Materialist epistemology lends design wings: educational design as an embodied process

Educational technology research and development - Materialist design is presented as an embodied perspective on educational design that can be applied to redesign of classroom-based learning...     

Small independent colleges and economies of scale

The financial problems of colleges under 1,000 in enrollment cannot be blamed entirely on a set of minimum, or fixed, costs that colleges of any size must bear. Enrollment fluctuations and lower tuitions also contribute to financial difficulties. In the past, colleges have used growth not so much to capitalize on economies of scale as to provide evidence of success to their constituents. As a result, the ranks of small colleges remain populated with those institutions experiencing financial difficulty, while more successful institutions have attained a larger size. However, in an era of limited growth potential, small colleges must not look to growth as a symbol of success. Success will be better equated with the continuation of quality academic programs in a closely knit community.     

Emotion Regulation, Parenting and Display of Social Reticence in Preschoolers

The study of social reticence in early childhood has focused primarily on those dispositional, intra-individual factors that might account for its demonstration among peers. Little is known, however, about the relations between social reticence and its association with the quality of parenting behaviors. Indeed, the independent and interactive “contributions” of dispositional and parenting factors to children's demonstration of socially reticent behavior have not received adequate attention. In this study, 188 preschool children and their mothers were observed during unstructured Free-play and a structured Lego-building teaching task. Additionally, the children were observed in quartets of same-sex, same-age unfamiliar peers. Results indicated that children's shy, socially reticent behavior was predicted by the extent to which mothers were over-solicitous during Free-play. In addition, preschooler's expressions of reticent behavior were predicted by the interactions between emotion dysregulation and the lack of maternal guidance and control during a teaching task. Emotionally dysregulated children whose mothers provided little control in this putatively stressful teaching task were more likely to be shy and reticent. This relation was non-significant for dysregulated children with mothers who provided high levels of guidance. The results suggest that early childhood educators offer reticent/shy children opportunities to explore their impersonal and social milieus and to warmly encourage such exploratory activities. Without such encouragement and opportunity building, reticent preschoolers may suffer from not having experienced sufficient exploration-to-play sequences thereby stifling the problem-solving competencies derived from such experiences.