Attachment and the child in school. Part I

Abstract

Using the framework of Attachment Theory and related research and the research and experience of the author, a particular pattern of behaviour is described which can be identified in the classroom. This pattern, known as the Anxious Resistant/Ambivalent Attachment Pattern, is described from a teaching and learning perspective and is illustrated with examples from educational practice. Possible opportunities for intervention are discussed aimed at facilitating change in the pupil and enhancing emotional well being and educational opportunity. This article will be followed by another (Part II) describing other patterns of attachment which have been identified, with the aim of extending the teacher's understanding of the meaning of pupil behaviour and increasing the resilience potential in the learning situation.     

History of Broadcasting

BBC TV PRESENTS A FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION by Nicholas Moss (London: BBC, 1986—about $8.00, paper)

THE HISTORY OF TELEVISION FROM EARLY DAYS TO THE PRESENT (same address as Burn's book on previous page—$50.00, Paper)

TELEVISION: THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS by Keith Geddes & Gordon Bussey (National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, Prince's View, Bradford, West rorkshire BD5 0TR—also available at the Science Museum in London $3.00, paper)

HERTZ AND THE MAXWELL IANS by J.G. Q'Hara and W. Pricha (same publisher as Burns on previous page—$48.00)

THE EARLY DAYS OF RADIO BROADCASTING by George H. Douglas (McFariand Publishing, Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640—$25.95)

THE RADIO COLLECTOR'S DIRECTORY AND PRICE GUIDE by Robert E. Grinder and George H. Fathauer (Ironwood Publishing, P.O. Box 8464, Scottsdale, AZ 85252—$15.95, paper)

NIXON AND THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC TELEVISION by David M. Stone (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985—$35.00)

VOICES OF THE GAME: THE FIRST FULL-SCALE OVERVIEW OF BASEBALL BROADCASTING, 1921 TO THE PRESENT by Curt Smith (Diamond Communications, P.O. Box 88, South Bend, IN. 46624—$22.95)     

Examining the dimensionality of performance feedback messages: Source and recipient perceptions of influence attempts

Performance feedback is considered an effective means of influencing organizational members. Nevertheless, recipient perceptions regarding such attempts to motivate, change, and/or reinforce certain behaviors and attitudes will determine the eventual response. Often these responses are unexpected and less than desirable. Efforts to better understand the performance feedback construct have produced conceptions emphasizing its complexity and multidimensionality. However, a recent challenge to the usefulness and /or validity of such conceptualizations has prompted the research reported here. This study explores feedback recipients’ and sources’ perceptions of the underlying dimensionality or “hidden structure” of performance feedback messages.     

Climbing the Staircase: science education for the knowledge economy

Science and technology are widely regarded as the dominant drivers of transformation to a ‘knowledge’ economy and society — a transition in which higher education has a critical role. This paper reviews the influence of successive NZ governments intention to ‘proactively steer’ the tertiary education system towards the achievement of this critical role, and describes an initiative at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) specifically designed to meet New Zealand's needs for a well trained, articulate and flexible workforce of scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff. The ‘staircasing’ model is the culmination of an effort to adapt, modify and extend traditional models of professional science and technology education to provide a mechanism for ‘life‐long learning’ through a flexible and responsive network of purpose‐built courses.     

Grounded blends and mathematical gesture spaces: developing mathematical understandings via gestures

This paper examines how a person’s gesture space can become endowed with mathematical meaning associated with mathematical spaces and how the resulting mathematical gesture space can be used to communicate and interpret mathematical features of gestures. We use the theory of grounded blends to analyse a case study of two teachers who used gestures to construct a graphical anti-derivative while working on a professional development task in a calculus modelling activity. Results indicate that mathematical gesture spaces can encourage mathematical experimentation, lighten the cognitive load for students and can be limited by a person’s physical constraints.     

Affecting the flow of a proof by creating presence—a case study in Number Theory

The notion of flow of a proof encapsulates mathematical, didactical, and contextual aspects of proof presentation. A proof may have different flows, depending on the lecturer’s choices regarding its presentation. Adopting Perelman’s New Rhetoric (PNR) as a theoretical framework, we designed methods to assess aspects of the flow of a proof. We present a case study from a Number Theory class at the beginning undergraduate level, focusing on an intervention concerning one lesson given in two consecutive years. The intervention consisted of a discussion with the lecturer about findings from Year-1 and potential changes in the flow of the proof before the Year-2 lesson. We analyze two aspects of the flow of the proof: the scope and organization of the argumentation and the presence (in the PNR sense) of different elements. Our analysis revealed that the intervention caused global and local changes in the flow and that PNR enables us to capture these changes.     

Query-oriented text summarization based on hypergraph transversals

The rise in the amount of textual resources available on the Internet has created the need for tools of automatic document summarization. The main challenges of query-oriented extractive summarization are (1) to identify the topics of the documents and (2) to recover query-relevant sentences of the documents that together cover these topics. Existing graph- or hypergraph-based summarizers use graph-based ranking algorithms to produce individual scores of relevance for the sentences. Hence, these systems fail to measure the topics jointly covered by the sentences forming the summary, which tends to produce redundant summaries. To address the issue of selecting non-redundant sentences jointly covering the main query-relevant topics of a corpus, we propose a new method using the powerful theory of hypergraph transversals. First, we introduce a new topic model based on the semantic clustering of terms in order to discover the topics present in a corpus. Second, these topics are modeled as the hyperedges of a hypergraph in which the nodes are the sentences. A summary is then produced by generating a transversal of nodes in the hypergraph. Algorithms based on the theory of submodular functions are proposed to generate the transversals and to build the summaries. The proposed summarizer outperforms existing graph- or hypergraph-based summarizers by at least 6% of ROUGE-SU4 F-measure on DUC 2007 dataset. It is moreover cheaper than existing hypergraph-based summarizers in terms of computational time complexity.     

VERBAL JUSTIFICATION—IS IT A PROOF? SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS

According to reform documents, teachers are expected to teach proofs and proving in school mathematics. Research results indicate that high school students prefer verbal proofs to other formats. We found it interesting and important to examine the position of secondary school teachers with regard to verbal proofs. Fifty high school teachers were asked to prove various elementary number theory statements, to write correct and incorrect proofs that students may use, and to evaluate given justifications to statements from elementary number theory. While all the participants provided correct proofs to the statements, our findings indicate that teachers are not aware of students’ preference for verbal justifications. Also, about half of the teachers rejected correct verbal justifications. They claimed that these justifications lacked generality and are mere examples.     

Effects of Mobility Patterning Techniques upon Selected Motor Skills of Primary School Educable Mentally Retarded Children

Abstract

This study compared the effects of mobility patterning techniques to the effects of special physical education activities upon selected motor skills of primary school educable mentally retarded children. The experimental group received the appropriate mobility patterns in creeping, crawling, and walking, which later were practiced in game situations. The control group received special physical education activities. Both groups received daily 30-minute classes, Monday through Friday, from September 1966 to December 1966. Based on the differences in leg power as measured by the hurdle jump and the standing broad jump, it appeared that the special physical education activities contributed more to the development of the subjects. However, neither program was more effective than the other in terms of dynamic balance, agility, or fine manual motor coordination.