Predicting Media Use in Very Young Children: The Role of Demographics and Parent Attitudes

This study used a survey design (N = 168) to examine how parent and child demographics, parental media-use motives, parental subjective norms, and parental attitudes toward preschool media use (PMU) are all related to actual media exposure among children 6 months to 5 years in age. Results indicate that, in accordance with the theory of reasoned action, parents’ perceived subjective norms regarding various categories of media were significantly related to actual child consumption. Further, positive attitudes toward media were significantly related to higher rates of child consumption. Interestingly, parental worries about media were only negatively related to television consumption and unrelated to child exposure to other kinds of media.     

Five-year-old children value reasons in apologies for belief-based accidents

Accidents can be intent-based (unintended action-unintended outcome) or belief-based (intended action-unintended outcome). As compared to intent-based accidents, giving reasons is more crucial for belief-based accidents because the transgressor appears to have intentionally transgressed. In Study 1, UK-based preschoolers who were native English speakers (N = 96, 53 girls, collected 2020–2021) witnessed two intent-based or belief-based accidents; one transgressor apologized, the other apologized with a reason. Five-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, favored the reason-giving transgressor following a belief-based accident but not an intent-based accident (where an apology sufficed). In Study 2, 5-year-olds (N = 48, 25 girls, collected 2021) distinguished between “good” and “bad” reasons for the harm caused. Thus, 5-year-old children recognize when reasons should accompany apologies and account for the quality of these reasons.     

Differences between good and poor child writers on fMRI contrasts for writing newly taught and highly practiced letter forms

During fMRI imaging, 12 good and 8 poor writers aged 11 wrote a newly taught pseudoletter and a highly practiced letter. Both letters were formed from the same components, but the pseudoletter had a novel configuration not corresponding to a written English letter form. On the first fMRI contrast between the newly taught pseudoletter and highly practiced letter, based on a group map, good and poor writers significantly activated many common regions; but the poor writers showed spatially more extensive brain activation than did the good writers. The additional regions of significant activation may reflect inefficiency in learning a new letter form. For the second contrast between the highly practiced and newly taught letters, individual brain activation analyses, based on exact clusters, showed that good and poor writers differed significantly in activation only in left fusiform. This individual fusiform activation correlated significantly with behavioral measures of automatic letter writing and expressive orthographic coding. Multiple regression in which both individual fusiform activation and individual orthographic coding were entered explained significant variance in written composition. Results are discussed in reference to the role of the orthographic loop, from internal letter form to external letter writing by hand, in writing letters and composing. The overall results are consistent with prior brain and behavioral studies of writing.     

Distance Education for Primary and Secondary Teacher Training in Turkey

This paper describes two teacher training programmes offered through Anadolu University's Open Education Faculty (OEF). The first programme, which began in 1985‐1986, is a pre‐bachelor certificate for 130,000 primary school teachers. The second programme, started in 1990, offers a university degree to 54,000 secondary school teachers. Pedagogy, course materials, delivery systems and evaluation are discussed for both programmes.     

Feeling of difficulty: An aspect of monitoring that influences control

This study aimed at delimiting possible relations of feeling of difficulty (FOD) with control ideas pertaining to a particular task. Participants were 274 students of 7th, 8th, and 9th grade. They were tested with two mathematical tasks; they were also asked to give ratings of the feeling of difficulty at 4 phases: In advance of problem solving, during planning of the solution, after solution production, and an overall estimation. Participants also gave ratings for control ideas such as need to know the rule, to do the computations right, to have practice, to use one’s thinking and to have help from others. Path analysis and ANOVAs were used for the identification of the relations and differentiations of ratings in the four phases of problem solving. Results indicated that FOD varied from phase to phase and influenced ideas related to control. Feeling of difficulty in the main was only indirectly related to performance via control ideas.     

Games to Improve Students Information Literacy Skills

Abstract

As digital natives enter higher education, there is the need to improve their information skills but they often overestimate their information research skills and are unfamiliar with the library. The serious games give the opportunity for innovative and engaging approaches to information literacy learning. The paper describes NAVIGATE - Information Literacy: a Game-based Learning Approach for Avoiding Fake Content, a project funded by Erasmus?+?program. The Project aims to improve the competences to avoid fake content of the higher education students in the Humanities. The paper focuses on the comparative analysis of the students’ skills gap and the difficulty of actually assessing the learning improvement achieved by games, highlighting the lessons learned and the open issues.     

Mastery of the counting principles in toddlers: A crucial step in the development of budding arithmetic abilities?

Counting abilities have been described as determinative precursors for a good development of later arithmetic abilities. Mastery of the stable order, the one–one-correspondence and the cardinality principles can be seen as essential features for the development of counting abilities. Mastery of the counting principles in kindergarten was assessed in a large group of children with a broad range of arithmetic abilities (N = 423). Not all children mastered the counting principles by the end of kindergarten. Mastery of the counting principles in kindergarten was predictive for arithmetic abilities one year later in first grade, especially for scores on arithmetic achievement tests. Children sharing a common educational background tend to have more similar scores on arithmetic tests, yet the importance of mastery of the essential counting principles in the prediction of later arithmetic achievement was the same for all classrooms.