Generalising the pattern rule for visual growth patterns: Actions that support 8 year olds’ thinking

A common approach used for introducing algebra to young adolescents is an exploration of visual growth patterns and expressing these patterns as functions and algebraic expressions. Past research has indicated that many adolescents experience difficulties with this approach. This paper explores teaching actions and thinking that begins to bridge many of these difficulties at an early age. A teaching experiment was conducted with two classes of students with an average age of eight years and six months. From the results it appears that young students are capable not only of thinking about the relationship between two data sets, but also of expressing this relationship in a very abstract form.     

LEARNING TO THINK SPATIALLY: WHAT DO STUDENTS ‘SEE’ IN NUMERACY TEST ITEMS?

Learning to think spatially in mathematics involves developing proficiency with graphics. This paper reports on 2 investigations of spatial thinking and graphics. The first investigation explored the importance of graphics as 1 of 3 communication systems (i.e. text, symbols, graphics) used to provide information in numeracy test items. The results showed that graphics were embedded in at least 50?% of test items across 3 year levels. The second investigation examined 11??C?12-year-olds?? performance on 2 mathematical tasks which required substantial interpretation of graphics and spatial thinking. The outcomes revealed that many students lacked proficiency in the basic spatial skills of visual memory and spatial perception and the more advanced skills of spatial orientation and spatial visualisation. This paper concludes with a reaffirmation of the importance of spatial thinking in mathematics and proposes ways to capitalize on graphics in learning to think spatially.     

A social semiotic analysis of the discursive construction of teacher identity in the ‘book of rules and customs’ of the Australian Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Up until the 1960s, Catholic schools throughout most of the English‐speaking world were dominated by members of religious teaching orders, including female religious. For over a century following their establishment in 1866, one of the most prominent female religious teaching orders in Australia was that of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The first part of this paper contextualises the emergence of this particular religious order in terms of the development of Catholic education internationally and in Australia, and the associated ‘religious formation’ of nuns as teachers. Part two is centered on the most significant text used to guide the ‘religious formation’ of members of this order both as religious and as teachers, namely, that of their ‘rules and customs’. Drawing on an analytic approach based on a theory of social semiotics, it analyses both the sets of practices and the textual mechanisms through which the identity of members of the order as teachers was constructed.     

Early Home Activities and Oral Language Skills in Middle Childhood: A Quantile Analysis

Oral language development is a key outcome of elementary school, and it is important to identify factors that predict it most effectively. Commonly researchers use ordinary least squares regression with conclusions restricted to average performance conditional on relevant covariates. Quantile regression offers a more sophisticated alternative. Using data of 17,687 children from the United Kingdom's Millennium Cohort Study, we compared ordinary least squares and quantile models with language development (verbal similarities) at 11 years as the outcome. Gender had more of an effect at the top of the distribution, whereas poverty, early language, and reading to the child had a greater effect at the bottom. The picture for TV watching was more mixed. The results are discussed in terms of the provision of universal and targeted interventions.     

A perpetual motion machine: The preserved digital scholarly record

• Digital preservation will never be a solved problem: it needs constant reinvention, and is going to become harder over time.
• Scholarship is changing and this is affecting what needs to be preserved and what preservation means to the future of knowledge discovery.
• The diversification of outputs means that knowledge exists in a network of contextual metadata, data, software, standards and publications—requiring multilateral management of this complex knowledge graph.
• Preservation demands new skills, technologies and resources from librarians, publishers, funders and institutions—and more joined-up thinking about archiving.