Dramatizing the Authentic Research of a Local Scientist to Urban Elementary Students Through Professional Theater

This article focuses on the impact of a professional play that we developed in order to introduce elementary learners of an urban school to the research of a scientist working at a local university. The play was written in a way that might increase student understandings of the nature of science, scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do. We collected pre-and post-play questionnaire responses and drawings of scientists from third and fourth grade students who attended the play. We also interviewed five of the ten teachers whose students attended the play. Findings indicated that most of these teachers felt strongly that their students had learned about scientific inquiry, the identity of scientists, and the work that scientists do as a result of attending the play. However, less than half of the student questionnaires and drawings of scientists indicated such growth as a result of the play. That being said, numerous students were able to tell us what they learned from the play and many questionnaire responses and drawings indicated such learning. Implications for partnerships between schools and university faculty from various disciplines in order to develop potentially impactful plays that portray authentic scientific research are discussed.     

OGRE: Three-Dimensional Program Visualization for Novice Programmers

As demonstrated in our earlier paper (Milne and Rowe, 2002), students learning object-oriented programming find topics related to the computer's handling of memory the most difficult to understand. Our results indicated that a visualization of a running object-oriented program, with particular emphasis on the display of how objects are related to each other in memory, would help students to learn these topics.Here we describe OGRE (Object-oriented GRaphical Environment) – a program visualization tool that has been developed to specifically address these memory related issues by providing three-dimensional, interactive visualizations that aid higher-level understanding of a program's execution in memory. OGRE has been evaluated with positive results that show significant improvements in students' understanding of C++'s memory-related topics.     

Infant pointing: communication to cooperate or communication to learn?

Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski (2007) present compelling data to support the view that infant pointing, from the outset, is communicative and deployed in many of the same situations in which adults would ordinarily point for one another, either to share their interest in something, or to informatively help the other person. This commentary concurs with the view that infant pointing is a communicative gesture, but challenges their interpretation of the motives behind pointing in 12-month-olds. An alternative account is proposed, according to which infant pointing is neither declarative nor imperative, but interrogative, and rather than being driven by the motive to share or help, it may serve a powerful cultural learning mechanism by which infants can obtain information from knowledgeable adults.     

Women's voices on recovery: a multi-method study of the complexity of recovery from child sexual abuse

OBJECTIVE: The current study was exploratory and used multiple methods to examine patterns of stability and change in resilient functioning across 7 years of early adulthood. Second, qualitative data were used to examine in greater detail survivors' own narratives about correlates of healing. METHOD: This study was longitudinal and used both structured and open-ended interviews. Eighty women with documented hospital records of child sexual abuse were interviewed at two time points 7 years apart in early adulthood. Structured interviews including investigator-based questions and standardized measures of trauma exposure and functioning were conducted. A subset of 21 survivors participated in in-depth, open-ended interviews about coping with sexual abuse. RESULTS: Quantitative findings showed patterns of both stability and change on an index of resilient functioning across multiple domains in the 7 years between interviews with 76% of participants showing less than a one standard deviation change in scores. Lower resilience was associated with exposure to additional trauma between the two interviews (r=-.44) while positive functioning was related to social role satisfaction and positive sense of community. Qualitative data permitted examination of the dynamic quality of recovery over time including the role of "turning points" across the lifespan. CONCLUSIONS: The findings extend previous studies of resilience in the examination of how it changes over the course of one segment of the life cycle. This study supports recent work that described resilience as a non-linear process and further highlights factors including the role of re-traumatization, social supports, and opportunities for making new choices that may be important correlates of recovery processes among sexual abuse survivors over time.     

Financing access and participation in primary education: Is there a ‘fast-track’ for fragile states?

Despite moves to ‘fast-track’ progress towards universal primary education, few fragile states have been able to access Fast Track Initiative (FTI) funding facilities. Weak systems and capacity have made these countries a high-risk proposition for donor investment. The absence of credible education sector plans has meant that the majority of fragile states are not eligible for endorsement to receive financial resources via the FTI. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that the FTI has struggled to identify suitable channels for resourcing education in these difficult development environments. Importantly, it finds that procedural and governance issues in particular have presented obstacles that have stymied the promotion of wider access to education in fragile states under the FTI umbrella.     

Deliberation 2.0: Comparing the Deliberative Quality of Online News User Comments Across Platforms

As news organizations look toward social networking sites as a way to expand their audience, the present article explores how this trend might impact discussion among users of political news content. A content analysis of user comments left by readers of the Washington Post suggests that when it comes to discussing political news, there are significant differences in the deliberative quality of those who access the news directly through the news organization's Web site and those who access the same news via Facebook. In short, comments left by Web site users exhibited greater deliberative quality than those left by Facebook users.     

Spelling development: Fine-tuning strategy-use and capitalising on the connections between words

English spelling, as well as in many other languages, consists of three elements: morphology, etymology and phonology. Spelling instruction, however, focuses primarily on phonology and there is a dearth of intervention studies that examine the effect of explicitly teaching all three elements to children. We report two studies, which examined 5- to 11-year olds' spelling strategies and the effect of a spelling intervention. The intervention groups, in both studies, significantly outperformed control groups on all spelling measures. The benefits of teaching children about morphology and etymology are discussed.     

Quasi-static mechanical behaviour of soils used for natural turf sports surfaces and stud force prediction

The quasi-static testing of soils used in natural turf pitches yields key parameters in soil modelling, including elastic moduli, Poisson’s ratio and Mohr–Coulomb parameters for shearing resistance and cohesion in soil. The bulk strength of a Sand soil used in the construction of elite sports surfaces was found to increase initially and then decrease with increasing water content due to apparent cohesion effects. For a Clay Loam soil, more common in recreational facilities, shear strength decreased with water content. Reducing density resulted in a reduction of shear strength and elastic moduli in both soils due to reduced packing of particles reducing particle–particle contact surface area. The effect of roots on the shear strength of a Sand soil was not significant but reduced elastic moduli significantly. Horizontal forces measured during running and turning in a biomechanics laboratory were in good agreement with forces predicted using a simple quasi-static soil model for coarse-grained (Sand) soils although this was not the case with the Clay Loam soil.