Physical education at preschools: practitioners’ and children’s engagements with physical activity and health discourses

This paper focuses on one aspect of a qualitative study concerned with investigating the place and meaning of ‘physical education’ to practitioners and children at three preschools in Scotland. We examine the ways in which the participants engaged with discourses related to physical activity and health in order to construct their subjectivities. Fourteen practitioners and 70 children participated. Research methods employed were observations, interviews with adults, a group drawing and discussion activity with children, and interviews with children. Both the adults’ and children’s talk illustrated the dominance of neoliberal, healthism meanings that position individuals as responsible for their own health. While the children’s talk primarily centred on health as a corporeal notion, the practitioners tended to talk about physical activity and health in both corporeal terms and in relation to the self more holistically. The practitioners also talked about physical activity as a means of regulating children’s behaviour.     

Effective learning activities in observation taks when learning to write and read argumentative texts

On repeated occasions, observational learning has proved itself to be an effective instruction method. Experimental studies have shown to be effective for complex tasks such as reading and writing for both teachers and students as models. The problem when interpreting the results of such research is that, in observation tasks, several mental activities play a simultaneous role. In this study we therefore set out to identify the effective elements of observation tasks. We focused on two elements of the observation tasks, both aimed at stimulating monitoring activities: evaluation of the model’s performance and elaboration on this evaluation. We have also distinguished between elaboration on the observed products (the models’ written answers), and elaboration on the observed processes (the models’ verbalisations of their mental activities). The data were subjected to a LISREL analysis. First of all, it was observed that subjects who performed “evaluation” and “productelaboration” better, and “process-elaboration” more often in one lesson, also performed these activities better or more often in the subsequent lesson. Next, we observed an effect of aptitude on the learning activities: pre skill scores influence “evaluation” and “product-elaboration”. The most important finding is that “evaluation” and “product-elaboration” contribute positively to argumentative writing skills. It is discussed that these findings confirm the importance of the monitoring, evaluative and reflective activities when learning complex tasks as writing.     

Correlations between teaching practices and class achievement in introductory algebra

Certain teaching practices were found to be linked to the educational achievement of students learning algebra for the first time. Collective teaching was observed with an instrument based on one developed by Stallings (1977). Student achievement appeared related, to some extent, to academic discourse. For this to be the case, this discourse had to come mainly from the teacher who was dispensing instruction, lecturing in a large-group context with or without teaching materials, asking questions, helping the student unable to give a correct answer, or giving feedback. The quantity of such discourse was also important. It appeared that it must be plentiful, but not excessive. Correlations with student achievement of large-group instruction and of instruction where the teacher monitors student work are the main focus of this paper. Student discourse in general, and non-academic discourse in particular, appear to have negative effects on achievement if they become frequent.     

Literary reading activities of good and weak students: A think aloud study

In this study we examined how good and weak students of literature interact with short literary stories. We focused on differences in the use of cognitive and affective reading activities, and in the extent to which good and weak students adapt their activities to (parts of) the story they are reading. 19 Dutch tenth-grade students from 8 classes participated in the study, of whom 10 were known to be good students of literature and 9 were known as weak literature students. Each student read five literary stories under think aloud conditions. The stories were presented segment by segment on a computer screen. Students responses were transcribed, segmented and coded. Analysis of variance was applied to the data to test the diffrences between good and weak students.     

Assessing reading skills by means of paper-and-pencil lexical decision: Issues of reliability,repetition, and word-pseudoword ratio

This study focused on the feasibility of agroup-administered paper-and-pencil lexical-decisiontest as a plausible alternative or supplementary tool for the assessment of readingskills. Lexical-decision tests and oral-readingtests were administered to 130 Dutch studentsfrom primary grades 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. Correlations were moderate to high in low grades, butdeclined in the high grades. The reliability ofthe lexical-decision test assessed by means ofa test--retest procedure was generally good. Asecond presentation of the lexical-decisiontest caused repetition effects (i.e., betterperformance on the second test), but generallyremained within reasonable limits. The presenceof different numbers of pseudowords (25%vs. 75%) in both lexical decision and oralreading, indicated that a large number ofpseudowords made oral reading harder, butlexical decision easier. Educational andclinical implications are discussed.     

Children's Memory of an Occurrence of a Repeated Event: Effects of Age, Repetition, and Retention Interval across Three Question Types

Children's memory of the final occurrence of a repeated event was examined whereby each occurrence had the same underlying structure but included unpredictable variations in the specific instantiations of items across the series. The event was administered by the children's teachers at the kindergarten or school. The effects of repetition (single vs. repeated event), age (4–5 vs. 6–8-year-olds), retention interval (1 week vs. 6 weeks), and the frequency of specific instantiations of items were examined across 3 question types. Repetition increased the number of items recalled on a level that was common to all occurrences in response to general probes and reduced the likelihood that children would report details that did not occur in the event. However, repetition also reduced the number of correct responses about which instantiation was included in the occurrence and decreased the consistency of responses across repeated questioning. Most errors were intrusions of details from other occurrences; usually references to instantiations of items that had occurred frequently throughout the series. The younger children showed a poorer ability to discriminate between the occurrences than the older children, but age differences were less evident at the longer retention interval. The results are discussed in relation to current theories of memory and children's eyewitness testimony.     

The relationship between child sexual abuse and academic achievement in a sample of adolescent psychiatric inpatients

OBJECTIVES: To examine the relationship between sexual abuse and academic achievement in an adolescent inpatient psychiatric population. Individual factors expected to influence this relationship were measured to explore the way they each interacted with sexual abuse and its relationship to academic achievement. METHOD: Eighty-one adolescent psychiatric inpatients participated in the study (aged 12--18 years: M=16.0). Participants were administered tests of academic achievement (dependent variable) and intelligence, and completed a number of self-report measures of their experience of different types of maltreatment, their perception of the parenting they received, socio-economic status, substance abuse, and psychopathology. RESULTS: Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that intelligence was the main predictor of academic achievement (uniquely explaining 26% of the variance). A number of interaction effects were also significant indicating that intelligence, substance abuse, internalizing behavior problems, externalizing behavior problems all influenced the relationship between sexual abuse and academic achievement. DISCUSSION: Examining the impact of sexual abuse is complex because it is typically an experience embedded in a range of other risk factors, such as poverty, family dysfunction, and other types of maltreatment. This study demonstrated coexistence between sexual abuse and a number of other variables, including other maltreatment types and parental overprotection, underscoring the requirement for complex models of research that more accurately reflect the experience of abused children.     

UNDERSTANDING THE EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF OLDER ADULTS: A NEW APPROACH

The educational needs of 103 adults aged 55‐75 were investigated. Using an approach that focused on existential needs prior to assessing their educational needs, and adopting a procedure that helped the group to identify their most basic needs, the inquiry found out that the educational needs expressed through this method considerably differed from those found through traditional checklist methods and are closely related with the major problems of older people at and after the retirement period.