Fifty-one families with computers: A study of children's academic uses of microcomputers at home

This paper examines the extent to which children in a 51-family, qualitative study used their home microcomputers for learning school subjects such as reading, mathematics, science, and social studies. Logs and analytic documents gathered over two years were content analyzed. This analysis revealed that most of the children who used their home microcomputers were not using them for academic learning. The absence of home academic microcomputing by children was found to be associated with a set of factors which included the lack of parental pressure and support for home academic microcomputing, the schools' emphasis on programming and computer literacy, the unreceptivity of the children and their peers to home academic microcomputing, and the dearth of academic software in the homes. The implications of these findings for the fostering of home academic microcomputing are discussed.     

Impacts of a university-elementary school partnership designed to support technology integration

Although administrators are scrambling to bring technology into their schools, the introduction of computers into individual classrooms has created challenges for both experienced and inexperienced teachers. Recognizing that teachers' use of technology is likely to increase when support is more readily available, a university-elementary school partnership was formed to provide ongoing professional, instructional, and technical support to teachers at one elementary school. Professional support was provided through monthly meetings and ongoing interactions initiated by teachers' changing technology needs. Instructional support was provided through two teacher inservice workshops that emphasized practical ideas for infusion. Technical support was provided, at least in part, by training 18 third- to fifth-grade students to serve as technology experts for the school. Survey and interview data from teachers, students, the principal, and the library media specialist were used to examine the impact of these efforts. Findings describe perceived increases in teachers' levels of instructional and professional uses, and in students' confidence, self-esteem, and computer skills. Although participants described changes in the school's overall approach to technology use, use of student-trainers was limited.Special thanks to other team members who contributed to this project: Justin Ahn, Brooke Banta, Kathy Cennamo, Tristan Johnson, Wade Oliver, Feng-Qi Lai, Scott Ringer, and Jamie Turpin, as well as the students, teachers, library media specialist, and principal from Midland School.     

The visual motor integration test: High interjudge reliability,high potential for diagnostic error

Extending Pryzwansky's (1977) work on the Developmental Test of Visual Motor Integration (VMI), this paper investigated scoring agreement among three levels of increasingly better trained VMI diagnosticians. Correlational data demonstrated high interexaminer reliabilities (.92, .93, and .98) between groups of Consumers (Special Education undergraduates), Experts (doctoral Psychology students), and Consensus-Judges (experienced school psychologists) in their scoring of 39 subject protocols. However, gross errors in precision were discovered after the raw scores had been converted into the VMI age equivalent scores: fully 56% of the assigned age equivalent scores resulted in discrepancies of at least one year of age. These findings indicate that, despite high interexaminer reliabilities, great caution must be exercised when children are evaluated or placed by virtue of their age equivalent scores.     

Family sources of educational gender inequality in rural China: A critical assessment

In this paper, we investigate the gender gap in education in rural northwest China. We first discuss parental perceptions of abilities and appropriate roles for girls and boys; parental concerns about old-age support; and parental perceptions of different labor market outcomes for girls’ and boys’ education. We then investigate gender disparities in investments in children, children's performance at school, and children's subsequent attainment. We analyze a survey of 9–12-year-old children and their families conducted in rural Gansu Province in the year 2000, along with follow-up information about subsequent educational attainment collected 7 years later. We complement our main analysis with two illustrative case studies of rural families drawn from 11 months of fieldwork conducted in rural Gansu between 2003 and 2005 by the second author.     

Implications from self-efficacy and attribution theories for an understanding of undergraduates’ motivation in a foreign language course

Although studies on self-efficacy and attribution have independently contributed to the motivation literature, these two constructs have rarely been considered together in the domain of foreign language learning. Here, 500 undergraduates in Spanish, German, and French courses were asked to report whether test scores represented a successful or unsuccessful outcome and to provide attribution and self-efficacy ratings upon receiving their grades. Representing an innovation over previous studies, attributions were measured in two ways, using dimensions of attributions and asking about actual reasons for a real outcome. In regressions predicting achievement, self-efficacy was the strongest predictor, supplemented by ability attributions. Students who attributed failure to lack of effort had higher self-efficacy than students not making effort attributions.