Development and Testing of a Curriculum to Improve Decision-Making Skills in Middle and High School Students

Adolescence is a key developmental period for developing and strengthening brain circuits that underlie effective decision-making skills, which profoundly impact lifelong health and academic, professional, and economic achievement. But decision-making skills are learned rather than inherent. School presents an ideal environment for the direct instruction and frequent practice of decision-making skills, however, finding time in the school day is a challenge for contemporary educators. We have developed a learning curriculum that involves active student participation to strengthen decision-making skills that is sufficiently flexible and adaptable to be utilized in a wide variety of content-specific classwork. Using this curriculum, students show evidence of improved decision-making skills, including increased consideration of the number of factors that are relevant to their decision, the resources needed to make a particular decision, and both the short-term and long-term consequences of decisions.     

Natural hazard preparedness in an Auckland community: child and community perceptions

Community engagement in natural hazard preparedness is crucial to ensure sustainable initiatives. Children are important members of communities, and can actively contribute to community preparedness. This article presents research undertaken with 11- to 12-year-old students from a school in Auckland, New Zealand, and leaders associated with the school community regarding their perceptions of the role of schools, communities and children in natural hazard preparedness. The findings show that the students believe they can be effective in promoting preparedness in their school, homes and community, and act as leaders in this capacity. Community leaders stated that preparedness actions should be culturally relevant, community initiated and owned and inclusive of child perspectives. From the combined perspectives of students and community leaders, this work concludes that emergency management must engage in culturally responsive ways with Māori and Pacific communities to enable community preparedness initiatives that are tailored to the cultural values and practices of communities most at risk from natural hazards. Further, it concludes that children have an important voice in community preparedness, which could be encouraged through school and community initiatives.     

Building a new culture of teaching & learning

The search is on for new and powerful ways to engage students, but today's campuses need more than new techniques. They need to build a culture where these new approaches can take hold and thrive.     

The Acceptability and Dissemination of Materials to Support Staff Development in Universities and Polytechnics in the United Kingdom

This article is based on work begun during the HERMES project, 'Higher Education Resource Materials: Evaluation and Service', January 1978–December 1979, a project to support the training and development of lecturers in universities and polytechnics through resource materials. Part A examines the discrepancy between availability of and demand for such materials, and comes to conclusions regarding the types and topics where the need is greatest. Part B examines factors which characterize productions used outside the authors' own institutions. In conclusion, the article describes how the findings are being implemented by a working group of the Society for Research into Higher Education.     

Towards a taxonomy of novices' misconceptions of the Prolog interpreter

A series of novice programmers' misconceptions of Prolog flow-of-control and variable unification are identified on the basis of existing empirical evidence, and informal observation. This classification is intended to serve as a first pass attempt towards an understanding of these errors and as a basis for future empirical work.     

The Effect of Cooperative and Mastery Learning Methods on Primary Grade Students' Learning and Retention of Economic Concepts

Empirical studies have shown the positive effects of combining cooperative and mastery learning methods on mathematics achievement higher order questioning skills, and originality, but little is known, at present, about the effects of cooperative-mastery learning in other subject areas or on other cognitive outcomes. The problem of this study was to explore the effects of cooperative and mastery learning methods, alone and in combination, on first and second grade students' learning and retention of basic economic concepts. A 2 X 2 (cooperative X mastery) factorial design compared the achievement of one hundred-twenty students who were individually randomly assigned (using grade level as a stratification variable) to one of four treatment conditions—instruction on basic economic concepts using (1) cooperative learning, (2) mastery learning, (3) cooperative-mastery learning, or (4) a control treatment (no cooperative or mastery learning). All subjects were administered a written pretest, post-test, and delayed post-test on their understanding of economic concepts. To further probe children's understanding of economic concepts, a randomly selected sub-sample of sixty- four students was interviewed using an oral pretest, post-test, and delayed post-test. Overall, the results support the superiority of the cooperative-mastery learning method over either method alone in promoting the acquisition and retention of economic concepts. Pretest data verified the initial equivalence of groups. The cooperative-mastery learning group outperformed (a) the control group on all post-tests and delayed post-tests and (b) the cooperative learning group on all post-tests and delayed post-tests except the written post-test. By delayed post-test on the oral measure, the cooperative-mastery learning group was also outperforming the mastery learning group. As further evidence of the superiority of the cooperative-mastery learning method, the mean score of the cooperative-mastery learning group was greater than the combined mean scores of the mastery and cooperative learning groups on the oral post-test and delayed post-test. The authors suggest that the cooperative-mastery learning method is in line with current early childhood practices and has the capacity for simultaneously boosting the conceptual development and language development of young children. This capacity is said to stem from the method's provision of (a) specific, positive feedback, (b) a social context for sustained effort and involvement in a topic, (c) child-child communication exchanges, and (d) adult-child communication exchanges.