Promoting literacy in play

When I was four my mother, father, sister, and I moved to California. My mother wrote my grandmother often, partly because she missed her terribly and partly because my mother relishes writing letters. Whenever she wrote, I sat beside her at the kitchen table and composed as many pages as she did, page after page of squiggly lines.Kathy Roskos is Assistant Professor, Department of Education, John Carroll University. Carol Vukelich is Associate Professor and Director of Inservice Education, College of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE.     

Tapping autobiographical narratives to illuminate resilience: A transformative learning tool for adult educators

Adversity has always been a part of life, however, today’s hurricanes and earthquakes in increasingly populated areas, violent unrest creating a global refugee crisis, battlefield stress and work-place harassment, and the challenges of aging populations are demanding a better understanding of how individuals cope with adversity regardless of the source. One answer is resilience. This paper describes a narrative strategy that captures resilience in its many forms based on current research on resilience and transformative learning. Resilience research has moved from a focus on personality traits that help some to rebound to resilience as a process and outcome. As process and outcome, resilience is seen as a teachable attribute. This article applies two metatheories—one from resilience research and one from transformative learning—to data gathered in a qualitative research study on life-story writing. The results provide educators with a tool for facilitating resilience in their learners, clients, and patients.     

努力学习,你也能送比萨饼

我是一位拥有3个小孩,年已43岁的母亲,拥有理学硕士学位.我也是靠外送比萨饼维持生计.在家和孩子们一起呆了4年后我才干起这行.在家整天照看自己的孩子对于许多女人而言是梦寐以求的机会,但它对我并不合适.我开始感到消沉,决定找一份工作这样才能更好体现我的价值.我上夜班时,丈夫就会在家,所以我们不必托人照顾孩子了.     

Urban High School Student Engagement Through CincySTEM iTEST Projects

Journal of Science Education and Technology - This paper focuses on the notable heightening of underrepresented students’ engagement in STEM education through project-based learning CincySTEM...     

Mass Incarceration and Eviction Applications in Calculus: A First-Timer Approach

Abstract

In the calculus classroom, integrating applications with the theoretical and procedural conveys the relevance of the material. Since Newton and Leibniz developed calculus in the context of physics and astronomy, applications in these fields tend to predominate. To engage and excite our students, pedagogical considerations must include broader examples from across the curriculum. Our students have been particularly responsive to examples that address social justice issues. Here we describe two projects used in calculus courses at two different (liberal arts) institutions concerning mass incarceration and eviction. In addition, we offer advice on the implementation for your classroom and include some of our materials.     

Career guidance,career assessment,and consultancy

Summary Although career guidance activities can positively influence students' career development, the effectiveness of such activities is often impaired because they attempt to provide the same services to all students at the same time. Programs typically do not consider either students' differential developmental patterns or the fact that many students have particular needs due to learning, physical, or emotional handicaps. Therefore, a primary focus of refining programs must be the individualization of services to meet a wide variety of student needs.Referral to career assessment or to professionals trained in career assessment and consultation is a valuable option open to school counselors who have neither the time nor the specialized training to conduct such assessments themselves. Career assessment centers offer comprehensive assessment services, including both more traditional assessments as well as innovative activities. Using a consultation paradigm, the school counselor and career assessment officer can better provide comprehensive, individualized assessment and counseling tailored to the specific needs of students, regardless of their handicaps and their different levels of developmental readiness     

Linking Extreme Marital Discord, Child Rearing, and Child Behavior Problems: Evidence from Battered Women

Relations between marital discord, parental behavior, and child behavior were investigated in a sample of 37 battered women and 37 comparison mothers and their children, aged 2-8 years. It was hypothesized that violent fathers would be more irritable but less involved, battered women more stressed and inconsistent in discipline, and both parents would reportedly use fewer positive and more negative child-rearing responses than comparison families. Based on maternal self-reports and mother-child observations, the only robust self-report difference between the groups of mothers were the level of stress and reports of inconsistency in parenting; in contrast, all of the expected differences were found between the mothers' reports of the 2 groups of fathers. Group effects on child behavior problems were also found. Children from violent families were reported to have more internalizing behavior problems, more difficult temperaments, and to be more aggressive than the comparison children. In the violent families, maternal stress and paternal irritability were the 2 significant predictors of child behavior problems, whereas in the comparison families only maternal stress was a reliable predictor.     

An international collaborative investigation of beginning seventh grade students' understandings of scientific inquiry: Establishing a baseline

Although understandings of scientific inquiry (as opposed to conducting inquiry) are included in science education reform documents around the world, little is known about what students have learned about inquiry during their elementary school years. This is partially due to the lack of any assessment instrument to measure understandings about scientific inquiry. However, a valid and reliable assessment has recently been developed and published, Views About Scientific Inquiry (VASI; Lederman et al. [2014], Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 65–83). The purpose of this large-scale international project was to collect the first baseline data on what beginning middle school students have learned about scientific inquiry during their elementary school years. Eighteen countries/regions spanning six continents including 2,634 students participated in the study. The participating countries/regions were: Australia, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Mainland China, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States. In many countries, science is not formally taught until middle school, which is the rationale for choosing seventh grade students for this investigation. This baseline data will simultaneously provide information on what, if anything, students learn about inquiry in elementary school, as well as their beginning knowledge as they enter secondary school. It is important to note that collecting data from all of the approximately 200 countries globally was not humanly possible, and it was also not possible to collect data from every region of each country. The results overwhelmingly show that students around the world at the beginning of grade seven have very little understandings about scientific inquiry. Some countries do show reasonable understandings in certain aspects but the overall picture of understandings of scientific inquiry is not what is hoped for after completing 6 years of elementary education in any country.     

Spanish Language Children and Teen Books Focusing on Human Sexuality and Reproductive Health

Talking to children and teens about sexuality is difficult for most parents, especially for those whose primary language is Spanish. Teens who come to the United States from Spanish speaking countries are also at a disadvantage because of a language barrier. Many times there is a lack of high quality Spanish materials that have been reviewed on the topic of sex and reproductive health. There are serious consequences of unplanned teen pregnancies to communities such as poverty, low educational attainment and other health disparities. This bibliography reviews human sexuality titles in Spanish for both children and teens. Professionals in the healthcare or medical libraries, school librarians, public librarians and academic librarians will find this bibliography valuable for the purposes of educating the public and developing their institution’s collection.