Communities of Caring: Developing Curriculum That Engages Latino/a Students’ Diverse Literacy Practices

This study investigates the learning and work of a community of practice that engaged in a specific inquiry around family/community literacy and the development of a culture of caring that would connect family/community/school literacies in ways that allowed their mostly Latino/a students to develop positive student identities, enhanced personal connections to their peers, and stronger experiential responses to literacy instruction.     

Unemployment and Work Interruption among African American Single Mothers: Effects on Parenting and Adolescent Socioemotional Functioning

Using interview data from a sample of 241 single African American mothers and their seventh- and eighth-grade children, this study tests a model of how 2 economic stressors, maternal unemployment and work interruption, influence adolescent socioemotional functioning. In general, these economic stressors affected adolescent socioemotional functioning indirectly, rather than directly, through their impact on mothers' psychological functioning and, in turn, parenting behavior and mother-child relations. Current unemployment, but not past work interruption, had a direct effect on depressive symptomatology in mothers. As expected, depressive symptomatology in mothers predicted more frequent maternal punishment of adolescents, and this relation was fully mediated by mothers' negative perceptions of the maternal role. More frequent maternal punishment was associated with increased cognitive distress and depressive symptoms in adolescents, and consistent with predictions, these relations were partially mediated by adolescents' perceptions of the quality of relations with their mothers. Increased availability of instrumental support, as perceived by mothers, predicted fewer depressive symptoms in mothers, less punishment of adolescents, and less negativity about the maternal role. Both economic stressors were associated with higher levels of perceived financial strain in mothers, which in turn predicted adolescents' perceptions of economic hardship. Adolescents who perceived their families as experiencing more severe economic hardship reported higher anxiety, more cognitive distress, and lower self-esteem.     

Word problem solving approaches in mathematics textbooks: a comparison between Singapore and Spain

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Singaporean children are the best performers on international achievement tests in mathematics (i.e. the TIMSS). Their excellent results could be due...     

Definitions of bullying: a comparison of terms used,and age and gender differences,in a fourteen-country international comparison

The study of school bullying has recently assumed an international dimension, but is faced with difficulties in finding terms in different languages to correspond to the English word bullying. To investigate the meanings given to various terms, a set of 25 stick-figure cartoons was devised, covering a range of social situations between peers. These cartoons were shown to samples of 8- and 14-year-old pupils (N = 1,245; n = 604 at 8 years, n = 641 at 14 years) in schools in 14 different countries, who judged whether various native terms cognate to bullying, applied to them. Terms from 10 Indo-European languages and three Asian languages were sampled. Multidimensional scaling showed that 8-year-olds primarily discriminated nonaggressive and aggressive cartoon situations; however, 14-year-olds discriminated fighting from physical bullying, and also discriminated verbal bullying and social exclusion. Gender differences were less appreciable than age differences. Based on the 14-year-old data, profiles of 67 words were then constructed across the five major cartoon clusters. The main types of terms used fell into six groups: bullying (of all kinds), verbal plus physical bullying, solely verbal bullying, social exclusion, solely physical aggression, and mainly physical aggression. The findings are discussed in relation to developmental trends in how children understand bullying, the inferences that can be made from cross-national studies, and the design of such studies.     

Assessment of a fertile dialogue (2012–17) / Balance de un diálogo fértil (2012–17)

This text reviews the main goals and achievements from the management of Infancia y Aprendizaje (2012–17). We have promoted a dialogue between developmental psychology and educational psychology from a complex and situated approach. We have also created a section for highly regarded authors to chart prospective lines that could have an impact on areas for development within this field of knowledge. In addition, we brought back the debate between theoretical and methodological positions around a central article. Two different calls promoted the training of scientific writers and reviewers, with an analysis of the modifications introduced into the texts from their receipt up to their publication as well as the interactions among author, reviewers and editors. Other calls encouraged research on the training of university teachers, learning in environments favoured by technology, relationships between argumentation and education, and cognitive change as a dynamic process. At an operational level, we highlight the transition to Taylor & Francis, the configuration of a strictly bilingual journal and the thematic and cultural expansion and diversification of the editorial team at its different levels.     

Development of an efficient search filter to retrieve systematic reviews from PubMed

Objective:Locating systematic reviews is essential for clinicians and researchers when creating or updating reviews and for decision-making in health care. This study aimed to develop a search filter for retrieving systematic reviews that improves upon the performance of the PubMed systematic review search filter.Methods:Search terms were identified from abstracts of reviews published in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and the titles of articles indexed as systematic reviews in PubMed. Both the precision of the candidate terms and the number of systematic reviews retrieved from PubMed were evaluated after excluding the subset of articles retrieved by the PubMed systematic review filter. Terms that achieved a precision greater than 70% and relevant publication types indexed with MeSH terms were included in the filter search strategy.Results:The search strategy used in our filter added specific terms not included in PubMed''s systematic review filter and achieved a 61.3% increase in the number of retrieved articles that are potential systematic reviews. Moreover, it achieved an average precision that is likely greater than 80%.Conclusions:The developed search filter will enable users to identify more systematic reviews from PubMed than the PubMed systematic review filter with high precision.     

A Model for Fostering the Transfer of Learning in Environmental Education

Environmental education programmes can only deal with some of the environmental issues that people face through their life. People will need, therefore, to transfer learning to new situations. In this article factors that could foster transfer are identified, and collected in a model. This model suggests that work in environmental education should be relevant, started by exploring the previous knowledge of those who learn in order to carry out a new learning process valid for resolving authentic environmental problems, and practising the application of what has been learnt to different cases. It also suggests that related content fields should be consciously used: culture, valuation, performance, reasoning, and communication. In each field resources of different cognitive scope, belonging to specific domains, general domains, and meta‐domain, have been identified. The model appears to be interesting for the theoretical development of environmental education, and could also facilitate the design of tools to analyse, improve and create proposals in this area.     

Los juegos de simulación en la EGB: una investigación en el área de las Ciencias Sociales

Resumen

Las autoras tratan de probar la eficacia de los «juegos de simulación» en la enseñanza de la Geografía en la EGB. Para ello realizan la adaptación de un juego aplicándolo a los niveles escolares de 5.° y 7.°, y comparan los resultados de los grupos experimentales con otros de control. Las conclusiones a que llegan se basan en cuatro tipos de pruebas: de memoria, de razonamiento, de aplicación y de valoración del juego. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que estas actividades dan mejores resultados en 7.° que en 5.° y favorecen principalmente a los sujetos menos dotados que ven aumentados sensiblemente sus rendimientos.     

What if we could Imagine an Ideal University? Narratives by Students with Disabilities

This article presents the results of a project entitled, ‘Analysis of University Barriers and Aids Identified by Students with Disabilities’, carried out in a Spanish University. The study used the biographical–narrative methodology, which emphasises the importance of people talking about themselves without silencing their subjectivity. Different types of data collection instruments, such as biographic interview, timelines and photography, were employed to acquire this information. The Results section presents proposals made by students with disabilities which could contribute to developing a more inclusive university. Some of their suggestions were that students with disabilities should be better informed and oriented, academic staff should be better trained to favour their educational inclusion, the settings and infrastructures should be accessible, and universities should be prepared to deal with people with disabilities. The conclusions discuss the main findings of the analysis, comparing them with other previous studies, and making some proposals that help universities progress towards inclusive education.