Coming‐of‐age in 1980s England: reconceptualising black students’ schooling experience

Much conventional ‘race‐relations’ research of the schooling of black youth has tended to be underpinned by models of social pathology and subjective discrimination. It is argued here that there is a need to reconceptualise black youths’ schooling experience within a theoretical framework that moves beyond mono‐causal explanations and examines the multifaceted dimensions of racially structured English schooling. Placing students at the centre of the research enables us to see how schooling for black female and male youths is a central part of an alienating social response to them, that results in their experience of a structured ‘different reality’ from the white population. In response to this, they have, collectively and individually, creatively developed coping and survival strategies. These are examined here.     

Timing in retroactive interference

Retroactive interference is conventionally viewed as attenuated retrieval of a target association due to the training of a second association between training and testing of the target association. In three experiments in which water-deprived rats were used as subjects, we manipulated the durations of the time between cue termination and outcome onset (Experiment 1), the durations of the target and the interfering cues (Experiment 2), and the durations of the outcome used during target and interfering training (Experiment 3). Greater interference was consistently observed between associations bearing a high degree of similarity in their temporal structure, which suggests that interference occurs between complex representations that encode not only the physical attributes of the stimuli, but also their temporal characteristics.     

The Relations between Frontal Brain Electrical Activity and Cognitive Development during Infancy

The relations between changes in the scalp-recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) and the development of the ability to perform successfully 2 cognitive tasks attributed to frontal lobe functioning were examined in 13 infants from 7 to 12 months of age. Infants successful in performing the A-not-B task with increasingly longer delays across the second half of the first year of life showed changes in power in scalp-recorded brain electrical activity in the frontal region and an increase in anterior/posterior EEG coherence. Infants with rapid mastery of object retrieval did not differ in frontal EEG development from infants who exhibited the normal developmental progression in object retrieval performance. In a task examining inhibition of reaching to a novel toy, there were no differences in frontal EEG as a function of performance. Results from a cross-sectional sample revealed similar findings. These data confirm work with nonhuman primates on the importance of maturation of frontal cortex in the successful performance on certain tasks (A-not-B), but do not confirm nonhuman primate data on the importance of frontal cortex for other tasks (object retrieval). The data also suggest that the electroencephalogram may be useful as a noninvasive measure of central nervous system development during the first year of life.     

Cultural cognition and climate change education in the U.S.: why consensus is not enough

Abstract

Integrating climate change into environmental education programs and formal science classrooms can be difficult, as the issue remains controversial and highly politicized among the American public. This study proposes that the same cultural values that shape worldview differences and divide public opinion on anthropogenic climate change will influence if and how science educators support education on the topic. An online survey with quantitative and qualitative measures was distributed among science educators in the southeastern United States to test what, if any, impact cultural cognition has on their opinions about climate change education. The results suggest that respondents’ cultural values have a significant influence on their intentions to support climate change education and preferences for curricula content. The findings also suggest potential avenues for the field of environmental education to develop climate change materials that may help decrease unintentional biases among science educators and more effectively engage their support in teaching its causes and potential solutions regardless of worldview differences.     

Using Games to Engage Students in Inquiry

Abstract

This paper discusses the author’s experiences of getting advanced undergraduate math students to engage in mathematical inquiry by using games as a vehicle for exploration. The students explored the mathematics behind SET^®1, Spot it!^®2, Blokus^®3, and Six^®4. Specifically, we present the experience of the instructor and students and how the games were used to promote and incite inquiry.     

Teachers'' Perceptions of a Learner-Centered Teacher Evaluation System

Promoting success for all students is the driving force to develop and implement sound teacher evaluation systems. As Stronge suggests, the two most frequently cited purposes of personnel evaluation are accountability and performance improvement (1997, p. 3). As a result, researchers are conceiving of teacher evaluation as a mechanism for improving teaching and learning (Danielson and McGreal, 2000). On the other hand, others affirm that the trend in teacher evaluation is toward more self-evaluation and expanding one's teaching repertoire (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1999, p. 8). However, teachers' voices relative to emerging teacher evaluation trends are missing. Thus, this study explored teachers' perceptions about the support for professional development available to them, the perceived potential benefits of a learner-centered teacher evaluation system to enhance their professional growth, and pitfalls. Only elementary school teachers participated in the study. The researcher analyzed teachers' written responses to open-ended questions, and generated categories by emerging themes to determine teachers' perceptions.Findings of the study suggest that teachers receive support from both campus level and central office level. Teachers also believe that a learner-centered teacher evaluation fosters walk-through observations, opportunities for professional growth, feedback, learner-centered dialogue, a holistic perspective, and teacher self-evaluation. On the other hand, findings suggest that teachers question the labels for each level of performance, and are concerned that the system might be somewhat subjective. Finally, suggestions are made to conduct additional studies to further illuminate teachers' voices associated with teacher evaluation and development at other school levels, and to expand our understanding of emerging teacher evaluation formats which aim at student success.