Pedagogy and possibility thinking in the early years

Connecting to current work in the area of creative pedagogies, this paper reports findings of an exploratory study that sought to identify what characterises possibility thinking in young children's learning experiences and how teachers’ pedagogical practice fosters this critical aspect of creativity. It focuses in particular on pedagogy, seeking to demonstrate how approaches adopted facilitated children's possibility thinking. Possibility thinking has been conceptualised as being central to creative learning although its role, as manifest in the learning engagement of children and the pedagogical strategies of practitioners has not been fully illuminated. The co-participative research team involved in this study comprised staff in an early childhood centre, in an infant and a primary school, working collaboratively with three university-based researchers. The 12-month long segment of a longer study employed various data collection methods including video-stimulated review (VSR) to facilitate reflection, critical conversations, classroom observation, interviews and examination of planning documents. The paper illuminates the perspectives and embedded values that the teachers expressed whilst reflecting upon their practice, and highlights common pedagogical themes, including the practice of ‘standing back’, profiling learner agency and creating time and space. Particular strategies were employed by each of the teachers. These approaches appeared to foster possibility thinking in young learners. In addition, the paper considers the development of the teachers’ thinking through the phases of the research process and presents a model for conceptualising a pedagogy of possibility thinking.     

Immediate and long-term effects of a cognitive intervention on intelligence,self-regulation,and academic achievement

The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a package of activities, knows as “Portfolio”, on cognitive functioning, self-regulation, and academic achievement. The study was carried out with a group of 40 students from Compulsory Secondary Education (mean age 13 years old) during 12 hours distributed over two school years. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest-1 and posttest-2 design was employed. Treatment consisted of the administration of specifically selected tasks, assessed in previous studies, from the psycho-pedagogical Instrumental Enrichment Program, the Philosophy for Children Program, and Project Intelligence. The students were evaluated in the criteria variables at the beginning and at the end of treatment, and once again two years later. The results indicate that the procedure was effective in all the variables studied and that gains observed at posttest-1 were maintained for at least two years after the intervention. Some relevant conclusions and suggestions at the educational and scientific level are commented upon.     

Assessment matters—Maximizing campus responsibility for the writing assessment process

The Writing Across the Curriculum movement sensitized institutions to the need for institutionwide commitment to improving student writing. At the University of South Florida, a widely used rubric has offered a powerful method for moving from spoken commitment to real change.     

Young children’s reading for pleasure with digital books: six key facets of engagement

This paper offers a new characterisation of young children’s (2–8 years) reading for pleasure (RfP) with digital books. This characterisation is rooted in a re-contextualisation of Anna Craft’s conceptualisation of twenty-first century childhoods in Creativity and education futures (Stoke on Trent, Trentham, 2011) and a review of the literature concerning young children’s RfP with digital books. The paper develops Craft’s (2011) work by considering the ways in which digital books can resource the ‘4Ps of digital childhood’ in reading for pleasure. Six facets of reader engagement, nested within Craft’s (2011) 4Ps, are presented: affective, creative, interactive, shared, sustained and personalised reading engagements. It is argued that this characterisation of young children’s reading engagements can enrich our understanding of the affordances of digital books in relation to RfP in the twenty-first century. The paper thus offers an important new contribution, going beyond established work in the field, which typically explores digital books in relation to children’s learning, product design or developmental outcomes.     

Validity of the comprehensive receptive and expressive vocabulary test in assessment of children with speech and learning problems

The current researchers investigated construct, predictive, and differential validity for the Comprehensive Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test (CREVT). Participants were 243 public school students, ages 5.5 to 17.25 years. They represented four primary disabilities: Learning Disability (n = 115), Learning Disability with Speech Impairment (n = 29), Mental Retardation (n = 40), and Speech Impairment (n = 59). Adequate construct validity for the CREVT was documented, using the Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children–III as a criterion. Also, the CREVT significantly predicted the scores on the Wide Range Achievement Test–3. Lastly, the CREVT effectively differentiated between students with disabilities. These findings suggest that the CREVT may be helpful in identifying the presence of learning problems. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 39: 613–619, 2002.     

AIDA: a methodology independent support tool for educational software authoring

Many authoring tools have been proposed in an attempt to find more effective ways to face the challenge of developing educational software. However, most of them are reported to be restrictive, since they are strongly connected to a specific educational software development methodology. The AIDA (Ambiente Integrado para o Desenvolvimento de Aplicações educacionais) authoring environment was developed at the University of Coimbra having as its main objectives the support of most of the activities involved in authoring and making educational software development easier. The AIDA system is based on a design module, i.e. a prototyping tool allowing the creation of Windows-based software, including multimedia features. The system assists evaluation activities and it caters also for support on translation and cultural adaptation, as well as on the reutilization of educational materials. The use of the AIDA environment is illustrated by three small examples using different development methodologies.     

Science and Mathematics Instruction of Beginning Elementary Teachers

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Metacognition and EFL/ESL reading

Several distinct research streams are converging in the field of foreign or second language reading in the U.S. Separate research streams in metacognition, in reading strategies, and in the training of reading strategies are converging in the field of English as a foreign or second language. This confluence of research is dramatically impacting the teaching of English to adult non-native speakers for academic purposes. In this article we will briefly review these distinct research streams for their relevance to the population in question, and will then describe the research design for an empirical study we are currently conducting to further investigate the efficacy of metacognitive strategy training for adult EFL/ESL reading.     

Young Children Are Wishful Thinkers: The Development of Wishful Thinking in 3- to 10-Year-Old Children

Previously, research on wishful thinking has found that desires bias older children’s and adults’ predictions during probabilistic reasoning tasks. In this article, we explore wishful thinking in children aged 3- to 10-years-old. Do young children learn to be wishful thinkers? Or do they begin with a wishful thinking bias that is gradually overturned during development? Across five experiments, we compare low- and middle-income United States and Peruvian 3- to 10-year-old children (N = 682). Children were asked to make predictions during games of chance. Across experiments, preschool-aged children from all backgrounds consistently displayed a strong wishful thinking bias. However, the bias declined with age.