Temperament and Parenting Antecedents of Individual Differences in Three-Year-Old Boys' Pride and Shame Reactions

To examine individual differences in pride and shame reactions of 3-year-olds and their temperamental and parenting antecedents, 110 boys were studied at ages 36 and 37 months in a "rigged" achievement situation. After being trained to complete explicitly stipulated "easy" and "difficult" tasks before a buzzer sounded, success and failure were manipulated by artificially "rigging" how much time the child had to work on these tasks. Children's facial, verbal, and postural reactions to success and failure were composited to create pride scores following success and shame scores following failure. As expected, pride reactions were greater following success on the difficult than on the easy task, and shame reactions were greater following failure on the easy than on the difficult task. Early temperament (at 12/13 months) proved unrelated to pride and shame. With respect to parenting, measurements composited across 15, 21, 27, and 33 months showed that mothers and fathers who were more positive in their parenting had children who displayed less pride, and that children whose parents (especially mothers) were more negative in their parenting evinced less shame. These counterintuitive findings are discussed in terms of differences between assessments of parenting obtained in this investigation of parenting antecedents and those obtained in other studies of parental responses in the achievement situation itself. Directions for future research are outlined.     

Re-visiting Hiroshima: The Role of us and japanese history textbooks in the construction of national memory

This paper originates from the perspective that school textbooks are crucial organs in the process of constructing legitimated ideologies and beliefs and are a reflection of the values considered important by powerful groups in society. This claim is explored through investigating the manner in which a selection of history textbooks in use in US and Japanese schools invites students to understand the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Linking narrative with historical analysis, the paper presents evidence which suggests that US and Japanese children are provided with a narrow view of the past which in promoting asense of unity and patriotism limits the development of a critical historical consciousness.     

Cognitive Neuroscience and Educational Psychology: What Season Is It?

Byrnes and Fox get much right in their review of the relevance of cognitive neuroscience for educational psychology. They are correct that theoretical reduction is to be welcomed. They are also right that neurophysiological findings can constrain psychological theory and that this too is to be welcomed. Their review is on the mark in recommending that educational psychologists must become bilingual in their understanding of neurological terms and their analogous psychological constructs. The one difference in our positions that I do highlight is one of calibration rather than strong disagreement—my level of enthusiasm for scientific reduction in domains related to education is somewhat more muted than that of Byrnes and Fox because of wariness bom of the premature reductive attempts that litter our field.     

Simplicity and Complexity in Contemporary School Leadership: A Response to Grace

Gerald Grace's (2000) paper Research and the Challenges of School Leadership: the Contribution of Critical Scholarship is applauded for making a powerful case for critical leadership studies to be taken seriously and for providing an exhortation for many educationists to think again about headship. However, this paper suggests that Grace's paper is weakened by: (a) traditionalism (e.g. a false equation of leadership with headship and neglect of more recent discourses of leadership, distributed leadership and complexity theory); (b) reductionism, oversimplification, selectivity and misrepresentation in his consideration of educational management studies; (c) neglect of the considerable overlap between critical leadership studies and educational management studies; (d) an untenably negative view of educational management studies (neglecting their potential for realising the same agenda as critical leadership studies); (e) eurocentrism; and (f) his neglect of foundational issues in, and authors on, critical theory.     

雅思创始人谈英语学习

“要学的是信息,而不是语言”我们要学习一个国家的语言就得知道这个国家的方方面面。要学习英语就得了解英美国家的社会、经济、人文、历史等各方面的信息。大家请看这个公式:“E≠C;C≠E”,翻译成中文就是:英语不等于汉语的翻译;汉语也不等于英语的翻译。学习英语,我们要学习的是英语国家的文化。请问大家,你们能列举出中国的主要港口吗?这个问题应该很简单。但是,请问各位,你们能列出英国的五个主要港口吗?你们知道苏格兰的首府吗?回答这两个问题也许就不是那么容易了。要把英语学习好,请大家记住:L=I=K,Language=Information=Knowle…     

Testing to Destruction: A problem in a small state

This paper presents a review of assessment procedures in the small state of Macau, a Special Administrative Region of China under the 'one country two systems' policy. The situation of Macau is used as a critical case study of some questionable educational practices that can occur when testing runs without restraint. The paper presents quantitative and qualitative data from two empirical studies to argue that testing--largely, in this case, the testing of students' ability to repeat book knowledge and facts--if left unchecked, becomes part of a dependency culture, a hermetically sealed system in which curricula and testing mutually reinforce each other in producing a low-level, facts-driven curriculum, dangerously didactic pedagogy, rote learning, poor student motivation, and a powerful controlling mechanism on teachers and students. What is disturbing is that this is the very system which many participants in education in Macau seem to want.     

Making Real Analysis Relevant to Secondary Teachers: Building Up from and Stepping Down to Practice

Future teachers often claim that advanced undergraduate courses, even those that attempt to connect to school mathematics, are not useful for their teaching. This paper proposes a new way of designing advanced undergraduate content courses for secondary teachers. The model involves beginning with an analysis of the curriculum and practices of school mathematics and its teaching, and then using those to build up to the advanced mathematics – in this case, real analysis. After developing definitions, examples, theorems, and proofs, the model then reconnects to practice, asking the teachers to translate ideas from real analysis in ways that are appropriate for teaching high school content to students. To illustrate the model, we provide and discuss two example tasks.     

The influence of warning messages on the public's perception of substance use: A theoretical framework

We bring different theories together to develop a theoretical framework that helps to understand how early warning messages about (new) dangerous drugs can influence the public's perception of substance use. We bring together the agenda setting theory, framing theory, dual processing theory, social learning theory, health belief model, theory of planned behavior, and cultivation theory in order to explain how warning messages diffused through the mass media can have an impact on the receivers' perceptions. Based on these insights we construct the Integrated Media Effect Framework (IMFE) that takes into account the role of cultural and structural contexts in the realm of early warning systems (EWS). Ultimately, this framework provides valuable guidelines for conceptualizing EWS and for developing applications by governments.     

The Impact of Relational Characteristics and Reasons for Topic Avoidance on Relational Closeness

Although research suggests that the act of topic avoidance itself has consequences for romantic partners, it seems equally likely that the antecedent conditions underlying these decisions to avoid certain topics also lead to important relational outcomes. Framed by communication boundary management theory, relationship characteristics, motivation for topic avoidance, and implications for relational closeness were examined. Findings indicate that relational commitment characteristics and individuals' reported rationale for topic avoidance are related to perceptions of relational closeness. These results illustrate the importance of understanding the underlying factors that motivate the decision to engage in topic avoidance and their impact on romantic relationships.     

Secondary School Students’ Epistemic Insight into the Relationships Between Science and Religion—A Preliminary Enquiry

A number of previous studies have shown that there is a widespread view among young people that science and religion are opposed. In this paper, we suggest that it requires a significant level of what can be termed “epistemic insight” to access the idea that some people see science and religion as compatible while others do not. To explore this further, we draw on previous work to devise a methodology to discover students’ thinking about apparent contradictions between scientific and religious explanations of the origins of the universe. In our discussion of the findings, we highlight that students’ epistemic insight in this context does seem in many cases to be limited and we outline some of the issues emerging from the study that seem to boost or limit students’ progress in this area.