An overview of RMP library activities: present and future

The creation of the Regional Medical Programs has resulted in the origin of many library-related projects. Different regions have had a variety of projects. Surveys of resources in hospital libraries, continuing medical education surveys, and workshops for training hospital library personnel have been frequent. Instructional materials for library education have been developed or improved. Reference services have been stressed in many regions, and union lists of serials have been started. Grants for library projects total $1.4 million.     

Verbal and nonverbal indices of the communicative performance and acculturation of Chinese immigrants

This paper develops a theoretical framework for examining the acculturation process of immigrants. Focusing on communication variables, it suggests five levels of analysis for assessing acculturation as a continuous rather than dichotomous variable: the speech act level, ritualistic communication, strategic communication, the organization of conversational discourse, and verbal information processing. Examples from research on Chinese communication are utilized to illustrate important differences between Chinese and Americans at each level of analysis. The use of this perspective offers the twofold promise of improving our understanding of “acculturation processes” in general as well as our understanding of the particular everyday communicative actions of immigrant groups. Research on Chinese communication patterns using this perspective will increase our knowledge of Chinese and American interrelations, in addition to providing insight aimed at developing better indices of acculturation of Chinese in the United States.     

Teachers’ and principals’ reflections on student participation in a school science and technology competition

Background The European Union asks for renewed pedagogies in schools according to teaching strategies and necessary competences for the twenty-first century, instead of the often-used transmissive pedagogies. The national Swedish competition in science and technology for grade eight, The Technology Eight, provides an opportunity for teachers to work with instructional strategies in line with suggested pedagogies.

Purpose To investigate teachers’ and principals’ reflections on the competition in schools.

Sample Seventeen secondary school teachers and three principals from districts in the south-western part of Sweden participated in the study. All teachers had long experience of the competition, and their classes had reached at least the regional finals during the last year.

Design and methods Semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and then analysed using content analysis. Focus was put on why the teachers decided to participate, how the teachers integrated the competition in their education and roles of the principals.

Results There were various reasons for participating in the competition. Teachers reported development of twenty-first-century skills such as better cooperation between the students. They also noticed an increased interest in science and technology and how learning in the subjects was stimulated. Furthermore, the teachers found participation in the competition to be positive for them too. They integrated the competition in ordinary education and gained teaching ideas as well as found connections to the curriculum. Participating in the competition seemed to be a tradition in most of the schools. The principals’ role was to facilitate the organisation around the competition and to provide social support.

Conclusions Participation in a school competition was considered as an instructional strategy with several positive outcomes. Use of this strategy can be supported by earlier suggestions to use pedagogies that are opposite to transmissive methods, enhancing students’ development of important skills for the future.     

Expertise, Aptitude, and Strategic Remembering

Second- and fourth-grade children were classified according to their knowledge of soccer (experts vs. novices) and IQ (high vs. low), and given 2 sort-recall tasks. One task included items related to the game of soccer and the other included items from familiar natural language categories. Previous research has shown that expertise in a subject can compensate for low levels of performance on text comprehension tasks. Our results, the first examining the effects of both expertise and intelligence on a strategic memory task, were that soccer expert children recalled more items on the soccer list but not on the nonsoccer list than soccer novice children. However, soccer expertise did not modify a significant effect of IQ level, with high-IQ children recalling more than low-IQ children for all contrasts. Interest in soccer was found to be related to expertise but did not contribute to differences in memory performance. The results demonstrate that the knowledge base plays an important role in children's memory, but that domain knowledge cannot fully eliminate the effects of IQ on sort-recall tasks using domain-related materials. That is, although rich domain knowledge seemed to compensate for low aptitude, in that low-aptitude experts performed at the level of high-aptitude novices, its effects were not strong enough to eliminate performance differences between high- and low-aptitude soccer experts.     

Social acceptance of students with Down syndrome and students without disability

We investigated the influence of teacher feedback on the social acceptance of peers with intellectual disabilities and peers without disabilities. A computer task was administered to 601 students in grades 3 and 4. Twenty-six per cent of the students attend an inclusive school; the others are in regular schools without students with special educational needs. Participants are introduced to ‘new’ virtual classmates, one student with Down syndrome (DS), and one control student with no obvious disability. Additionally, teacher feedback and feedback about fun playing with the new classmates is given. Social acceptance is evaluated by asking if one would like to sit next to him/her. Both feedbacks showed a strong effect. The child with DS was less socially accepted than the child without disability. No difference regarding the social acceptance of the students with DS was found between students from inclusive and regular classes. Students from regular classes rate the social acceptance of the student without disabilities significantly higher than students from inclusive classrooms.     

The role of classroom characteristics for students’ motivation and career exploration

This study focused on students enrolled in obligatory vocational education courses in German secondary schools that aim to support students’ career exploration. The study examined the relations between student-perceived classroom characteristics (support for autonomy, competence and relatedness), students’ intrinsic motivation and their career exploration (self- and environmental exploration). Data were analysed from 1780 seventh- to tenth-graders (boys: 54.2%) from 13 German secondary schools. The structural equation modelling results revealed that student-perceived support for autonomy, competence and relatedness in class was significantly positively related to their intrinsic motivation and self-exploration. Student-perceived support for competence was significantly positively related to environment exploration. Student-perceived relatedness in class was significantly positively related to their achievement. Intrinsic motivation was significantly positively related to self- and environment exploration and achievement. The results showed that the paths within the tested model varied for boys and girls. Findings are discussed in relation to their implications for career preparation in school, as well as related to gendered motivational processes.     

Saving squawk? Animal and human entanglement at the edge of the lagoon

Emerging posthuman paradigms are beginning to influence approaches to educational research and pedagogy, including the ‘common worlds’ investigations of relations among children and wild animals in early childhood settings. This paper turns to child-animal encounters in a secondary school wetlands project to explore some of the implications of posthumanism for environmental education. It explores how singular encounters with wild animals – a swamp hen, a turtle and an eel – became pivot points for young people’ s affective and creative engagement with the site and emerging issues of environmental responsibility, sustainability and urban land and water management. Though initially the neighbourhood lagoon in the middle of a new housing development seemed to be a tenuous, degraded and domesticated wetland, the students and their teachers began an inquiry into the deep interconnectedness of the site with natural waterways, the animals that move through them, and themselves. Open-ended interdisciplinary inquiries enabled students to choose a range of modes of response including a rap song about the ‘rescue’ of a swamp hen, a picture book that documented the passage of eels from the Pacific to the urban wetland and a dance about a dead turtle.     

Friendship and Attitudes Toward School Among Children of Two Muslim Communities in Marseille

Immigrants from the Comoros Islands constitute a closely-knit community in Marseille, where they interact in the Quartiers Nord with the North African community, which is larger in number, which arrived generally a generation earlier, and whose children continue to underachieve at school. It is commonly expected that the Comorians will adjust better to school because of their tight communal organization and because of their specific needs for educational achievement. These needs are thought to relate to the money needed to return to the Comoros and to finance their children's marriage ceremonies there. In our study, pupils of Comorian origin in the senior primary school years displayed more positive attitudes toward the academic aspects of schooling than did pupils of North African origin. For both Algerians and Comorians, positive aspects of friendship quality were associated with better attitudes toward school. In-group friendships were more common than friendships with members of other ethnic groups. In-group friendships were of higher quality than friendships between members of different groups. Comorian children whose best friends were from outside their ethnic group were those with more negative attitudes toward school; the reverse applied to Algerians.     

Beliefs and practices of itinerant teachers of deaf and hard of hearing children concerning literacy development

A qualitative case study examined beliefs and practices of itinerant teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students concerning literacy development, the match between these teachers' beliefs and practices, and the impact of itinerant settings. Five itinerant teachers and 15 students participated. Hearing losses were mild to profound. The research addressed 5 areas: sociocultural aspects of literacy development; effects of hearing loss on literacy development; beliefs about teaching and literacy development; practices used to develop literacy; the impact of itinerant settings on literacy development of deaf and hard of hearing learners. Five themes emerged from the data: Itinerant teachers used a variety of practices to develop literacy; itinerant teachers played a supporting role in developing literacy; most of the teachers' beliefs about literacy development were matched in their practices; the itinerant teachers were lifelong learners; the impact of itinerant settings on literacy development took many forms.