Learning about literacy: Children’s versions of the Literacy Hour

This article reports on an enquiry into the responses of a class of Year 1 children, aged 5‐6 years, to the first eight months of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS). Children were given incomplete drawings to represent the four parts of the Literacy Hour. In completing the drawings the children made their own interpretations of the Literacy Hour. They could choose to write thought or speech bubbles, draw faces and expressions, make written or dictated comments about the teacher and the children portrayed. The methodology enabled these young children to articulate detailed responses to their experience of a particular style of teaching. Each child documented a range of attitudes to and feelings about whole class teaching, group work and the plenary session. These insights, which were often challenging, put the emotional dimension of learning at the centre of their experiences of the NLS.     

Nonword recall and phonemic discrimination in four‐ to six‐year‐old children

Previous research has established that the degree of ‘wordlikeness’ of nonwords affects young children's nonword repetition performance. Experiment 1 examined the possibility that output processes are responsible for the wordlikeness effect by using a probed recall procedure. Wordlikeness was defined in terms of phonological neighbourhood density, although this measure was found to be related to the traditional measure of wordlikeness involving adult ratings. A significant effect of number of phonological neighbours/wordlikeness was observed in favour of nonwords with many neighbours. In Experiments 2 and 3 the wordlikeness effect was qualified by a significant interaction with nonword repetition ability. Children with poorer repetition ability were affected by number of neighbours/wordlikeness, while children with better repetition ability were not. Children with poorer repetition ability were significantly poorer than the better repeaters with nonwords with few neighbours. The results were interpreted in terms of theories of phonological development that suggest progressive segmentation of lexical representations. In Experiment 4 the relationship of children's nonword repetition ability to phonemic discrimination ability was investigated. The results demonstrated that children with better nonword repetition ability had superior phonemic discrimination performance than children with poorer nonword repetition ability.     

Temporal integration in second-order conditioning and sensory preconditioning

Lick suppression experiments with rats revealed that the magnitude of both second-order conditioning (Experiment 1) and sensory preconditioning (Experiment 2) was superior when that conditioning was based on backward (US→CS) relative to forward (CS→US) first-order pairings of a CS and US. The superiority of backward relative to forward first-order conditioning on suppression to the higher order cues can be understood by assuming that the magnitude of higher order conditioning was determined by a memory representation of the higher order cues that provided information about the expected temporal location of the US. The results suggest that temporal information such as order between paired CSs and USs was encoded, preserved, and integrated with memory for the higher order stimuli. The relevance of these findings to memory integration in Pavlovian learning, the temporal coding hypothesis (Barnet, Arnold, & Miller, 1991; Matzel, Held, & Miller, 1988), backward excitatory conditioning, and the associative structure that underlies second-order Pavlovian fear conditioning are discussed.     

Located in the thin of it: Young children’s use of thin moral concepts

One important socio-cultural medium through which young children’s moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children’s use of basic (‘thin’) evaluative concepts (good, bad, right and wrong), which are ubiquitous in everyday discourse and serve as a potential bridge from the non-moral to the moral domain. We investigated 14 2–5-year-old children’s (and their parents’) use of thin evaluative concepts and found that while they frequently used good and bad to morally evaluate other people’s and their own psychological/dispositional states and behaviors—as well as, less frequently, to highlight relevant standards, expectations and rules—they did not use right and wrong. In contrast, a sample of US written and spoken public conversation revealed that adults did. Reasons for this are discussed, along with the frequency of different types of moral evaluations, differences between children and their parents, and age-related trends.     

Do Differential Grading Standards Across Fields Matter for Major Choice? Evidence from a Policy Change in Florida

Research in Higher Education - Grading standards in college vary substantially across fields, especially among STEM fields that tend to give lower grades than non-STEM fields. Prior research has...     

University students’ perceptions of a fair learning environment: a social justice perspective

This study aimed to identify the manner in which university students construe ‘fair treatment’ and how justice related processes are perceived to influence students’ psychological identification with their academic department. In the first study, 342 undergraduate psychology students completed two questionnaires: one measured various aspects of interpersonal, procedural and outcome fairness in their department, and the other measured their level of psychological identification with the department. Students construed the fairness of their learning environment in terms of two conceptually distinct justice factors: respectful partnership between staff and students reflecting primarily interpersonal justice considerations; and systemic fairness reflecting a concern for accessible information and effective problem‐solving procedures. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that although both justice factors significantly influenced students’ psychological identification with their department, interactional justice concerns (i.e., respectful staff–student partnership) were most strongly predictive. In the second study (n = 87), students’ perceptions of fairness were found to share substantial variance with their ratings on the good teaching and clear goals scales of the Course Experience Questionnaire.     

The Effects of Verbal Mediation Training on the Problem‐Solving Skills of Children with Partial Sight and Children without Visual Impairments

Thirty children with partial sight and 30 children with unimpaired sight aged between 8 and 12 years were randomly assigned to either verbal mediation or visual mediation training regimes. Participants were asked to complete four variations of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and success on the task was judged on the basis of the number of moves and time taken to complete the puzzles. Children with visual impairments had some difficulty in adjusting to the requirements of the problem‐solving tasks. However, on the final and most difficult of the tasks (a four‐disc problem), the children with impaired sight performed very much like participants without visual impairments. The effect of verbal mediation training was superior to that of visual mediation training in the final trials of the four‐disc problem‐solving period for both children with partial sight and children without visual impairments.