你接受挑战吗?

Should we easily wail about the embarrassment and the unfairness of life?Or should we accept obstacles as challenges?With a choice of stance we can allow ourselves to be oppressed victims.When anything happens to us,we can take it as a sign that we should not expect anything good out of our lives.These are times when we need to determine whether it is wisdom or fear that motivates us in our choices.……     

Implementing Criterion-referenced Assessment Within a Multi-disciplinary University Department

This paper is concerned with the reconstruction, at the departmental level, of a university assessment policy that required a shift from norm-referenced assessment to criterion-referenced assessment (CRA). As such, it provides an account of a change process driven by a centralised policy imperative and yet implemented and driven also from a bottom-up process. A wide range of data was gathered using action research methods. Individual and focus group interviews were conducted with staff and students, participant journals were kept and successive drafts of criteria and standards, and samples of students' responses were collected. The data suggested that a top-down policy can be successfully combined with a departmental-driven process, if financial and time considerations are addressed and a collaborative process amongst staff is sustained. The use of action learning, as a tool for change, appeared to assist participants to begin to own a top-down policy.     

Emotional pedagogy and the gendering of social and emotional learning

Social and emotional learning (SEL) has predominantly been conceptualised as a neurological process, which has precluded understanding of how social, cultural and material discourses inform the expression of emotional experiences. Gender remains a notable omission. This article explores the micro-practices through which gender structures the development of young people’s emotional subjectivities within the context of a school-based SEL intervention. Particular emphasis is placed on the gendering strategies utilised by educational professionals during the course of their emotional pedagogy. Three strategies are considered: the overt coercion of girls to demonstrate their learning; the permission of boys’ passivity, with their docile bodies being indicated as a signifier of participation; and the restricting of occasions for emotional expression in accordance with perceived gender norms. Efforts to inculcate students with a gendered emotional subjectivity mean that differential learning opportunities are on offer, raising concerns about the introduction of new forms of gendered educational inequalities.     

Another failure to replicate Lynn's estimate of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans

In his comment on our literature review of data on the performance of sub-Saharan Africans on Raven's Progressive Matrices, Lynn (this issue) criticized our selection of samples of primary and secondary school students. On the basis of the samples he deemed representative, Lynn concluded that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans stands at 67 when compared to UK norms after a correction of the Flynn Effect. We criticize his methods for being unsystematic. Here we select only those samples that were based on stratified or clustered random sampling and were deemed representative by the original authors. We again fail to replicate Lynn's low estimate of the average IQ of Africans. We argue that these scores are hard to interpret in terms of latent cognitive variables such as g because of the psychometric incomparability we established and because the Flynn Effect has yet to take hold in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Phonological processing and emergent literacy in Spanish-speaking preschool children

Phonological awareness (PA), phonological memory (PM), and phonological access to lexical storage (also known as RAN), play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPAs) in 147 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children whose native language was Spanish. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the validity of each PPA as separate from general cognitive ability and separate from each other. Moreover, structural equation modeling found RAN uniquely associated with knowledge of Spanish letter names and Spanish letter sounds. PA was found the best predictor of children’s ability to distinguish alphabetic text from nonalphabetic text. Finally, general cognitive ability was only indirectly associated with emergent literacy skills via PPAs. These results highlight the importance of PPAs in the early literacy development of native Spanish speaking preschool children.     

Relations between physiological and cognitive regulatory systems: infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning

The aim of this report was to investigate the prospective links between infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning (EF). The authors assessed sleep regulation through a parent sleep diary when children were 12 and 18 months old (N = 60). Child EF was assessed at 18 and 26 months of age. Higher proportions of total sleep occurring at night time, at both 12 and 18 months, were related to better performance on executive tasks, especially those involving a strong impulse control component. Most relations held above family socioeconomic status, prior mental development and concurrent verbal ability. These findings add to previous results with school-age children in suggesting that sleep favors the development of higher order cognitive functions requiring prefrontal cortex involvement.