An exploration of young children’s ethnic identities as communities of practice

This study is concerned with experiences of ethnic identity amongst a group of three‐year‐old and four‐year‐old children, four‐fifths of whom are of Pakistani heritage and the remainder of white indigenous heritage. Focused on a nursery school in the United Kingdom, the study explores the relationship between the individual and the social and cultural, initially in the home and then as the children start nursery school. An ethnographic approach is used to record the children’s daily experiences and relationships as contexts where they reveal, shape and reshape who they are. Children’s ethnic identities are explored in relation to boundaries where different communities of practice collide, alongside other aspects such as gender and sexuality and under the influence of factors such as power and religion. What appears to emerge is a sense of ethnic identity as social practice and performance rather than as the result of maturation or of internal cognitive development.     

Impairment of teacher efficiency during extended sessions of test correction

SUMMARY The relationship between monotonous work, mental fatigue, and reduction in efficiency has been discussed at length in the literature. This paper examines a theory, based on the interactions revealed in those studies, that uninterrupted examination of a large number of tests over an extended period of time, leads to inconsistency in grading. Three specialists judged typed compositions of seventh-grade pupils, and independently awarded the grade of 80% to 31 papers. These compositions were submitted to 60 female teachers. Each teacher received all 31 papers, stacked in one of three different, randomly arranged sequences. The subjects, unaware of the earlier review, were asked to read the compositions in one sitting and in the order in which they were stacked, and to assign a grade. There was no communication between teachers in the project with regard to the task. The variable found to contribute significantly to the grading pattern was the order in which the essays were arranged. The first tests received lower grades, on average, than those awarded by the specialists. As the teachers worked their way through the stack, the grades gradually rose, and eventually exceeded those given by the specialists. The discrepancy between the mean evaluation of the first papers and last papers in the pile was approximately 10%. Teacher seniority and other variables tested did not contribute significantly to the process.     

Paradise Restored: The significance of coincidence in some children's books

Pat Pinsent is a Principal Lecturer in English at the Roehampton Institute, London, where she teaches children's literature to undergraduates as well as courses on language and literacy for in-service teachers.     

BASIC UBRARY SKILLS: A CHOICE OF LEARNING MEDIA

The paper describes an attempt to provide students with a choice of learning media with which to absorb basic library skills. We were interested in seeing whether students particularly favoured one medium rather than another, and also, from the point of view of our Media Services section, we were concerned with comparing the various formats with regard to their effectiveness in communicating this particular information