Teaching Method,Memory and Learning: an enquiry with primary school children

The problem of different teaching methods is briefly discussed in the context of Bennett's work. An experiment involving four different teaching strategies carried out with about 200 senior primary school children is described. Results obtained on two appropriate tests are presented and analysed. The analysis suggests that there is no one uniformly best teaching method, though one appears to be uniformly weak. The other three are effective, or ineffective, insofar as they do, or do not, satisfy the criteria for memory set out by Craik.     

Nurturing faculty vitality by matching institutional interventions with career-stage needs

A questionnaire study, modeled after Baldwin's 1979 research on faculty at a liberal arts college, was conducted with 42 Lilly Teaching Fellows and Lilly Mentors at a large, public, research-oriented university in the Southeast U.S.A. Results from the study support the notion that one of the keys to a successful instructional and faculty development program is to target activities to the academic career stage of the faculty member.Patricia Kalivoda works in the Office of Instructional Development at The University of Georgia. She holds an MBA and an Ed.D. from The University of Georgia. Her research focuses on faculty career development and faculty vitality. Geraldine Rogers Sorrell is Special Populations Coordinator at Middle Georgia Technical Institute. She holds an M.Ed.and an Ed.D. from The University of Georgia. She specializes in faculty and staff development, and career counseling. Ronald D. Simpson is Director of the Office of Instructional Development at The University of Georgia, where he also is professor of Higher Education and Science Education. He holds degrees from The University of Tennessee and The University of Georgia.     

A comprehensive needs assessment to facilitate prevention of school drop out and violence

The present study addresses school violence and school drop out and proposes that the underlying factor of school connectedness/school climate should guide preventive and intervention efforts. Data were gathered from five schools in a small city school district in north Georgia. Group and individual interviews served as the basis for constructing a 78‐item district‐wide survey administered to 304 school employees. Data are presented on individual items from the survey. Principal components analysis revealed five distinct factors: school connectedness/positive school climate, causes of violence, causes of school drop out, interventions for drop out, and interventions for violence. The principal components analysis was the basis for construction of a revised scale. Differences between revised scale scores were noted as a function of whether respondents were from central office, elementary or secondary schools. The five revised scales had correlation ranging from .31 to .59. Implications for research and practice are discussed. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Learning to teach,learning to act: becoming a critical literacy teacher

Critical literacy requires an exploration of privilege and social justice. This includes an exploration of power and action in one’s “inner” and “outer” lives. This qualitative case study illustrates the ways in which Jonah, a preservice teacher, navigates social practices and actions in his roles as a student, activist, and literacy teacher. Through critical discourse analysis, we conceptualize social action in relation to critical literacy teaching, using a framework of discourses of, discourses as, and discourses in action to construct a nuanced understanding of social action in relation to critical literacy. Given the demands of a standardized curriculum on teachers’ autonomy, this is an important illustration of how social action can be enacted and embodied through the act of teaching.     

Whatever it takes! Using a component theory approach with public secondary school principals ‘doing schooling differently’

Purpose: The research seeks to capture the ‘special character’ of schools as seen through the eyes of the Principal and to introduce alternative understandings of ideological praxis’ to challenge and unsettle the dominant ideology and logics of secondary schooling with consequent school design implications in South Australia.

Design/methodology/approach: Using an ideological framework based, the research focussed on the common shared understandings across each school pertaining to each ideology. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysed through interpretive and hermeneutic processes.

Findings: The findings show the tensions, subtleties and nuances of two dominant and competing ideologies: a dominant discourse of individual schooling purpose for student mobility and economic productivity and an emerging public purposes ideology of education for good citizenship, sustainable futures and the public good. The dominant neoliberal public policy ideology and the associated historical design logics of conventional schooling is challenged and reconstituted by the experience, expertise, courage, determination and moral purpose of the principals in this research.

Originality/value: This article opens specific ideological understandings held by the Principals that have moved all of the schools towards pedagogical excellence and a repurposing of their organisations for the students’ sake.     

Experiencing an ‘inclusive’ education: parents and their children with ‘special educational needs’

This paper focuses on the experiences of British parents who have children identified with ‘special education needs’ within mainstream education. Expectations of mainstream education can have a negative affect on parents when a child is unable to maintain his or her education within a mainstream school. In England and Wales, ‘inclusion’ within mainstream schools is implemented by the current government and promoted as anti‐exclusionary. However, current research indicates that actual ‘inclusion’ (the child experiencing inclusion as well as being placed in a mainstream environment) is not necessarily occurring in practice. As it stands, the conflict is between desires to embrace difference based on a philosophy of ‘equal rights’ (‘inclusive’ education) and prioritising educational performance, structuring it in such a way that it leaves little room for difference and creativity due to the highly structured testing and examination culture. Qualitative analysis of parents who have children identified with special educational needs indicate that they have hopes and expectations for their children. These hopes and expectations are challenged recurrently.     

Chemosensory-based contextual conditioning inHermissenda crassicornis

In two experiments, the marine molluskHermissenda crassicornis was exposed to context discrimination training. In one context, defined by the presence of a diffuse chemosensory stimulus (shellfish extract A), brief, unsignaled, unconditioned stimuli (USs; high-speed rotation) were presented; in a second context, defined by the presence of shellfish extract B, no USs were presented. Animals were then tested (at both 1.5 and 24 h) by exposing them to small pieces of the shellfish meat used to define the two contexts. The latency to strike at the meat served as an index of the context-US association. In Experiment 1, the latency to strike at the cue associated with rotation was reduced relative to both preconditioning strike latencies and the associatively neutral cue. However, in a two-choice test where the animals could approach the conditioned or neutral stimulus, the animals regularly avoided the stimulus paired with rotation. Moreover, if, following conditioning, the animals were presented with an unsignaled rotation in the conditioned context or the neutral context, the animals exhibited more effective defensive clinging (an unconditioned reflex normally elicited by rotation) in the conditioned context, suggesting that it “prepared” the animal for the aversive US. In total, these results demonstrate thatHermissenda is capable of making associations to diffuse background (contextual) stimuli. Moreover, the results suggest that pairing the chemosensory cue with an aversive US elicits a strike response inHermissenda when the animal is placed in forced contact with the cue and an active avoidance response when the animal can choose between that cue and a neutral cue.     

Exploring the Use of Lesson Study to Develop Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching Nature of Science

This study explored a modified version of Japanese Lesson Study to determine whether and how it influenced preservice elementary teachers in their abilities to deliver science lessons that included nature of science (NOS) to their own students. We used a case study approach that focused on one subset of a cohort of preservice elementary teachers within their field placement settings. Data sources included lesson plans, lesson feedback forms, videotapes of delivered lessons, and videotapes of lesson study feedback sessions. Early in the semester peers provided feedback on content, and later in the semester peers provided feedback on classroom management as well as content during the lesson study feedback sessions. We found that preservice elementary teachers were able to provide feedback to their peers regarding how to include NOS in their science lessons, yet did not naturally included NOS connections within their own lessons.