Academic Expectations in Mothers of Preschool Children: A Psychometric Study of the Educational Attitude Scale

This study reports psychometric data on the Educational Attitude Scale, a new instrument designed to tap parental opinions about early academic, artistic, athletic, and social experiences. Mothers of 371 middle class prekindergarten children in 22 different schools completed the 32-item Likert-style survey. Mothers were highly similar in their views about the importance of social experiences, but differed widely in their opinions about early academic instruction for preschoolers. The scale proved to have excellent split-half and test-retest reliability. Correlational analysis and factor analysis supported the general domain structure along which the instrument was designed. Scores on the Educational Attitude Scale were significantly correlated with scores on a Developmental Expectations Card Sort. Highly significant differences were found in parent attitudes on the scale when schools were grouped into those High versus Low in academic emphasis by community reputation and observed classroom practices. Parents had significantly higher academic expectations than their children's teachers, particularly in schools with “Low Academic” emphasis.     

Relations between intelligence and the development of metaconceptual knowledge

Across two studies, we developed and tested a declarative metacognitive interview to investigate the effects of developmental level and verbal intelligence on children's metaconceptual understanding of processes related to concept use and object categorization. Metaconceptual knowledge developed throughout elementary school, with near ceiling scores for adults. IQ scores correlated positively with metaconceptual interview scores for all groups of children. Study 2 confirmed a relationship between scores on the metaconceptual interview and performance on a Twenty Questions task for which strategic performance was presumed to depend on such knowledge, though metaconceptual knowledge was most important when IQ was lower. Implications for theory development and hypotheses about how metaconceptual knowledge develops are discussed.     

Volume contents

Volume Contents

Volume contents     

On Building Islands of Decency

In this article, I argue that at its best, work in the foundations of education is about building islands of decency, borrowing from a metaphor originally used by Myles Horton. Horton suggests that in times of crisis and despair, we can work our way out of pessimism by surrounding ourselves with people who share some of our goals for a better world and working with them to create pockets of decency that are contagious. I begin by describing some of the commitments we share in the foundations field, focusing specifically on the ways we work toward social justice, diversity, and democracy. I then describe three tensions we must navigate in our work to be decent as scholars and people, unpacking the meaning of decency throughout the article. These are tensions between construction and critique, inquiry and advocacy, and humanist and instrumentalist rationality. I end by sketching some visions of hope and possibility, what the American Educational Studies Association can be in our next 50 years if we nourish the best of our habits and tendencies, and work to address some of our challenges.     

“We’ve been wastin’ a whole million watchin’ her doin’ her shoes” situated practice within a pedagogy of multiliteracies

Communication in society today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning-making in a context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. The need to teach these new literacy practices referred to as multiliteracies, is now embedded within systemic policies in Australia. This research paper is a response to these imperatives, releasing key findings of a critical ethnographic study concerning interactions between pedagogy and access to multiliteracies among culturally and linguistically diverse learners. A salient finding was that situated practice was enacted as an isolated stage rather than occurring concurrently with overt instruction. This had significant connections to some learners’ inability to access new, multimodal, and digitally-mediated designs of meaning. More importantly, culturally and linguistically non-students who were not of the dominant culture were least served by the separation of overt instruction and situated practice. The article concludes with the recommendation that multimodal meaning-making requires an instructional model that involves both practice and instruction.     

The mathematics problem: the construction of a market-led education discourse in the Republic of Ireland

Educational change in the neoliberal state is permeated by the effects of forces from outside the field of education itself. The process of governmentality welcomes, indeed demands, the participation of those non-state actors valorised by neoliberalism as well as government agencies dedicated to the advancement of such groups. Inevitably, the concerns of such organisations become central to how the state sees education. This article traces the assembly of national and international agents from industry, business and special interest groups around the concept of ‘knowledge economy’. It treats this assemblage as an apparatus (dispositif), examining how the construction of an economic problem is brought to bear on the demand for educational change, and how this construction of the problem is used to shape public opinion in order to prepare the public for a radical change of direction. Confining itself to the reform of mathematics education introduced in the Republic of Ireland in 2010, this article traces the emergence of a mathematics discourse focused on market-led education. It interrogates the construction of ‘the mathematics problem’ or ‘crisis in maths’ and argues that the discourse of the present construction is economic in nature, centring as it does on human capital production and market-led reform.     

Using rapid application development to improve the usability of a preservice teacher technology course

The aim of this research was to examine the use of a rapid application development (RAD) approach in improving the usability (effectiveness, efficiency, and appeal) of instructional materials for preservice teachers. The RAD approach used was the analysis, synthesis, evaluation and change (ASEC) model (Reigeluth & Nelson, 1997). After examining existing materials, 11 units of instruction were prototyped, tested, modified, and retested with the requisite changes being implemented over the course of three semesters. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from 570 students, 7 instructional designers, and 4 lab assistants. Results of the study showed significant increases in usability scores between the second and third semester. Both positive and negative experiences in using a rapid development model are discussed.