An Investigation of Alternative Methods for Item Mapping in the National Assessment of Educational Progress

What is item mapping and how does it aid test score interpretation? Which item mapping technique produces the most consistent results and most closely matches expert opinion?     

Who is schooled in developing countries? The roles of income,parental schooling,sex, residence and family size

This paper explores schooling determinants in Nicaragua. Results include: (1) schooling is determined simultaneously with number of children, although simultaneous estimates do not indicate sharp ‘quantity-quality’ trade-offs. (2) Rural boys receive less schooling than rural girls, possibly because of higher opportunity costs for boys in agricultural work. (3) Family background is quite important, suggesting limited intergenerational mobility. (4) Income has permanent and transitory effects. However, women's full income does not seem particularly important. (5) Parental schooling partially represents taste and genetic effects. Thus the interpretation of schooling as representing only efficiency is misleading and may lead to important distortions in the allocation of resources and ambiguous private welfare effects.     

Expressing community through freedom market and visual connections

ABSTRACT

Building on a long-term university/community research partnership, this article examines how different ways of conceptualizing, interpreting, and producing murals impacted how an urban community saw itself. Using a participatory action research design, university researchers worked alongside community researchers to ethnographically document the transformation. Findings indicate that the mural project constructed pathways for building relationships and community in ways that made neighborhood transformation possible. The mural project embodied this transformative goal by providing a space where people gathered with shared attention to talk and to envision how their lives and their community could be different.     

Concerns of First‐Year Teachers in Australian Catholic Schools

Fifty primary and 52 secondary teachers were interviewed about their concerns and fears as first‐year teachers in Catholic schools. Teacher variables of gender and maturity, as well as school variables such as socio‐economic status (SES), non‐English speaking background (NESB), school size and primary/secondary level were examined as sources of difference in expressed concerns and needs. Ranked concerns associated with meeting individual differences were ranked highest followed by ‘Content’, ‘Control’ and ‘Motivation’, ‘Teaching Migrants’, ‘Record Keeping’ and ‘Communication’. Open‐ended responses differed from ranked responses with ‘Efficacy’, ‘Control’ and ‘Content’ the most frequently mentioned fears. In general, no significant differences were found between rankings of concerns for primary/secondary levels or for teacher gender. However SES, NESB and teacher tender were significantly related to concerns for certain subsets of data.     

Rediscovering the ninja turtles' namesakes

We are not ninja turtles! If the dead could talk this would be the cry of the Italian Renaissance Masters—Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello—to young children currently clamoring for a bunch of TV turtle characters who live in a sewer, fight bad guys with swords and order out for pizza.Joyce Mesrobian is an Early Education Consultant and a reviewer of children's books. © Joyce Mesrobian, August 1990.     

Emotion and cognition: an intricately bound developmental process

Regulatory aspects of development can best be understood by research that conceptualizes relations between cognition and emotion. The neural mechanisms associated with regulatory processes may be the same as those associated with higher order cognitive processes. Thus, from a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective, emotion and cognition are dynamically linked and work together to process information and execute action. This article highlights the authors' recent efforts at integrating emotion regulation and cognitive processing during the first year of life by focusing on the methodological criteria outlined by Cole, Martin, and Dennis (this issue), and it discusses the idea that emotion and cognition are an intricately bound developmental process.     

Cultural Group,Reading Attainments and Dialect Interference

(NB. In the interests of brevity, the British-born children of parents of West Indian origin are referred to as the WI group and the children of parents of English origin are referred to as the E group.) It has been suggested that, partly because of dialect interferences, WI children experience greater difficulty than E group children in various aspects of reading. The present study compares the attainments of a sample of 20 WI and E boys and girls of equivalent intellectual ability attending a multi-cultural inner-city comprehensive school in a social priority area. Reading accuracy, reading comprehension and listening comprehension attainments of the children were tested by the individual administration of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, Forms A, B and C. In terms of both reading accuracy and comprehension, although the group mean scores were all below the norms for their chronological ages, there were no significant mean differences between the WI and E pupils or between boys and girls. Silent reading led to significantly lower scores than did reading aloud.