Food for Education in Honduras: Psychosocial correlates of childhood literacy

School feeding programs in low- and middle-income countries tend to focus on school attendance and literacy. Some evidence suggests that bolstering schools as a nexus of community plays an important psychosocial function for children and families. This study examines the extent to which childhood literacy rates are associated with parents’ and teachers’ perceptions of community violence and cohesion, following participation in a large-scale school feeding program in the Department of Intibucá, Honduras. Primary school children (n = 3,147) from 176 schools completed standardized literacy tests. Scores were linked to parents’ (n = 328) and teachers’ (n = 537) responses about community cohesion and violence. Social bonding among parents was positively associated with children’s literacy. Community violence reported by teachers exerted a negative influence. The authors discuss these results in light of how vertically focused interventions such as school feeding can be integrated to account for the specific contextual factors that affect, and are affected by, the program itself.     

Cumulative Risk,the Mother–Child Relationship,and Social-Emotional Competence in Latino Head Start Children

Research Findings: Supportive mother–child interactions promote the development of social-emotional competence. Poverty and other associated psychosocial risk factors have a negative impact on mother–child interaction. In spite of Latino children being disproportionately represented among children living in poverty, research on mother–child interactions among economically disadvantaged Latino families remains scarce and results are mixed. The current study used an ecological approach to examine the relationship between maternal cumulative risk, child developmental delay, observed and self-reported quality of the mother–child relationship, time spent in Head Start, and teachers’ and parents’ ratings of social-emotional competence among 106 Latino Head Start children and their mothers. Cumulative risk showed a negative association with observed maternal supportiveness and self-reported quality of the mother–child relationship. Cumulative risk had negative and positive indirect effects, respectively, on child social competence and problem behavior through perceived quality of the mother–child relationship. This association only occurred when parent ratings of child behavior were used. Time spent in Head Start moderated the association between observed maternal supportiveness and social competence. Practice or Policy: Implications for providers and researchers attempting to improve social-emotional competence in disadvantaged Latino children by enhancing positive and supportive parenting practice are discussed.     

Involvement in sedentary activities and academic performance in adolescents: differences according to sociodemographic variables / Implicación en actividades sedentarias y rendimiento académico en adolescentes: diferencias según variables sociodemográficas

This study provides a first-time analysis of the differences in the time dedicated each day to different sedentary activities (SA) (productive, technology-based recreation and social activities) and their relation with the academic performance of Spanish adolescents according to sex, school year and socioeconomic status (SES). The sample was made up of 681 participants (50.2% girls), between 12 and 18 years old, who completed self-reported questionnaires. The likelihood of obtaining lower levels of academic success increase in adolescents who spend two or more hours on social SAs and have a lower SES. With boys, this increases further if they spend four or more hours on SAs involving technology-based recreation and two or less hours on productive SAs. In conclusion, adolescents spend a high number of hours carrying out sedentary activities after school. This is something that needs controlling since it may have a detrimental effect on their academic success, especially among adolescent boys.     

Important announcement

Important announcement     

The national curriculum vs. the ideal curriculum: acknowledging student learning interests

For many students, school is a place that makes no sense; a place where students’ interests are not reflected in the curriculum. Using mixed methods research, we developed an instrument that identifies student interests. This instrument was applied in a pilot study that considered 10th-grade students from three schools in Santiago, Chile. We compared student interest and national curriculum for different factors and established how well aligned these are. The results reveal that private school students prefer subjects that require greater cognitive development, related to Young’s powerful knowledge. Students from voucher schools, on the other hand, prefer to develop their knowledge of the arts and physical education, both of which are subjects they tend to enjoy. These findings are coherent with Bernstein’s theories. This pattern is also repeated when comparing high-performing students with their low-performing counterparts, regardless of school type. The findings of this study not only help identify which subjects the students want to study, but also to understand the reasons behind their preferences. Understanding these reasons is key for developing a more contextualised curriculum that makes more sense to the students.     

Teaching of Energy Issues: A Debate Proposal for a Global Reorientation

The growing awareness of serious difficulties in the learning of energy issues has produced a great deal of research, most of which is focused on specific conceptual aspects. In our opinion, the difficulties pointed out in the literature are interrelated and connected to other aspects (conceptual as well as procedural and axiological), which are not sufficiently taken into account in previous research. This paper aims to carry out a global analysis in order to avoid the more limited approaches that deal only with individual aspects. From this global analysis we have outlined 24 propositions that are put forward for debate to lay the foundations for a profound reorientation of the teaching of energy topics in upper high school courses, in order to facilitate a better scientific understanding of these topics, avoid many students’ misconceptions and enhance awareness of the current situation of planetary emergency. This paper has been conceived as a contribution to the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, established by the UN General Assembly for the period 2005–2014.     

A framework for climate change engagement through video games

Abstract

Video games have the potential to educate and engage people—especially young people—in climate change and energy issues by facilitating the development of helpful thoughts, feelings, and actions. The objective of the present article is to propose a set of game attributes that could maximise the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural engagement of players, and lay the foundations for future work. We have used semi-structured interviews with experts to identify a set of game attributes and a group discussion with teenagers to validate them. By applying grounded theory in our analysis of the experts’ responses, we have developed a framework for climate change engagement through serious games. It consists of 15?key attributes that we have classified in three dimensions: cognitive, emotional, and behavioural. Literature review drawn on sources in social psychology, communication and education has contributed to further explain and justify the inclusion of each of the attributes.     

What do K-12 students feel when dealing with technology and engineering issues? Gardner's multiple intelligence theory implications in technology lessons for motivating engineering vocations at Spanish Secondary School

The interest on engineering and scientific studies can be raised up even from the early years of academic instructional process. This vocation may be linked to emotions and aptitudes towards technological education. Particularly, students get in touch with these technological issues (namely STEM) during the Compulsory Secondary Education in Spain (12–16 years old).This work presents a preliminary evaluation of how relevant is Gardner's multiple intelligence theory (MIT) in the teaching–learning process within the Technology Lessons. In this sense, MIT was considered as an explanation variable of the emotional response within the different educational parts (so-called syllabus units, SU) in the Technology spanish curriculum. Different intelligence style (IS) will orient the student to a vision of the engineering and technology. This work tries to identify which relationships can be established between IS and specific technology and engineering learning. This research involved up to 135 students were subsequently tested about their predominant (IS) and on the emotions that arouse in them when working with each SU. The results were statistically significant and only those with a Logic-arithmetic or Environmental IS were not affected by the SU.Best teaching and learning practicesare required for encouraging further engineering studies.     

From resource to document: scaffolding content and organising student learning in teachers’ documentation work on the teaching of series

We examine teachers’ use of resources as they prepare to teach the topic of numerical series of real numbers, in order to identify how their personal relationship with mathematical content—and its teaching—interacts with their use of a commonly used textbook. We describe this interplay between textbook and personal relationship, a term coined in the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD, Chevallard, 2003), in terms of documentation work (resources, aims, rules of action, operational invariants), a key construct from the documentational approach (DA, Gueudet & Trouche, in Educational Studies in Mathematics, 71, 199–218, 2009). We do so in the case of five post-secondary teachers who use the same textbook as a main resource for teaching the topic. Documentational analysis of interviews with the teachers led to the identification of their aims and rules of action (the what and how of their resource use as they organise their teaching of the topic) as well as the operational invariants (the why for this organisation of their teaching). We describe the teachers’ documentation work in two sets of aims/rules of action: scaffolding mathematical content (series as a stepping stone to learning about Taylor polynomials and Maclaurin series), and organising student learning about series through drill exercises, visualisation, examples, and applications. Our bridging (networking) of theoretical constructs originating in one theoretical framework (personal relationship, ATD) with the constructs of a different, yet compatible, framework (documentation work, DA) aims to enrich the latter (teachers’ documentation work) with the individual agency (teachers’ personal relationships with the topic) provided by the former.