Finding Common Ground

Teen Tokyo, a 3,000-square-foot, $1-million long-term exhibition at The Children's Museum, Boston, opened in 1992. It was developed to complement the museum's permanent Japanese House exhibition and to further its commitment to teaching about cultural differences and similarities. Designed primarily, but not exclusively, for youngsters aged 10 to 15 years, it is about growing up in contemporary Japan and the international culture of youth. An international team of developers, designers, and consultants spent five years preparing and funding the exhibition, using formative evaluation throughout. The project also included publication of a 50-page catalogue/curriculum unit.     

Meeting in the Middle: The Role of Mutual Biracial Friends in Cross-Race Friendships

Social network analysis was used to examine the role of having a mutual biracial friend on cross-race friendship nominations among monoracial sixth-grade students (M_age = 10.56 years) in two racially diverse middle schools (n = 385; n = 351). Monoracial youth were most likely to choose same-race peers as friends but more likely to choose biracial than different-race peers as friends, suggesting that racial homophily may operate in an incremental way to influence friendships. Monoracial different-race youth were also more likely to be friends if they had a mutual biracial friend. The findings shed light on the unique role that biracial youth play in diverse friendship networks. Implications for including biracial youth in studies of cross-race friendship are discussed.     

Exploring the relationship between hope and burnout in competitive sport

Abstract

Researchers have postulated that hope may be an important factor associated with burnout. Consistent with hope theory contentions, low-hope individuals may be susceptible to burnout because they are prone to experience goal blockage, frustration, and negative affect, all of which likely increase the risk of burnout. We examined the relationship between hope and athlete burnout among 178 competitive athletes (63 females and 115 males) aged 15–20 years. Hope was significantly and negatively correlated with all three burnout subscales: emotional/physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and sport devaluation. Moreover, results of a multivariate analysis of variance showed that low-hope athletes scored significantly higher than medium- and high-hope athletes on all three burnout dimensions. Finally, results revealed that agency thinking was a significant predictor of all burnout dimensions. Frustration over unmet goals and a perceived lack of agency, a characteristic of low-hope athletes, might pose a risk factor in athlete burnout, whereas being able to maintain hope appears to be associated with health and well-being.     

Integrating expanded school mental health programs and school‐based health centers

This article provides background on national movements toward expanded school mental health (ESMH) programs and school‐based health centers (SBHCs), and presents advantages and challenges of joining these two systems of child and adolescent health care. Delivering ESMH through SBHCs promotes an interdisciplinary approach, health–mental health care integration, and benefits including enhancing referral bases, improving screening of problems, and enhanced confidentiality and privacy. But this integrated approach also presents challenges including managing referrals and significant needs, handling crises, building a focus on prevention and mental health promotion, handling administrative demands, and coping with limited resources. These challenges, ideas for overcoming them, and future directions for this promising service delivery approach are discussed. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 297–308, 2003.     

Forms of Knowledge in Art Education and the Corollary of Authenticity in the Teaching and Assessment of Such Forms of Knowledge

This article explores why art education after modernism needs to engage with and assess two forms of knowledge. It distinguishes procedural knowledge or ‘knowing how’ from declarative knowledge or ‘knowing that’, and argues that current classroom practice and more general thinking in art education in the UK confuses evidence of procedural knowledge with evidence for declarative knowledge. A corollary is that assessment evidence for ‘knowing how’, which is shown or demonstrated, is confused with assessment evidence for ‘knowing that’, which requires spoken or written forms of reporting. This conceptual confusion is currently embedded in the national, flagship examination known as the General Certificate of Secondary Education, taken by students at the age of 16, resulting in that examination requiring evidence of understanding the meaning of art in its socio‐historical context while at the same time denying the necessity of written or spoken work to reveal such knowledge. The article advocates a Wittgensteinian, socio‐cultural solution to the confusions of current practice.     

Researching and conceptualising the field

This concluding paper examines the contributions in this Guest Issue by locating them within the ongoing debates about the role and contribution of social science research, particularly through the production of journals. Set in the context of on-going attacks on the relevance of social science research and the failure to respond to major crises that affect us all, I argue that the field of educational leadership is an important site for showing the dangers of becoming relevant and accepting that a constructed crisis is a crisis. I argue for intellectual work within the field of educational leadership, and use the critical and socially critical traditions to illuminate this. The papers in this Guest Issue are located in these traditions, and so I examine the contribution made through problematising educational leadership, examining the realities of working lives in schools and conceptualising alternative ways of thinking about professional practice.     

Improving the Comparability and Local Usefulness of International Assessments: A Look Back and A Way Forward

Over time international large-scale assessments have grown in terms of number of studies, cycles, and participating countries, many of which are a heterogeneous mix of economies, languages, cultures, and geography. This heterogeneity has meaningful consequences for comparably measuring both achievement and non-achievement constructs, such as social and emotional skills. In this paper we propose one way to directly incorporate country-specific differences into the methods used to construct background scales. We use research that demonstrates data quality issues in international assessment and the degree to which these issues can impact inferences. Our proposed solution incorporates innovations that have been developed for achievement measures but have not been applied to background scales. We demonstrate this possible solution with PISA 2012 data.     

Uncontrollable Mental Imagery: Graphical Connections Between A Function And Its Derivative

The view that imagery might be a disadvantage on certain tasks might surprise some mathematics educators who contend that a learner's conceptual understanding is increased whenever visual imagery is used. One of the limitations of imagery found in the literature comes to bear on a unique aspect of mathematics teaching and learning. This is the notion of an uncontrollable image, which may persist, thereby preventing the opening up of more fruitful avenues of thought, a difficulty which is particularly acute if the image is vivid. Although one calculus student's images supported high levels of mathematical functioning, occasionally his vivid images became uncontrollable, and the power of these images did more to obscure than to explain. This type of imagery can be a major hindrance in constructing meaning for mathematical concepts — contrary to the panacea view of imagery which is sometimes expressed.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.