Values and Needs of Children With and Without Special Educational Needs in Early School Years: A Study of Young Children’s Views on What Matters to Them

Understanding how children experience life in educational settings should be an imperative for educational practitioners, evaluators, and researchers. Listening to children’s points of views would facilitate the development of educational settings that meet the needs of children and contribute to their wellbeing and development so that their experiences are both joyful and meaningful. A total of 56 children between the ages of 5 and 7 in 65 educational settings located in central Sweden were included in the study. Amongst the 56 participating children, 29 were identified as having special educational needs. The children’s views were collected from 2012 to 2015 using drawings and interviews, and these were analysed using a thematic analysis. Nine themes that reflected matters of importance for the children, both those with and without special educational needs, are described. These themes are discussed and linked to previous research, educational evaluation models, and theories of values and needs.     

Biographical Sketch of Frederick G. Kilgour Librarian,Educator, Entrepreneur, 1914–2006

The article traces the career of Frederick G. Kilgour (1914–2006), who is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in 20^th-century librarianship. He founded the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) and from 1967 to 1981 was its first president and chief executive officer, presiding over OCLC's rapid growth from an intrastate network to an international network. In 1971, under Kilgour's leadership, OCLC introduced an online shared cataloging system and an online union catalog (WorldCat) that is today the world's foremost bibliographic database. In 1978, he created the OCLC Office of Research, and in 1979, under his direction, OCLC launched its online interlibrary loan system. The author of 205 scholarly papers, Kilgour received numerous awards and honors over the course a career that took him from Harvard University Library, to the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, to Yale Medical Library, to OCLC, and finally, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he spent his final years on the faculty of the School of Information and Library Science as a Distinguished Research Professor.     

The genetic-environmental etiology of cognitive school readiness and later academic achievement in early childhood

Using a genetic design of 840 60-month-old twins, this study investigated the genetic and environmental contributions to (a) individual differences in four components of cognitive school readiness, (b) the general ability underlying these four components, and (c) the predictive association between school readiness and school achievement. Results revealed that the contribution of the shared environment for cognitive school readiness was substantial. Genetic effects were more important for the core abilities underlying school readiness than for each specific skill, although shared environment remained the largest factor overall. Genetic, shared, and nonshared environmental factors all accounted for the predictive association between school readiness and early school achievement. These results contribute to a better understanding of the early determinants of school readiness.     

ATEE Interactive Co-ordination and Educational Monitoring of Socrates Comenius Action 3 Projects

The Comenius Action 3 courses were well accepted and showed high quality. But we need a structure for easily monitoring and evaluating these projects. The authors present in this article a pilot project with this purpose. It should be useful in order to implement a system of co-ordination and communication among the different projects, and to evaluate their effectiveness. It also seems essential in order to determine that the EU funds are well invested in projects that fulfil the objective of enhancing and strengthening the European dimension among teachers and teacher trainers.     

Relationship between inductive arithmetic argumentation and deductive algebraic proof

In this paper, we present a cognitive analysis of the relationship between the argumentation process leading to the construction of a conjecture and its algebraic proof in solving Calendar Algebra problems. To solve this kind of problem, students encounter two sources of potential difficulties: the shift from using arithmetic in the argumentation to using algebra in the proof and the shift from an inductive argument towards a deductive proof. Thus, the aims of this article are to describe these cognitive difficulties and to show how students overcome them. Methodologically, we compare students’ problem solving process corresponding to three problems presented in the first four lessons of a teaching experiment. The analysis and comparison between these three resolution processes is performed using Toulmin’s model.