Shared Reading by Cambodian Mothers and Children Learning English as a Second Language: Reciprocal Gains

Subjects were five Cambodian mother‐child pairs. Three mothers (Group One) had received one year's schooling, and two (Group Two) had had no schooling in Cambodia; all children were participating in regular primary school class reading programs and receiving individual help from an ESL teacher. Group One was introduced to Shared Reading in a multiple baseline across‐subjects design, while an AB design was used for Group Two. Probes were taken of mothers and children reading individually from unseen books at the same level as those used in Shared Reading. During the Shared Reading program the Group One mothers and children markedly increased their rate of progress through book levels as did the Group Two children, but the Group Two mothers did not, although there was some evidence of minor progress in word recognition. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of the interactive social context for acquiring literacy skills.     

Contexts for Independent Learning

One major world view that dominates the field of developmental psychology is the organismic world view. This world view depicts individuals, including children, as active agents who know the world in terms of their own operations upon it. Individuals are seen as being in control of their own learning. This control is exercised by individuals initiating and maintaining their own learning opportunities within a responsive social context.

The responsive social context is increasingly seen by developmental psychologists (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Wood, 1982) as of fundamental importance for the acquisition of intellectual skills. It is within responsive social contexts that individuals acquire not only specific skills but also generic knowledge about how to learn. It is this generic knowledge that allows individuals a measure of control over, and hence independence in, these social contexts.

Educational policy statements, school prospectuses and, more recently, the Core Curriculum, abound with aims and objectives to do with achieving individual autonomy and independence as a learner. Yet there is growing evidence that in many contemporary classrooms at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, we may be providing precisely the wrong contexts for students to become autonomous and independent learners. Too many classroom learning environments simply do not qualify as responsive social contexts. Individual learners have minimal control over learning interactions and hence are excessively dependent on external control by teachers.

Theoretical explanations for differences between unskilled and skilled performance are being sought increasingly in terms of characteristics of the specific contexts in which performance occurs and less in terms of qualitative differences in global capacities or in thinking processes between individuals (Wood, 1982). For example, differences in complexity of oral language between three‐year‐old children might be explained by differences in the amount and quality of language exchange with caregivers. They might also be explained by differences in caregiver skills in interpreting and responding to needs signalled by an individual child's use of language in a particular context. If we are genuinely concerned about aims of autonomy and independence in learning, then we need to discover and analyse those characteristics of responsive environments which support and promote independent learning. On the basis of existing research it is possible to specify four such characteristics of responsive learning contexts.

     

Organizational responses to the labor market

Shifts in the labor market require adaptive responses on the part of formal organizations. Such organizational responses are shown in changes in recruitment strategies. This study examines how departments in comprehensive colleges and universities formulate their faculty recruitment strategies and set standards for new faculty personnel. Comprehensive institutions are neither research universities nor liberal arts colleges. Even though most offer graduate degrees at the master's level in such areas as teacher training and business programs, they are predominantly devoted to undergraduate education. Lacking strong ties to distinctive beliefs and identities, these institutions have become increasingly vulnerable to environmental changes.Based on extensive fieldwork at four institutions, this paper focuses on twenty faculty searches conducted over a period of substantial changes in academic labor markets. Several common search episodes are identified.The general pattern of recruitment strategies is shaped by the rule of status competition in a prestige hierarchy: less prestigious organizations compete for institutional legitimacy by adopting the norms of more prestigious organizations. Search-related practices in these comprehensive institutions are, therefore, organized around the institutional rituals that conform to the standards of more prestigious research universities and elite liberal arts colleges. Search and recruitment practices often reflect a ritualized form of preoccupation with credentials, specialities, and procedures. Despite their initial emphasis on specific goals, those involved in the search were less concerned about search outcomes than about processes.     

Using Kinesthetic Activities to Teach Ptolemaic and Copernican Retrograde Motion

This paper describes a method for teaching planetary retrograde motion, and the Ptolemaic and Copernican accounts of retrograde motion, by means of a series kinesthetic learning activities (KLAs). In the KLAs described, the students literally walk through the motions of the planets in both systems. A retrospective statistical analysis shows that students who participated in these activities performed better on examination questions pertaining to retrograde motion than students who did not. Potential explanations for this result, including the breaking of classroom routine, the effect of body movement on conceptual memory, and egocentric spatial proprioception, are considered.     

International assessment: A Rasch model and teachers' evaluation of TIMSS science achievement items

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is a comparative assessment of the achievement of students in many countries. In the present study, a rigorous independent evaluation was conducted of a representative sample of TIMSS science test items because item quality influences the validity of the scores used to inform educational policy in those countries. The items had been administered internationally to 16,009 students in their eighth year of formal schooling. The evaluation had three components. First, the Rasch model, which emphasizes high quality items, was used to evaluate the items psychometrically. Second, readability and vocabulary analyses were used to evaluate the wording of the items to ensure they were comprehensible to the students. And third, item development guidelines were used by a focus group of science teachers to evaluate the items in light of the TIMSS assessment framework, which specified the format, content, and cognitive domains of the items. The evaluation components indicated that the majority of the items were of high quality, thereby contributing to the validity of TIMSS scores. These items had good psychometric characteristics, readability, vocabulary, and compliance with the assessment framework. Overall, the items tended to be difficult: constructed response items assessing reasoning or application were the most difficult, and multiple choice items assessing knowledge or application were less difficult. The teachers revised some of the sampled items to improve their clarity of content, conciseness of wording, and fit with format specifications. For TIMSS, the findings imply that some of the non‐sampled items may need revision, too. For researchers and teachers, the findings imply that the TIMSS science items and the Rasch model are valuable resources for assessing the achievement of students. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 1321–1344, 2012     

Evoking the World of Poetic Nonfiction Picture Books

An increasingly prevalent and accessible form of hybrid nonfiction picture books blends factual information with poetry or poetic devices to create literary nonfiction. This important form of hybrid text has been sparsely examined. This article addresses three questions about poetic nonfiction picture books: first, how might we categorize picture books that represent this hybrid text?; second, by what criteria might we evaluate the quality of these books?; third, based in Rosenblatt’s concept of reader’s stance, how might we read these books? The author develops a typology of six categories along a continuum from poetry to narrative or expository prose. He examines well-established criteria in the fields of picture books, children’s nonfiction, and poetry that can apply to poetic nonfiction picture books. He argues that in the best of these books, the poetry or poetic devices are synergistic with the content and raise the overall reading experience. The author also argues that, depending where along the continuum each of these books is located, a reader’s stance moves along the continuum of efferent to aesthetic experience. All these books demand a dynamic and recursive reading process. He suggests ways to work with teachers to teach deep readings of these books.     

The Inevitable Shift to Cloud-Based Book Publishing: The Next Step in the Digital Transformation of Book Publishing May be Closer than You Think

Software used by book publishers to manage contracts, royalties, production workflow, sales, and marketing have begun to migrate from relatively closed systems that are internally maintained, to cloud-based platforms on the Web. Business drivers behind this migration include a highly dynamic market for ebooks and other digital products, pressures to cut costs, and a shrinking ROI horizon for technology investments. While questions remain as to how quickly the transition will take, the possibility of cloud-based book publishing promises to change the nature of publishing infrastructure and with it the role of the IT professionals in publishing.     

The Changing Structure of British Higher Education: How diverse is it?

With the passage of the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act the British system of higher education formally moved from a binary to a unitary structure. However, ever since successive governments have argued for a diversified model of higher education within which institutions should pursue contrasting goals. This article offers an interpretation of the key ingredients of institutional diversification and constructs alternative structural models of higher education. It proceeds by exploring the changing structure of British higher education since the creation of the unitary model. The argument is that there has been a steady emergence of flexible sectors, which both converge and diversify. However, there is a danger that the 2011 White Paper, rather than sustaining flexible sectors, could intensify the nascent shift in the direction of stratification marked by increasing differentiation between sectors as they converge internally.

     

Taking Political Autonomy Seriously: a reply to Ian Gregory

This paper raises some questions about academic authorial honesty under the headings of Plagiarism (including self‐plagiarism), Theft, and Collusion. Compared with the medical sciences, the social sciences in general and education specifically, lag behind in terms of critical attention being paid to the problem of plagiarism, the peer review process and academic authorial ethics. The ubiquity of the Internet, the ever intensifying demand to publish or perish, and maybe, a general shift in perceptions of what constitutes ‘bad’ plagiarism and collusion which challenge traditional notions of what constitutes authorial honesty, mean that the time may be ripe for a consideration by academic writers and journal editors of how they regard and deal with the whole area. This paper makes an early contribution to the discussion.