MEMORY TRAINING IN THE COMMUNITY: EVALUATIONS BY PARTICIPANTS AND EFFECTS ON METAMEMORY

This study examined 129 participants in seven types of memory training programs in Belgium. It was found that more than half of the subjects participated because they felt their memory was deteriorating or because they were afraid of memory deterioration. After completion of the program, subjects rated the training as being somewhat too short, as useful for their daily lives, as very pleasant, and as being of adequate difficulty. Almost all subjects indicated they would like to take part in a follow‐up training program. Forty‐one percent of the subjects indicated increased memory awareness as the main effect; other effects often cited included the discovery that subjects were not the only ones with complaints, increased knowledge of memory functioning, and the possibility for self‐development. However, no pre‐to‐posttraining effect could be found on scales of the Memory Functioning Questionnaire, except for a small (but significant) increase in self‐reported frequency of forgetting.     

Exploration of teaching strategies that stimulate the growth of academic skills of children with ASD in special education school

The cognitive growth of children with developmental disorders, like autism, can be seriously impaired due to the disorder. If so, in the Netherlands, these children can attend special schools where they are treated to ameliorate disorder symptoms and to stimulate cognitive growth. The aim of this paper was to identify teaching strategies that stimulate the growth of academic skills in children diagnosed with autism, attending a special needs education school in the Netherlands. Findings showed that the strongest underlying teaching strategy that predicted the academic growth of the children on the autism spectrum in the short and long term was the provision of structure in place, time and activities. It was further found that long-term academic gains were partly predicted by the emotional support from their teachers. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Adult education in Australia: shifting identities 1980?2000

In this paper we analyse changes in the provision of adult education in Australia in the 20 years to 2000. We do so by identifying the ways in which adult education has responded to global trends and issues relating to demography, the ‘knowledge economy’, the changing workplace, and the changing role of the state from a ‘provider’ to a ‘purchaser’ of education. Perhaps the key change in adult education since 1980 is that it has been reconfigured as ‘adult learning’, while paradoxically increasing its profile in the guise of the ‘ACE’ sector, and thus standing alongside TAFE and the universities as a major postsecondary education provider. We argue that adult education provision in 2000 is more widely recognized, inclusive of more activities, more central, better managed, more abundant, and that it has recognizably responded to the changing context in which it is located.     

Finger-writing intervention impacts the spelling and handwriting skills of children with developmental language disorder: a multiple single-case study

Learning to use grapheme to phoneme correspondences (GPCs) provides a powerful mechanism for the foundation of reading skills in children. However, for some children, such as those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), the GPC learning process takes time, is laborious, and impacts the entire reading and spelling processes. The present study aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of a finger-writing intervention on reading, spelling and handwriting performances. A visuomotor support was designed to help them to learn more efficiently GPCs since children with DLD appear to have altered phonological representations in memory. Over a period of two months, five children with DLD from a special primary school (aged from 7.42 years to 10.17 years) received individually either a finger-writing intervention or a control intervention, both focusing on phonological awareness and the learning of specific GPCs. In the finger-writing intervention, the child had to explore with their fingers the shape of relief-graphemes and excavated-letter. In the control intervention, the same exercises were made except that the two finger-writing tasks were replaced by two visual discrimination tasks. Children were compared on several measures (reading, spelling, handwriting and phonological awareness) before and after the treatment. Results indicated that the children from the finger-writing intervention showed greater improvement than the children from the control group in learning GPCs to improve their graphemic spelling and, for two of the three children, in handwriting. These findings have a clear practical implication for teachers' instructional practices at school.     

Picturing ‘our’ heritage in the pedagogic text: layout and illustrations in an Australian and a Swedish history textbook

This paper is about re-representing the lifeworlds experienced by different participants in the 'same' physics classrooms; dissatisfied with the monolithic accounts that dominate the educational literature, we offer here an attempt to w/ri(gh)te classroom research. This paper, therefore, has a dual purpose: We exemplify how authors might want to represent different perspectives on the 'same' classroom and we build on this example to argue for w/ri(gh)ting research by drawing on literary forms that differ from traditional master narratives. W/ri(gh)ting requires reading in new ways; by skipping text, readers risk missing out on the reflexivity of our argument.     

The Behavior of Teachers and the Productive Behavior of their Pupils

This experiment investigated the effects of progress self-monitoring on children’s achievement and percepts of self-efficacy in the context of mathematical competency development. Children lacking subtraction skills received didactic instruction in subtraction and practice opportunities. Some children (self-monitoring) monitored their own progress after each training session, whereas others (external monitoring) had their progress monitored by an adult. A third group received no monitoring. Results showed that self- and external monitoring led to significantly higher percepts of efficacy, skill, and persistence compared with no monitoring. The two progress monitoring conditions did not differ significantly on these measures. The utility of self-monitoring procedures in actual classrooms is discussed.     

“Conversation of Mankind” or “idle talk”?: a pragmatist approach to Social Networking Sites

What do Social Networking Sites (SNS) ‘do to us’: are they a damning threat or an emancipating force? Recent publications on the impact of “Web 2.0” proclaim very opposite evaluative positions. With the aim of finding a middle ground, this paper develops a pragmatist approach to SNS based on the work of Richard Rorty. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze SNS as conversational practices. Second, we outline, in the form of an imaginary conversation between Rorty and Heidegger, a positive and negative ‘conversational’ view on SNS. Third, we deploy a reflection, again using Rortian notions, on that evaluation, starting from the concept of ‘self-reflectivity.’ Finally, the relations between these three steps are more detailedly investigated. By way of the sketched technique, we can interrelate the two opposing sides of the recent debates—hope and threat—and judge SNS in all their ambiguity.