Dialogic voices in talk about drinking and pregnancy

Alcohol use during pregnancy poses a significant risk of fetal alcohol syndrome. This study presents the interpretive findings of the formative research phase of a funded grant to develop a community‐based public health media campaign on the topic of drinking during pregnancy. In the initial wave of data collection, 50 rural women were recruited from four Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) clinics in southeastern Iowa to participate in semi‐structured interviews. In the second wave, 10 additional WIC clients were interviewed for member‐checking purposes. Findings revealed two competing discourses that organized these women's attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding drinking and pregnancy: the discourse of individualism and the discourse of responsible motherhood. These two discourses offer opposing normative guidelines for talk among their close female relatives and friends. The implications of these findings for designing a community‐based media campaign are discussed.     

A Scottish diaspora: influences on educational planning in twentieth-century England

Grant regulations under the Education Minutes of 1846 prohibited ministers of religion teaching in aided schools. This article examines the background to this professional disability, the extent of its application and its survival for 112 years. The impact of changing social conditions and the creation of new justifications as the policy became anachronistic are discussed. The fiftieth anniversary of its abolition in 1959 allows a long view of this regulation, unjust yet remarkably resistant to change. Documentary sources, public and personal, reveal the actions of policy‐makers and concerns of groups and individuals, and expose complex issues forming the historical context of this contested aspect of teacher employment. Attention is given to the effects of central policy on individual schools and teachers at significant stages in the account. Finally, suggestions are made for further research on the employment of ordained teachers since the ban was lifted 50 years ago.     

Self-generated drawings for supporting comprehension of a complex animation

The perceptual and cognitive processing demands involved in comprehending complex animations can pose considerable challenges to learners. There is a tendency for learners to extract information that is highly perceptually salient but neglect less conspicuous information of crucial relevance to the building of a quality mental model. This study investigated the effectiveness of self-generated drawing for learning from an animation illustrating a scientific phenomenon, the so-called “Newton’s Cradle.” Participants were 199 students in grade seven, randomly assigned to three experimental conditions: self-generated drawing, traced/copied drawing, and no drawing. All participants were asked to produce an explanation of the animation for both immediate and delayed posttests. The results revealed the superiority of self-generated drawing in supporting animation comprehension at both testing times compared to the other two conditions, which did not differ from each other. In addition, comprehension of the animation was related to the quality of self-generated drawings. Specifically, the depiction of information characterized by low perceptual salience but high conceptual relevance to the phenomenon predicted comprehension and retention over time.     

Diane Ravitch Revised?

Long associated with conservative views on education, Diane Ravitch recently has won wide acclaim from educators and others who do not identify with conservatism. The publication of The Death and Life of the Great American School System has been central to her newfound popularity because it is an effective critique of the market-based reforms she previously championed and because it defends both public schools and their teachers. As attractive as these stances are to defenders of public education, Ravitch’s book offers little evidence that she has backed away from an underlying conservatism that is complacent about inequalities inside and outside of public schools.     

Cueing complex animations: Does direction of attention foster learning processes?

The time course of learners’ processing of a complex animation was studied using a dynamic diagram of a piano mechanism. Over successive repetitions of the material, two forms of cueing (standard colour cueing and anti-cueing) were administered either before or during the animated segment of the presentation. An uncued group and two other control conditions were also employed. Development of an internal representation of the movements depicted in the animation was evaluated through participant demonstrations of the mechanism’s operation on a replica piano mechanism. Eye tracking (fixation lengths) indicated that overall, conventional visuospatially-based cueing was largely ineffective for directing attention across the presentations of the animation. Demonstration scores from cued animations were no better than those produced from the uncued version. Cue obedience for standard colour cueing was initially superior to that for anti-cues but fell away after the animation’s first exposure. Contrary to expectations, there was no difference in cue obedience for cueing applied before or during animation of the display. The findings suggest that alternatives to visuospatial cues are needed to help learners process complex animations more effectively.     

Are there long-term effects of early child care?

Effects of early child care on children's functioning from 4(1/2) years through the end of 6th grade (M age=12.0 years) were examined in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n=1,364). The results indicated that although parenting was a stronger and more consistent predictor of children's development than early child-care experience, higher quality care predicted higher vocabulary scores and more exposure to center care predicted more teacher-reported externalizing problems. Discussion focuses on mechanisms responsible for these effects, the potential collective consequences of small child-care effects, and the importance of the ongoing follow-up at age 15.