Why do Chinese students cheat? Initial findings based on the self-reports of high school students in China

Academic dishonesty is recognised as a serious problem in Australia, and educators have been searching for ways to prevent its escalation. It is important to understand what factors influence cheating. This study used a sample of 446 grade 7 to 9 students, 160 from Macao and 286 from Zhuhai in China, to examine the personal and contextual aspects of academic dishonesty. The findings suggest that involvement and task orientation in the classroom environment (contextual aspects) and intrinsic value and utility value (personal aspects) are associated with students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and cheating behaviour in mathematics. Some suggestions for reducing academic dishonesty are included in the paper.     

Bion and Schön: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Reflection in Action

Schön’s concept of ‘reflection in action’, particularly when interpreted from a sociocultural perspective, is often used as frame with which to consider the relationship between theoretical and tacit knowledge in the work of teachers. This paper presents an alternative interpretative frame for Schön which makes use of the ideas of Wilfred Bion, perhaps the most influential psychoanalyst of the second half of the twentieth century. It is argued that it is the productive emotional struggle with uncertainty that lies within Schön’s moment, which ultimately leads to the teacher coming to a moment of decision about what the child might need in a particular situation. This (contingent) understanding arises from a dialectic intertwining of knowledge derived from intersubjective relationship and theoretical knowledge, for example, about typical and atypical development in children. Implications for professional practice particularly in relation to working with children with special educational needs are discussed.     

The Effects of Storytelling and Story Reading on the Oral Language Complexity and Story Comprehension of Young Children

What began as a case study of intergenerational initiatives in university-based early childhood programs evolved into a comparative study of two different program implementation processes. Despite operating with the same goals, university partners, and resources, two early childhood centers pursued fundamentally different strategies for launching their intergenerational programs. One site followed what we call an explicit intervention with a set timeline and series of planned steps for finding, placing, and involving seniors in classroom activities. The other pursued what we call an emergent (or organic) strategy with no predetermined plan for finding senior volunteers and integrating them into classroom activities. Drawing on data collected from interviews with program staff and parents, and observations of intergenerational activities, this study serves to describe, compare, and contrast these alternative program initiation strategies. Both models are effective, but represent different approaches to valuing the contributions of older adults in the lives of young children.     

Altering the structure of teacher education: A case study from Atlantic Canada

The paper is concerned with attempts to reform the outer structure of teacher education. Structure as used here refers to the totality of formal, legal, financial, and administrative arrangements that make institutions of teacher education what they are. A case study of various attempts to change structure within the province of Nova Scotia in the last 25 years is used to illuminate the various concerns, problems, and factors affecting attempts to change the structure of teacher education both in Nova Scotia and elsewhere.

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Résumé Les tentatives en vue de réformer la structure extérieure de la formation des maîtres font l'objet du présent article. Tel qu'employé ici, le terme structure se rapporte à l'ensemble des arrangements légaux, fiscaux, et administratifs qui caractérisent les établissements de formation de maîtres. L'auteur se sert d'une étude en profondeur sur les diverses tentatives pour changer la structure menées au cours des 25 dernières années en Nouvelle-Ecosse afin d'illustrer les divers problèmes, préoccupations, et facteurs qui affectent ces tentatives, tant en Nouvelle-Ecosse qu'ailleurs.

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Atlantic Institute of Education     

Chemosensory conditioning in molluscs: II. A critical review

We critically review chemosensory conditioning studies with molluscs and find that, in many studies, the influence of nonassociative processes complicates, obscures, and renders ambiguous the unique contribution of associative learning. These nonassociative processes include sensory adaptation, habituation, sensitization, and changes in feeding motivation. They arise from both the food extracts that have often been used as conditioned stimuli and the aversive stimuli that have been used as unconditioned stimuli.     

Evaluating the quality of American universities: A new approach

Considerable effort has been devoted to developing systematic rankings of the quality of American univerities. Some approaches focus on the assessments of knowledgeable individuals. Other approaches necessitate the accumulation of considerable data and the construction of some composite measure. The present article argues that researchers should devote more attention to faculty salary data. Utilizing the quartile deviation as a measure of institutional quality, the authors ranked the 138 major universities designated by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as Class I institutions. Because the authors' results were not strikingly different from other ranking systems and because salary data are readily available, the authors argue that studies of faculty salaries hold great promise as measures of institutional quality.     

Rethinking Inclusion as Mundanity: Insights from an Experimental Bilingual Kindergarten Classe LSF at École Maternelle Gabriel Sajus in France

In this article, I demonstrate how hybrid language practices allow for children to make use of their full linguistic repertoire in negotiating the social and communicative demands of the school environment (Axelrod in Early Child Educ J, p 1–8, 2014). I argue that the unusual case of classe LSF and École Maternelle Gabriel Sajus directly challenges mainstream progressive assumptions of inclusion that effectively exclude deaf children from their deaf peers. Current so-called progressive models of inclusion often isolate deaf learners in mainstream classroom settings with non-deaf classmates and adults. Classe LSF and École Maternelle Gabriel Sajus offers insights for rethinking inclusion in early childhood classrooms in the ways that it provokes us to consider the inclusive potential of hybrid linguistic spaces for bilingual learners.     

Dampening of Adrenocortical Responses during Infancy: Normative Changes and Individual Differences

Changes in cortisol and behavioral responses were examined longitudinally in 83 infants (39 girls, 44 boys) tested at their well-baby exams with inoculations at 2, 4, 6, and 15 months (72 infants completed all testing). Another sample of 2-, 4-, and 6-month-olds ( n = 18 per age) received mock exams without inoculations to determine early developmental changes to the exam procedures. Behavioral distress was coded every 30 sec during the exam, a 5-min inoculation period, and a 20-min recovery period. Salivary cortisol was obtained upon arrival at the clinic and 25 min after the beginning of the inoculation period. To the exam-inoculation procedures, cortisol responses were high at 2 months, decreased significantly between 2 and 4 months, remained comparable between 4 and 6 months, and then declined again between 6 and 15 months. Between 6 and 15 months there was also a decrease in pretest cortisol. By 15 months, significant increases in cortisol from pre- to posttest were no longer observed for most infants. To the exam-only procedures, cortisol responses decreased between 2 and 4 months, and by 4 months most infants failed to show pre- to posttest increases in cortisol. Behavioral distress decreased between 2 and 6 months, but increased again at 15 months. While crying and cortisol were modestly correlated during the 2- to 6-month exam-inoculation procedures, at 15 months no significant correlations were obtained. Behavioral and hormonal reactions thus followed different ontogenetic paths and may provide different information about infant functioning. There was some evidence that the emergence of the circadian rhythm in cortisol might be related to the early decrease in cortisol response.     

Students' conceptions of chemical change

One hundred high school chemistry students who had completed a unit on chemical change were given a written instrument in which they were shown three oxidation-reduction reactions and were asked to explain them. Eleven students representing a range of achievement levels were chosen for more intensive clinical interviews in which they explained their responses, evaluated the quality of their responses, and compared them to other hypothetical responses. Interview results revealed that students commonly experienced difficulties at three different epistemological levels: 1. Chemical knowledge. Most students failed to invoke atoms and molecules as explanatory constructs, even though they had been emphasized in their chemistry course. Some students also listed “substances” such as heat, cold, or decay as reactants or products. 2. Conservation reasoning. Many students could not predict or explain mass changes in the chemical reactions. Their most common problems included (a) a tendency to treat chemical changes such as rusting as physical changes in form or state, and (b) failure to understand the role of invisible (in this case gaseous) reactants or products in the reactions. 3. Explanatory ideals. Many students demonstrated a preference for explanations based on superficial analogies with everyday events (e.g., rusting is like decay) over explanations based on chemical theories. Only one of the 11 students interviewed demonstrated mastery of the unit's contents at all three levels. Results of this and other research indicate a need for substantial revision in chemistry teaching practice.