Temperament, Emotion, and Cognition at Fourteen Months: The MacArthur Longitudinal Twin Study

200 pairs of twins were assessed at 14 months of age in the laboratory and home. Measures were obtained of temperament, emotion, and cognition/language. Comparisons between identical and fraternal twin correlations suggest that individual differences are due in part to heritable influences. For temperament, genetic influence was significant for behavioral observations of inhibition to the unfamiliar, tester ratings of activity, and parental ratings of temperament. For emotion, significant genetic influence was found for empathy and parental ratings of negative emotion. The estimate of heritability for parental report of expression of negative emotions was relatively high, whereas that for expression of positive emotions was low, a finding consistent with previous research. For cognition and language, genetic influence was significant for behavioral indices of spatial memory, categorization, and word comprehension. Shared rearing environment appears influential for parental reports of language and for positive emotions, but not for other measures of emotion or for temperament.     

Meaning in life and school guidance programs: Adolescents’ voices from Hong Kong

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - This study provides insights into how Chinese adolescents in Hong Kong interpret the concept of “meaning in life.” Data...     

Preschool enrichment and learning

This paper discusses some of the basic cognitive units and processes involved in intellective functioning. It suggests that the basic units, consist of schemata, images, symbols, concepts, and rules and that motor action does not have to be an accompaniment to the acquisition of some of these cognitive structures. Comprehension, memory, generation of solution hypotheses, evaluation, and implementation are offered as the basic cognitive processes and some suggestions are made that may be helpful to the teacher. It is argued that the concept of intelligence has no explanatory meaning and that the components that are selected to characterize the intelligent child will change over culture and history. It is urged that communities and educators adopt a relativistic attitude toward the familial or educational experiences that promote optimal growth, for it is not possible to specify the correct set of experiences unless one simultaneously notes the cultural demands the child will encounter.

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Résumé L'auteur traite de certains procédés cognitifs de base qui font partie de la fonction intellectuelle. Il suggère que les structures de base consistent en schémas, images, symboles, concepts, et règles et que l'action motrice n'est pas nécessaire à l'acquisition de certains de ces structures cognitives. L'auteur considère la compréhension, la mémoire, les hypothèses de solution, l'évaluation, et l'exécution comme les procédés cognitifs de base; il offre quelques suggestions qui peuvent aider l'instituteur. L'auteur affirme que le concept de l'intelligence n'a pas de sens explicatif et que les traits qu'on choisit pour caractériser l'enfant intelligent changeront selon la culture et l'histoire. L'auteur propose que les communautés et les éducateurs adoptent une attitude relativiste envers les expériences familiales ou éducatives qui promeuvent le développement optimal, car il est impossible de préciser les expériences correctes à moins qu'on ne note en même temps les exigences culturelles que l'enfant rencontrera.

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Preparation of this paper was supported by grants from NICHD (HD04299), U.S. Public Health Service, and from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.     

Emergent patterns of teaching/learning in electronic classrooms

Novel patterns of teaching/learning have emerged from faculty and students who use our three teaching/learning theaters at the University of Maryland, College Park. These fully-equipped electronic classrooms have been used by 74 faculty in 264 semester-long courses since the fall of 1991 with largely enthusiastic reception by both faculty and students. The designers of the teaching/learning theaters sought to provide a technologically rich environment and a support staff so that faculty could concentrate on changing the traditional lecture from its unidirectional information flow to a more collaborative activity. As faculty have evolved their personal styles in using the electronic classrooms, novel patterns of teaching/learning have emerged. In addition to enhanced lectures, we identified three common patterns: (a) active individual learning, (b) small-group collaborative learning, and (c) entire-class collaborative learning.     

The Use of the Microgenetic Method with Children with Disabilities: Discovering Competence

In this paper, we advocate the use of the microgenetic method, a methodology that combines dense sampling of observations across time and extensive trial-by-trial analysis, to examine strategy change in children with disabilities. This methodology has revealed new information about normally achieving children's cognition, such as large individual variability in strategy use among children of the same age and more gradual patterns of strategy change than previously assumed. In this paper, we review data from three different microgenetic studies in the domains of memory, arithmetic, and reading with children with or at risk for mental retardation and normally achieving children. Our review indicates that there are similar sequences of strategy change, similar rates of strategy change, and similar frequency of strategy discovery and use in children with and without mental retardation (compared to mental age peers). Implications are discussed for the use of this methodology to design instructional techniques for children with disabilities.     

Geographical education and ideology in England and Wales

Conclusion If ideology is a nexus of ideas which represent the values of a society and the way that society operates, then clearly such ideas, in so far as they are held by those who have power in society, are bound to affect what is taught within the system of education. This may not be openly avowed, though in totalitarian regimes the education system is determinedly used to enforce the only ideology—that of those in power. The saving grace in a democratic system is that those being educated have access ideologies other than the dominant one. In England and Wales and to some extent elsewhere in the United Kingdom, there is little doubt that the geography curriculum has tended to serve the dominant ideology during the heyday of the British Empire and even during its period of decline in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1960s and 1970s, an alternative ideology stressing the rights of the underprivileged became manifest in a geography curriculum that was not controlled centrally. The 1980s saw a reversal of this trend by those who had political power, though the reason advanced for the greater control of the curriculum was couched in terms of the economic needs of the nation and the desire to raise standards. But clearly those in power considered that theraison d'être of education was to promote an enterprise culture. However, in practice no ideology is ever pure. When the enterprise culture came into contact with long-cherished ideas of national sovereignty, marrying the two proved difficult. This was reflected in the neutral (not to say negative) position of the national curriculum in geography with respect to the European Union. Original language: English Norman Graves (United Kingdom) Professor Emeritus of Geography Education at the University of London Institute of Education. He is consultant to UNESCO in association with the International Geographical Union. Author of numerous works on geography education, he is involved in curriculum and textbook planning and is an acknowledged expert in his field of research.