Reviews

FREEDOM SPENT. By Richard Harris. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976; pp. 460. $12.95.

MALE/FEMALE LANGUAGE, WITH A COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY. By Mary Ritchie Key. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1975; pp. vii + 200; $7.95.

CONTEMPORARY SPEECH: A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO COMMUNICATION. Compiled by Mary Frances Hopkins and Beverly Whitaker. Edited by Bernard Brommel. Skokie, IL: National Textbook Company, 1976; pp. ix + 316. $11.

COMMUNICATING. By Anita Taylor, Teresa Rosegrant, Authur Meyer, and B. Thomas Samples. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, Inc., pp. xiii + 466. $9.95.

MASTERING CLASSROOM COMMUNICATION: WHAT INTERACTION ANALYSIS TELLS THE TEACHER. By Dorothy Grant Hennings. Pacific Palisades, California: Goodyear Publishing Company, 1975; pp. xiii + 193. $5.95.

THE RHETORIC OF WESTERN THOUGHT. By James L. Golden, Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1976; pp. 272. Paper $9.95.     

Imagining Recovery,Resilience, and Vulnerability at 75: Perceptions of Social Work Students

BSW and MSW students (N = 183) read one of three vignettes and were asked to respond to 21 items investigating their perceptions about depression, anxiety, and resilience of the vignette's character. While the incidents in each vignette were identical, the main character was (a) a 75-year-old Mr. Jones, (b) a 75-year-old Ms. Jones, or (c) “Imagine you are 75 years old.” The character of each vignette had lost a spouse, was a victim of a mugging, and was exhibiting symptoms of depression and anxiety. The 21 items were analyzed by vignette type using a General Linear Model (GLM) and controlling for student type (BSW, MSW) and ethnocultural identity (member of the dominant or minority group). The GLM was significant (F = 3.020, df = 42, p = .000). There were significant differences among the vignette types in 11 of the 21 items. In general, respondents were more likely to perceive that they would be more resilient and less vulnerable at 75 than other 75-year-old men and women.     

Opportunities for Professional Learning in Mathematics Teacher Workgroup Conversations: Relationships to Instructional Expertise

Increasingly, instructional improvement efforts include teacher communities as part of their overall strategy, yet the relationship between teachers’ talk and professional learning remains underspecified. Using a discourse perspective on learning, this article compares opportunities to learn (OTLs) in the collaborative conversations of 3 mathematics teacher workgroups. We examined the differences in OTLs in 17 hr of videotaped meetings from 3 groups at different levels of instructional accomplishment in secondary mathematics. Using mixed methods, we uncovered differences in the groups’ interactions and found that OTLs were not equally distributed. Instead, teacher groups whose active participants demonstrated the greatest facility with ambitious instruction also had the richest conversational OTLs. We interpret this as an accumulated advantage developmental story: Because collaborative work in teaching involves problem posing and the articulation of practice, teachers’ conceptions get built into the framing and discussion of pedagogical problems. Accomplished teachers are thus positioned to learn more from talking with colleagues. This analysis contributes to understanding of how OTLs are constituted in teacher workgroups, with implications for making better use of teacher collaboration for professional learning.     

The power of the ‘object’ to influence teacher induction outcomes

In this paper we explore newly qualified New Zealand secondary teachers’ varied accounts of induction. We claim that multiple interpretations of objectives for induction programs are a significant source of this variation. With reference to an activity system framework, we identify four primary objects of induction that were represented in the induction accounts as follows: ‘orientation to learning about the context’, ‘fitting into the school’, ‘completing registration requirements’, and ‘becoming a professional inquirer’. Whilst teachers would be expected to experience all of these objects within their induction experiences, the balance and emphases of these objects within programs varied considerably.     

Goal neglect and working memory capacity in 4- to 6-year-old children

Goal neglect is the phenomenon of failing to execute the momentary demands of a task despite understanding and being able to recall the task instructions. Successful goal maintenance is more likely to occur in adults with high working memory capacity (WMC) who can keep rules mentally accessible while performing the task. The current study predicted that goal neglect would also be related to WMC in children. It assessed thirty-seven 4-year-old and twenty-eight 6-year-old children on the goal neglect version of the Dimensional Change Card Sort, and 3 tasks that measure WMC. As predicted, children with higher WMC scores were more likely to maintain goals adequately for task performance. The findings are consistent with a 2-factor model of working memory and its development.     

Quality Talk and dialogic teaching—an examination of a professional development programme on secondary teachers’ facilitation of student talk

This study used the Quality Talk and dialogic teaching approach with a group of secondary school teachers (N = 7) to train their facilitation of dialogical discussions by small groups of students. The study used video and audio analysis to assess the teachers’ observable behaviours during these discussions, before and after professional development; for example, types of Quality Talk questions asked. The study also used face‐to‐face interviews, held before and after the professional development, to investigate the teachers’ beliefs about learning through discussion. Results show that although the number of high‐quality questions from the teachers did not increase, the quality of the questions students asked of each other did improve, and resulted in extended periods of dialogic spells. Positive developments were found for teachers’ beliefs about the use of dialogue to foster deeper thinking with their secondary school‐aged students.     

Correction to: The summer learning effect in writing in New Zealand

Reading and Writing - The original publication of the article contained an error.     

From the podium to the boardroom: Encouraging gender parity in scholarly publishing

• Despite their nearly three-fifths industry majority, women trail men in key leadership positions, occupying about one-third of CEO positions, and one-fifth of Board chairs.
• Speaking at industry conferences is key to professional development and to consideration for senior leadership positions.
• An analysis of seven major scholarly publishing conferences held in 2015 showed an average gender split of 63% male to 37% female speakers, with nearly two-thirds of all keynote addresses given by men.
• To correct for this disparity, the authors propose three distinct challenges, to include a potential accreditation for conferences that prioritise diversity.