Supporting Scientific Conceptual Consciousness or Learning in ‘a Roundabout Way’ in Play‐based Contexts

Little change has been noted over 10 years of research into teacher knowledge and confidence to teach science in the early and primary years of schooling. There is a significant body of research demonstrating that early childhood and primary teachers lack confidence and competence in teaching science. However, much of this research blames the victim, and offers little analysis for the systemic reasons for teachers’ confidence and competence in science education other than a lack of science knowledge. This paper reports on a study that examined teacher philosophy and pedagogical practices within the context of an analysis of children’s concept formation within playful early childhood settings. Through teacher interviews, video recordings of science play, and photographic documentation of children’s science activities in one rural preschool, it was noted that teacher philosophy about how young children learn is a significant contributing factor to learning in science. It is argued that teacher philosophy makes more of a difference to children’s scientific learning than does teacher confidence to teach science or knowledge of science. The study also shows that without a mediational scientific framework for using materials in play‐based contexts, children will generate their own imaginary, often non‐scientific, narratives for making sense of the materials provided.     

Epigenetic Vestiges of Early Developmental Adversity: Childhood Stress Exposure and DNA Methylation in Adolescence

Fifteen‐year‐old adolescents (N = 109) in a longitudinal study of child development were recruited to examine differences in DNA methylation in relation to parent reports of adversity during the adolescents’ infancy and preschool periods. Microarray technology applied to 28,000 cytosine–guanine dinucleotide sites within DNA derived from buccal epithelial cells showed differential methylation among adolescents whose parents reported high levels of stress during their children’s early lives. Maternal stressors in infancy and paternal stressors in the preschool years were most strongly predictive of differential methylation, and the patterning of such epigenetic marks varied by children’s gender. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first report of prospective associations between adversities in early childhood and the epigenetic conformation of adolescents’ genomic DNA.     

Rate-distortion optimized frame dropping and scheduling for multi-user conversational and streaming video

INTRODUCTION Video packets are transmitted over the Internet using a best-effort service. Therefore, a large number of simultaneous video streams or cross traffic arriving at a network node (e.g. a multimedia gateway) may sometimes exceed the node’s forwarding capacity, i.e., the incoming data rate may exceed the outgoing data rate at the node. In this paper, we consider a scenario where M streaming videos and N conversa- tional videos pass through a network node with lim- ited forwardi…     

Should Spirituality be Taught in Post-compulsory Education? Justifications for its Inclusion in the Further Education Curriculum

Marilyn Tatarkowski points to Dearing's suggestion that all providers of education and training should take spiritual and moral issues into account in the design and delivery of the curriculum. In her own FE college she found that social science students were generally positive about the idea of a forum to discuss religious and spiritual issues, and that a high percentage of them had become more interested in this area since moving into HE. Having provided a detailed analysis of the concept of spiritual development, she ends by providing both a justification for the inclusion of spiritual development in the FE curriculum and some suggestions as to how this might be done.