Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us: Egyptian teachers’ views of science education in secondary schools in London,UK

Small differences in working patterns and social relationships can be indicators of deeper cultural differences. It is these non‐educational issues which point to the serious difficulty of making cross‐cultural comparisons. Data collected from Egyptian science teachers who have visited science classes in London are reported here. UK teachers may be habituated, or unaware of features of school life that are quite striking to the Egyptians as new observers. These include well resourced laboratories, considerable practical work done in small groups and a wide variety of classroom activities. However, it is the professionalism and the good interpersonal relationships that they see in the UK that the Egyptian teachers come to appreciate even more on their return to Egypt. Such a feature of UK teachers’ work cannot be identified by international test score comparisons.     

Assessing preschool number sense: skills demonstrated by children prior to school entry

Components of early number sense, as identified in two Delphi studies and in the number sense literature related to mathematics difficulties, were assessed for 176 children in preschools and childcare centres across one local government area in Sydney, Australia, using tasks or modifications of tasks reported in the number sense literature. In addition, the children’s receptive vocabulary was measured using The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (third edition) and math reasoning was measured using Woodcock‐Johnson III Tests of Achievement. Although the children demonstrated a broad range of skills, there were no significant differences between children attending childcare and preschools for any of the measures. However, boys performed significantly better than girls in quantitative concepts and girls performed better than boys in subitising. In discussing the data, a comparison is made of the skills demonstrated by children and skills that were highlighted in the two Delphi studies and in the early number sense literature as being essential components of number sense prior to school entry. Implications for kindergarten mathematics curricula and approaches to the teaching of early number skills are discussed.     

Harbingers of feminism? Gender,cultural capital and education in mid‐twentieth‐century rural Wales

This paper reports the results of a small‐scale narrative study of men and women who grew up in mid‐twentieth‐century rural Wales, and their reminiscences regarding women and education. Although the dominant image of Wales during that era is that of a male‐dominated society, all of our participants remembered influential independent women and educational aspiration for both girls and boys. We use Bourdieusian notions of types of cultural capital and the role of women in transmitting this to illuminate our participants’ narratives. Accounts of family life disclosed themes of sacrifice concerning education, poverty during childhood and the role of school teaching as a career for women. Yet at the same time, there were forms of exclusion in operation. In conclusion, we suggest that in many ways, the women remembered by our participants could be seen as forerunners of the second wave of feminism.     

Doth the lady protest too much? Pre-service teachers and the experience of dissonance as a catalyst for development

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of beginning pre-service teachers enrolled in a large U.S. teacher preparation program (N = 34). Discussion focuses on participants' identity development as examined through the lens of the stories they learn and tell during and about their initial experiences of becoming teachers. Specifically, the analyses suggest that dissonance may play an important catalytic role in pre-service teacher identity development among the study participants. The stories participants tell illuminate their negotiations of conflicting stories about teaching, teachers work and themselves and inform a tentative theoretical model of identity development. The implications for teacher educators include immediate programmatic concerns as well as issues potentially related to teacher attrition.     

Lexical expertise and reading skill: bottom-up and top-down processing of lexical ambiguity

The lexical quality hypothesis assumes that skilled readers rely on high quality lexical representations that afford autonomous lexical retrieval and reduce the need to rely on top-down context. This experiment investigated this hypothesis by comparing the performance of adults classified on reading comprehension and spelling performance. ‘Lexical experts’, defined by above average performance on both measures, were compared with individuals who are good readers/poor spellers, poor readers/good spellers, or poor on both measures. Sentences finishing with a homograph (e.g., She danced all night at the ball) were followed by a probe word and participants had to decide whether it had occurred in the sentence. Critical probe words were related to either the sentence-congruous or the sentence-incongruous meaning of the homograph (e.g., waltz vs. throw). Lexical experts showed less interference from related probes than the other groups. When the sentences were presented at fast rates, poorer spellers showed interference for sentence-congruous but not sentence-incongruous probes. However, at slower presentation rates, all groups showed equivalent interference for both types of probes. The results support the lexical quality hypothesis by showing that high quality lexical representations, indexed by better spelling, are associated with reduced reliance on sentence context.

Executive Functions in Young Children with Autism

The executive dysfunction hypothesis of autism has received support from most studies of older people with autism; however, studies of young children have produced mixed results. Two studies are presented that compare the performance of preschoolers with autism (mean = 51 months/4.3 years of age) to a control group matched on age, and verbal and nonverbal ability. The first study (n = 18 autism and 17 control) found no group differences in performance on 8 executive function tasks (A not B, Object Retrieval, A not B with Invisible Displacement, 3-Boxes Stationary and Scrambled, 6-Boxes Stationary and Scrambled, and Spatial Reversal), but did find that children with autism initiated fewer joint attention and social interaction behaviors. The second (longitudinal) study of a subset of the children (n = 13 autism and 11 control) from the first study found that neither groups' performance on Spatial Reversal changed significantly over the course of a year. The results of these studies pose a serious challenge to the executive dysfunction hypothesis of autism.