Supporting young children's explanations through inquiry science in preschool

This study examines the ways in which preschool teachers support the development of children's explanatory language through science inquiry. Two classrooms in a preschool center using a science inquiry curriculum were videotaped during a 5-week unit on color mixing. Videotapes were analyzed for how teachers facilitated children's explanatory language. An assessment of explanatory language was administered to 47 children in the center before and after the color mixing unit. Analysis of discourse revealed that teachers engaged children as conversational partners and as scientific investigators responsible for their own learning. Explanations were dynamically co-constructed by adults and children within the context of participation in scientific inquiry. By the end of the unit, children produced more on-topic responses, more standard color-mixing terms, and more causal connectives in their responses to the assessment of explanatory language.     

Disconnections Between Teacher Expectations and Student Confidence in Bioethics

This study examines how student practice of scientific argumentation using socioscientific bioethics issues affects both teacher expectations of students’ general performance and student confidence in their own work. When teachers use bioethical issues in the classroom students can gain not only biology content knowledge but also important decision-making skills. Learning bioethics through scientific argumentation gives students opportunities to express their ideas, formulate educated opinions and value others’ viewpoints. Research has shown that science teachers’ expectations of student success and knowledge directly influence student achievement and confidence levels. Our study analyzes pre-course and post-course surveys completed by students enrolled in a university level bioethics course (n = 111) and by faculty in the College of Biology and Agriculture faculty (n = 34) based on their perceptions of student confidence. Additionally, student data were collected from classroom observations and interviews. Data analysis showed a disconnect between faculty and students perceptions of confidence for both knowledge and the use of science argumentation. Student reports of their confidence levels regarding various bioethical issues were higher than faculty reports. A further disconnect showed up between students’ preferred learning styles and the general faculty’s common teaching methods; students learned more by practicing scientific argumentation than listening to traditional lectures. Students who completed a bioethics course that included practice in scientific argumentation, significantly increased their confidence levels. This study suggests that professors’ expectations and teaching styles influence student confidence levels in both knowledge and scientific argumentation.     

Scaffolding 5-year-old children in Japanese kindergarten collaboratively retelling a tale

This study reports an analysis of how children in a Japanese kindergarten are scaffolded when facing the challenge of collaboratively retelling a kitsune story they have been told. What is referred to as a kitsune story is an example of a trickster tale with foxes as anthropomorphised animals. The participants were ten 5-year-old children and their teacher. Told a story by their teacher, the children were asked later to collaboratively retell it. How this retelling activity is supported – theorised in terms of the metaphor of scaffolding – is analysed on the basis of recordings. The findings show the nature of this evolving process. The conclusion is that the metaphor of scaffolding may require some contextual specification to remain a functional conceptual – and in extension, pedagogical – tool in activities fundamentally different from the activity studied in Wood, Bruner and Ross’ founding 1976 study.     

Developing a Research Agenda in Science Education

The Science Summit reinforced a question upon which many of us in science education are focused: How can we, the science education community of researchers, practitioners, and consumers, lead policy? We include a brief review of the No Child Left Behind Act and its implications for teachers, and elaborate about one ongoing and growing effort to answer the concerns about the paucity of research expressed at the Summit. We describe a unique and growing collaboration across professional science education and science organizations and societies that focuses on the development of a research agenda. The term ‘consilience’ refers to the “jumping together of knowledge” that leads to scientific advancements, progressive, creative, fluid scientific research and intellectual capacity to move a research community toward an enlightened research agenda. A coherent research agenda enables us to specify what we know, what we need to know, and how research can be employed for creating and implementing policy. The use of a dynamic organizer (such as Pasteur’s Quadrant) for a research matrix of topics provides a possible structure for organizing and cataloging research questions, designs, findings from past studies, needed areas for research, and policy implications. Through this unique collaboration, the science education community can better focus on needs and priorities and ensure that teachers, policy makers, scientists, and researchers in education at local through national levels have an important stake in research priorities and actions.     

The pedagogical benefits of enacting positive psychology practices through a student–faculty partnership approach to academic development

Academic development that supports the enactment of positive psychology practices through student–faculty pedagogical partnership can increase faculty confidence and capacity in their first year in a new institution. When student partners practice affirmation and encouragement of strengths-based growth, processes of faculty acclimation and self-authoring can be accelerated. This article presents a student–faculty pedagogical partnership program and positive psychology practices that focus on faculty strengths and capacities as the foundation for reinforcing and revising existing pedagogical strategies and for sustaining energy for continued development. It combines collaborative autoethnographic and comparative case study approaches to investigate the pedagogical benefits of these practices.     

Expectancies as mediators in the differential-reward conditional discrimination performance of pigeons

In a series of within-subject experiments employing a two-choice delayed conditional discrimination task, pigeons chose correctly more often when kind of correct choice and kind of reinforcer were perfectly correlated than when uncorrelated. Correct choice behavior fell to chance levels when the correlation was reversed or when it was removed by using only one kind of reinforcer. Implications for mediation theories are discussed, with the conclusion being that, although the possibility that instrumental mediators are present in this situation cannot be dismissed, the overall pattern of results indicates that classical mediators are of principal importance in this type of task.     

Previous traumatic birth: an impetus for requested cesarean birth

This paper addresses the meaningfulness of the childbearing experience and how a traumatic occurrence can affect women for years into the future. Every woman deserves to have a fulfilling childbearing experience, even if it may be different from the one she imagined. This paper examines the phenomenon of previous traumatic birth and its potential effects on choices during subsequent pregnancies. Discussion includes how childbirth educators can assist women in healing from past birth traumas and preventing them from recurring.     

Community college student-parents: priorities for persistence

This study of community college student-parents used interpretive phenomenological analysis of interview data contributed by 15 participants from three Mountain West Community Colleges. The participants qualified by the following criteria: had delayed college entrance by 2 years or more, had a child not yet in kindergarten, were full-time students in an associate degree program, worked part-time, and had 15 credits or more toward their degree. This study revealed what it meant for student-parents to have success while they addressed the challenges of balancing work, home, child care, and academic responsibilities. The student-parents described experiences that required prioritizing responsibilities, managing time effectively, securing needed support services, addressing stress, developing strategies for study and parenting, and maintaining a positive mindset. The findings include quotations that describe the challenges of each student-parent; whether individually unique, conflicting, or shared by the subset of this nontraditional student group. The student-parents shared a common sense of resolve to use prioritizing strategies as they made decisions affecting their degree completion. Student-parents had the common goal to obtain a better life for themselves and their children.