowledge and understanding from human values: a critique of National Curriculum development

This research was prompted by the developing political discourse proposing the teaching of Britishness and British values in the context of the United Kingdom. This discourse will be reviewed in the first part of the article, in the context of previous work which has sought to assess how Britishness and related concepts might be promoted through education. The second part will be based on questionnaire responses from a sample of students following post-graduate initial teacher training programmes in a number of higher education partnerships. It indicates that, while political discourse and educational policy have sensitised trainee teachers to the agenda, there remains a deep uncertainty and misgiving about this as an educational objective.     

Adolescents' Perceptions of Opportunities in the U.S. South: Postracial Mirage or Reality in the New Black Mecca?

The scholarly community has eagerly assessed adults' perspectives on race and opportunity in the “postracial” era. Noticeably absent are studies that probe youths' perceptions of social and educational opportunity within this era, given the relationship between education and upward mobility, and the symbolism embodied in Obama's 2008 election as the first African-American president of the United States. This paper uses data drawn from a four-year longitudinal study that examined the educational experiences of Black adolescents in Metro Atlanta, Georgia—referred to as the “New Black Mecca.” Interview data from a subset of 75 Black adolescents participating in an ethnographic study, and 1,329 surveys from a racially diverse group of adolescents across three different high schools, capture: (a) how Black adolescents embraced meritocratic notions of opportunity—while inheriting a social awareness of race-based opportunities, (b) Black adolescents' use of destigmatization strategies to thwart prejudice, and (c) the protective role a predominantly Black suburban context plays in mitigating the effects of day-to-day encounters with racial discrimination.     

Child sexual abuse prevention education: A review of school policy and curriculum provision in Australia

The past four decades have seen increasing public and professional awareness of child sexual abuse. Congruent with public health approaches to prevention, efforts to eliminate child sexual abuse have inspired the emergence of prevention initiatives which can be provided to all children as part of their standard school curriculum. However, relatively little is known about the scope and nature of child sexual abuse prevention efforts in government school systems internationally. This paper assesses and compares the policies and curriculum initiatives in primary (elementary) schools across state and territory Departments of Education in Australia. Using publicly available electronic data, a deductive qualitative content analysis of policy and curriculum documents was undertaken to examine the characteristics of child sexual abuse prevention education in these school systems. It was found that the system-level provision occurs unevenly across state and territory jurisdictions. This results in the potential for substantial inequity in Australian children’s access to learning opportunities in child abuse prevention education as a part of their standard school curriculum. In this research, we have developed a strategy for generating a set of theoretically-sound empirical criteria that may be more extensively applied in comparative research about prevention initiatives internationally.