The relation between resource limitations and optional conceptual processing by children and adults

In some situations children fail to perform optional conceptual processing that they are able to perform. The purpose of the 4 experiments was to determine if the difficulty of word identification affects optional conceptual processing by second/third graders, fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Conceptual processing was manipulated by presenting Hard (e.g., hawk eagle canary) or Easy (river lake canary) word triplets that varied in the contrastive processing necessary to identify the "odd" target word (canary). The orienting activity also varied: for the Oddity Choice activity, contrastive processing was obligatory because the subject had to identify the target; for the Read activity, contrastive processing was optional because the experimenter identified the target. A recall advantage for the Hard over the Easy triplets was the measure of contrastive processing. Finally, the difficulty of word identification varied in that the subjects read the stimuli or the experimenter read the stimuli, and all the words were degraded, only the nontarget words were degraded, or all the words were intact. The results established that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that word identification difficulty may limit the extent of optional contrastive processing.     

International minority ethnic academics at predominantly white institutions

Using critical race theory, this article examines the racial positioning of British international minority ethnic (IME) academics in predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Empirical data, in the form of 28 in-depth interviews with IME academics, is used to analyze the complex raced and gendered positionalities of IME academics in institutions of higher education in the United States. We argue that the institutional contexts of predominantly White universities continue to re-affirm White privilege in ways that reflect the struggles in higher education to diversify faculty at PWIs. As scholars call for more diversity across higher education campuses, we suggest that it is important to understand the interconnections between policy and practice surrounding attempts to recruit and retain IME academics.     

Incorporating the Narrative in Career Planning

The article makes a case for the construction of narratives as major focus for career planning. Narratives can be seen as an appropriate compliment to the analysis of objective test data that has dominated our practice in the past. Narrative is described as an approach for career counselors to understand clients' vocational experiences and future plans. Subjective and objective aspects of a career narrative are explored, and emphasis is placed on co-authoring a career story that is subjectively meaningful and objectively sound. The client's subjective understanding of the career story is given importance as being pivotal information that must be considered in career counseling. Five key interventions are described from a narrative perspective.     

Morphological structure: Latin and Greek roots and affixes as upper grade code strategies

Some students in the upper elementary grades and high schools may benefit from extended decoding and spelling instruction. These students, because of their age level and reading selections, require strategies going well beyond phonics. For these older readers, including adults, learning about morphological structure may provide the strategies needed to decode and spell multisyllabic words found often in literature and content area texts. In this paper, literature providing a rationale for such instruction is reviewed, and a curriculum and instructional plan is described.     

Describing individual incidents of sexual abuse: a review of research on the effects of multiple sources of information on children's reports

OBJECTIVE: For successful prosecution of child sexual abuse, children are often required to provide reports about individual, alleged incidents. Although verbally or mentally rehearsing memory of an incident can strengthen memories, children's report of individual incidents can also be contaminated when they experience other events related to the individual incidents (e.g., informal interviews, dreams of the incident) and/or when they have similar, repeated experiences of an incident, as in cases of multiple abuse. METHOD: Research is reviewed on the positive and negative effects of these related experiences on the length, accuracy, and structure of children's reports of a particular incident. RESULTS: Children's memories of a particular incident can be strengthened when exposed to information that does not contradict what they have experienced, thus promoting accurate recall and resistance to false, suggestive influences. When the encountered information differs from children's experiences of the target incident, however, children can become confused between their experiences-they may remember the content but not the source of their experiences. CONCLUSIONS: We discuss the implications of this research for interviewing children in sexual abuse investigations and provide a set of research-based recommendations for investigative interviewers.     

A content analysis of research published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching from 1985 through 1989

To determine if actual practice was consistent with commonly recommended research methods and procedures, this study examined 130 studies reported over a 5-year period in three volumes of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (JRST). The results were consistent with similar previous analyses (Shaver & Norton, 1980a, 1980b; Wallen & Fraenkel, 1988a) and indicate that appropriate generalizations beyond the confines of the reported studies may be impossible for most (64%) of the JRST studies surveyed. The findings also show that replication studies, which could be employed to offset deficiencies in generalizability, were not commonly encountered (3%) in these 130 reports. In addition, the study results indicate that many researchers (48%) do not properly restrict their conclusions based on the limits imposed by the accessible populations and samples used; nor do they typically provide possible alternative explanations for the outcomes obtained (76%). These findings prompt the following recommendations: 1. A greater awareness and use of replication as a check on generalizability should be encouraged by the science education community. 2. Clearly defined populations (target and accessible) and fully described samples warrant increased attention as report components from authors, reviewers, and editorial board members of JRST. 3. In light of the difficulties inherent in effecting random selection in educational settings, a greater emphasis should be placed on recognizing the limits that the underlying assumptions of inferential statistics place on research conclusions. The results of this study indicate that the methodological quality of published science education research should remain a concern for both practitioners and readers.