An Interview with Kenneth A. Kiewra

Educational Psychology Review -     

The Resources and Strategies Boys Use to Establish Status in a Junior School without Competitive Sport

The data in this paper comes from an ethnographically based study of Year 6 (10-11-year-old) boys in an English junior school. It investigates the resources and strategies used and created by the boys to classify themselves, and to construct and perform their masculinity in a tightly regulated school where competitive sport (including playground football) is prohibited for the majority of the school year. The paper considers the relationship between the formal school culture and informal pupil culture, and, in particular, the options open, limited and closed to the boys to construct their masculinities and establish status/prestige within their immediate peer group. One option open was being able to work hard in class without peer reprovement, but despite the limitation of competitive games/sport, the most favoured form of masculine status was still exemplified by embodied forms of athleticism and physicality. The paper also explores another way of gaining status, which was by a form of verbal abuse known as 'cussing': this was a pervasive and prevalent part of school life, and is viewed as another form of competitive, stylised performance.     

Constructing normalcy: a qualitative study of parenting children with Asperger's Disorder

Children with Asperger's Disorder present unique challenges due to their impairments in social functioning. In order to better understand the experiences of parents of children with Asperger's Disorder, interviews were conducted with 20 parents. The interviews were taped, transcribed, and coded using the systematic methods of Grounded Theory. The central phenomenon of “constructing normalcy” emerged from the data as a salient construct for participants. Parents interviewed described a process of meaning‐making with respect to standards of “normalcy” and an effort to create adaptive environments for their children.     

Piecing Together the Puzzle of Pictorial Representation: How Jigsaw Puzzles Index Metacognitive Development

Jigsaw puzzles are ubiquitous developmental toys in Western societies, used here to examine the development of metarepresentation. For jigsaw puzzles this entails understanding that individual pieces, when assembled, produce a picture. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 117) completed jigsaw puzzles that were normal, had no picture, or comprised noninterlocking rectangular pieces. Pictorial puzzle completion was associated with mental and graphical metarepresentational task performance. Guide pictures of completed pictorial puzzles were not useful. In Experiment 2, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 52) completed a simplified task, to choose the correct final piece. Guide-use associated with age and specifically graphical metarepresentation performance. We conclude that the pragmatically natural measure of jigsaw puzzle completion ability demonstrates general and pictorial metarepresentational development at 4 years.     

Sandcastle competitions

This commentary discusses reasons that lead scholars to feel entitled to make judgements in areas where they have little or no expertise. Three current reports about the future of online learning are considered, issued by the Global Learning Council, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Gates Foundation. Two of these publications contain contradictions and confusion that may simply be due to lack of awareness of distance education (DE) and online learning research. The third report gives good evidence but has been criticized for being too academic. The conflicting standards and criteria evident in such writings may be due to institutional pressures to promote policies and principles despite lack of supportive evidence, and to weaknesses in the DE literature itself. As major institutional policies about online learning are likely to be based on the recommendations of such reports, it is important for DE specialists to challenge them where appropriate.     

Fear of death and physical illness: a personal construct approach

The Threat Index, Templer's Death Anxiety Scale, and the Collett-Lester Fear of Death Scale were administered to 100 respondents in an attempt to assess their personal orientation toward death. Each respondent was a member of one of the following groups: people with no known illness; people attending their family physician for a checkup; rheumatoid arthritics; diabetics; or people recently treated for cancer. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that older respondents were significantly less death anxious, less fearful of their own death, and more integrated (that is, showed less self-death discrepancy) than younger respondents. Further analyses revealed no differences between any of the groups on fear of death or death anxiety, indicating that the current state of an individual's health was not related to his or her death orientation. Instead, correlational and regression analyses suggested that anxiety and fear were much more likely to be influenced by a respondent's level of actualization and, to a lesser extent, level of integration. The expected additive effects of actualization and integration did not emerge, a finding that was at variance with previous research.     

What is meant by ‘support’ in higher education? Towards a model of academic and welfare support

This paper focuses on academic and welfare support for students in higher education, and specifically what makes that support effective. It draws on data from a research project which aimed to explore networks of support for disabled and non‐disabled students. Part of the research focused on the nature and sources of support that were identified as important by students, as well as the kinds of support that were available within the higher education institution (HEI). What emerged as of particular interest was the question, ‘What do we mean by support?’ Drawing mainly on the voices and experiences of the students, perceptions of support were explored and the effects of support on the students’ experience of higher education were considered. Through a focus on more generic support structures as well as support which was specific to individual (disabled) students, the research aimed to understand ‘support’ and its importance from the student perspective.     

Evaluating item response theory linking and model fit for data from PISA 2000–2012

ABSTRACT

Based on concerns about the item response theory (IRT) linking approach used in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) until 2012 as well as the desire to include new, more complex, interactive items with the introduction of computer-based assessments, alternative IRT linking methods were implemented in the 2015 PISA round. The new linking method represents a concurrent calibration using all available data, enabling us to find item parameters that maximize fit across all groups and allowing us to investigate measurement invariance across groups. Apart from the Rasch model that historically has been used in PISA operational analyses, we compared our method against more general IRT models that can incorporate item-by-country interactions. The results suggest that our proposed method holds promise not only to provide a strong linkage across countries and cycles but also to serve as a tool for investigating measurement invariance.     

Achieving School Improvement through Challenging and Changing Teachers' Schema

The importance of changing teachers' beliefsand practices in school improvement efforts iswell accepted but little empirical work hasbeen reported on the micro-processes involved.In this paper, we use schema theory to examinehow the teachers in three schools changed theirbeliefs about the causes of low academicachievement from external factors, such as theparents' and children's deficits, to internalfactors, such as the contribution of their ownteaching practices. These change processes arecontrasted briefly with those in a fourthschool in which the teachers continued to blameexternal factors. The three conditionsidentified as critical for schema revisionincluded the salience of discrepant data, thepresence of an external agent to assist withthe interpretation of those data, and theavailability of information on alternativepractices.