Looking on the bright side: children's knowledge about the benefits of positive versus negative thinking

Five- to 10-year-olds (N = 90) listened to 6 illustrated scenarios featuring 2 characters that jointly experience the same positive event (and feel good), negative event (and feel bad), or ambiguous event (and feel okay). Afterward, one character thinks a positive thought and the other thinks a negative thought. Children predicted and explained each character's emotions. Results showed significant development between 5 and 10 years in children's understanding that thinking positively improves emotions and thinking negatively makes one feel worse, with earliest knowledge demonstrated when reasoning about ambiguous and positive events. Individual differences in child and parental optimism and hope predicted children's knowledge about thought-emotion connections on some measures, including their beliefs about the emotional benefits of thinking positively in negative situations.     

Education reform for the expansion of mother-tongue education in Ghana

In 1957 Ghana was the first sub-Saharan colonial nation-state to achieve independence from British rule. The language of literacy instruction, however, remained English throughout most of Ghana’s independence, effectively thwarting reading and writing in 11 major and 67 minor indigenous languages in use today. After years of policy shifts, including the intermittent of mother tongue in early childhood schooling to facilitate English language and literacy instruction, prospects for a bold move towards multilingual education have emerged from a coalescence of forces inside and outside of Ghanaian education policy circles. This article discusses how the inertia of a dated language policy and a historic disregard for Ghana’s multilingual landscape by the country’s own policy makers are being overcome, at least partially, by progressive powers of change, albeit not without challenge. It undertakes an analysis of how a policy environment that supports bilingual education was created in order to implement a comprehensive and innovative multilingual programme, the National Literacy Acceleration Program (NALAP), which was rolled out across the nation’s schools in early 2010. Having been involved in the process of designing NALAP, the authors describe the development of standards of learning and materials, as well as innovative aspects of a constructivist teacher education approach. The paper concludes with recommendations for further research, including combining a change process for key stakeholders and randomised language and literacy assessment with social marketing research in a unified approach.     

Initial Results of a New Clinical Practice Model: Impact on Learners at Risk

The last several years have seen a dramatic increase in interest surrounding the role of clinical experiences in enhancing the learning of teacher candidates. Further, pressure has intensified to demonstrate the impact of teacher candidates on P–12 learners. With these goals in mind, a model alternative school/university partnership was created, based on Korthagen's “Realistic Teacher Education” framework. This article is an evaluation of the impact of this intervention on student outcomes from the program's first three years. A convergence of evidence reveals significant improvements in grade point average and credits earned; furthermore, significant improvements in total disciplinary incidents emerged in some of the analyses. These results suggest that this teacher education intervention has promise for documenting impact on P–12 learners. This outcome is significant for accreditation purposes, for bolstering the image of teacher education programs within the broader community, and for establishing a common research agenda.     

Identifying Best Practice in a Shifting Landscape: Making Sense of RTI in the Context of SLD Identification

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. 1997, 1999, 2004. 20 U. S. C. 1400 et. Seq. (Statute). 34 C.F.R. 300 (Regulations) [Google Scholar] has had substantial influence on special education in general and the field of learning disabilities in particular. Since its reauthorization in 2004, ongoing regulatory efforts have been underway to determine its operationalization and implementation. Of particular concern to those involved in the educational process (i.e., special educators, school psychologists, families, advocates) are the guidelines for identifying children with specific learning disabilities (SLD), including the use of Response to Intervention (RTI). In this article, some of the most relevant and controversial issues associated with the use of RTI for the identification of SLD are detailed. We discuss how SLD is conceptualized in terms of identification approaches and classification criteria and present position statements of special education professional associations on the changes to the federal SLD definition and identification criteria. Finally, we summarize proposed resolutions to the seemingly irreconcilable differences identified throughout the article.     

Accreditation and Power: A Discourse Analysis of a New Regime of Governance in Higher Education

This article studies discourses within the accreditation of Norwegian higher education conducted by the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT), using one concrete case (the accreditation of bachelor programs in nursing). Analysis of policy documents and accreditation reports are influenced by two of Foucault's concepts of power; governmentality and panopticon. The analysis provides insights into firstly, how the two forms of power are woven into the schemes used for quality control by redefining quality to be a quantifiable concept; secondly, how the supervision of quality gives privilege to specific types of knowledge; thirdly, how supervisory power is reformulated to require self-control mechanisms within higher education in terms of constant quality development and realization of unexploited potentials; and fourthly, how this power legitimates itself by making all parties guardians of quality control, deconstructing the difference between evaluator and evaluated.     

Helping the In‐Group Feels Better: Children’s Judgments and Emotion Attributions in Response to Prosocial Dilemmas

Five‐ to 13‐year‐old European American children (N = 76) predicted characters’ decisions, emotions, and obligations in prosocial moral dilemmas. Across age, children judged that characters would feel more positive emotions helping an unfamiliar child from the racial in‐group versus out‐group (African American), happier ignoring the needs of a child from the racial out‐group versus in‐group, and greater obligation to help a child from the racial in‐group versus out‐group. Situations varied by whether the race of the needy child matched versus mismatched that of the focal character. With increasing age, children attributed more positive emotions to people who sacrifice their own desires to help needy others as well as became more discriminating about the situations that call for altruistic action.     

Giving Till it Helps? Alumnae Giving and Children’s College Options

This paper examines whether donations to colleges and universities are partly motivated by the desire of alumni to increase their children’s admissions probabilities. The paper uses data from a single-sex college, so that only alums with a daughter would evince this motive. We find that alums with a teenage daughter, as opposed to a teenage son, are more likely to make donations of at least $5,000. The same relationship is not evident for smaller donations, or when children are older than 18. Further, we find evidence that this difference in the probability of a donation by alums with teenage daughters and teenage sons does not exist when acceptance rates are higher in an earlier period.     

Why We Watch Them Sing and Dance: The Uses and Gratifications of Talent-Based Reality Television

This study explores how talent-based reality shows with different thematic content influence gratifications obtained (GO) by viewers. Participants completed surveys regarding their reasons for watching reality programs, in general, and their reasons for watching specific talent-based reality shows (American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, and America's Got Talent). Results identified 2 gratifications not previously observed in other gratifications research (TV personalities and schadenfreude), and that correlations exist between the content of talent-based programs and GO.