The Effect of Relationship on Children's Distributive Justice Reasoning

Kindergarten, third-grade, and sixth-grade children were told 2 stories about a group of children who made artwork that was subsequently sold at a craft fair. The characters in one story were described as friends, while the characters in the other story were described as strangers (relationship condition). 1 character in each story was presented as the oldest in the group, 1 as the most productive, and 1 as the poorest. Children were asked to allocate 9 dollars to the 3 characters under each relationship condition, provide rationales for those allocations, and rate the fairness of 4 different patterns of allocation. Older children allocated more money to needy friends than to needy strangers and more to productive strangers than to productive friends. Kindergartners' allocations and fairness ratings did not vary with relationship. Rationales for allocation judgements suggested that equality was the most salient principle for decisions at all ages, but the older children provided rationales based on benevolence more often than younger children when characters were presented as friends.     

Integrating storytelling and quantitative career assessment

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - Combining quantitative career assessment with narrative career counselling is a career counselling challenge. The Integrative...     

Exercising a bounded autonomy: novice and experienced teachers’ adaptations to curriculum materials in an age of accountability

This study explores teachers’ first enactments of a set of theory-based curriculum materials designed to support academic language instruction. Specifically, this multiple case study looks at how six middle school English teachers in three US schools adapted the materials; each case includes a pair of teachers, one novice and one more experienced. All schools were located in the same district where a school performance measurement system was being used to publicly rank schools’ academic performance and growth. Multiple measures were used to look for evidence of adaptations and why teachers made adaptations. We found that all teachers adapted the curriculum, most often in response to either perceived student needs or district reform pressures. In two cases, patterns of adaptation differed by teacher experience; experienced teachers appeared better able to adapt curriculum materials to meet instructional goals. This pattern did not hold up at the third school, where teachers faced greater reform pressures. Taken together, these findings suggest that researchers should pay more attention to the role of school and district policy on teachers’ enactments of theory-based reforms. We conclude with guidance to researchers, instructional leaders and others interested in the potential of theory-based curricula as a lever for improving classroom instruction.     

Team Hyena Puppet: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Making and Teaching Science Through Art

In 2016, professors representing Biology, Dance, Music, and Theatre and dance program students created Dunes, a performance piece that depicts the ecological succession of Michigan's sand dunes. The process used to make this work is a direct representation of the steps that Team Hyena Puppet, a collective of teaching artists and scientists, takes in their science-based art collaborations, which are used to reflect on and depict scientific research and simultaneously teach student participants and audience members science through the performing arts.