“We love Hawaii”... kids ride a rainbow of learning

Kids love to go places and to things. Although Hawaii is thousands of miles away, the islands extend a warm welcome. Look beyond the basics and plan to take your young travelers on a super, educational experience. She is also a consultant working with pre-service and in-service teachers.     

The field as a ‘pedagogical resource’? A critical analysis of students’ affective engagement with the field environment

This paper presents findings from research into students’ perceptions and experiences of geography fieldwork. The study focused on Year 9 students (13–14 years) from three state secondary schools in urban northern England. Geography fieldwork, depending on its conceptualisation and implementation, has the potential to provide students with a wide range of environmental learning experiences. This paper analyses the implicit values and ideologies underlying the three schools’ approaches to fieldwork using Fien’s (1993 Fien, J. 1993. Education for the environment: Critical curriculum theorising and environmental education, Melbourne, Australia: Deakin University Press.  [Google Scholar]) conceptual distinction between education about, through and for the environment. The significance of these underlying values and ideologies to the students’ affective engagement with the field environment is discussed. The paper concludes that, while some students engaged with the field environment in terms of their personal values and environmental ideologies, broader influences on the fieldwork agenda were also discernable. These findings deepen our understanding of the implicit values underlying environmental education and highlight a potentially important conflict between the cognitive and affective objectives of such work.     

CLOCKSS—It Takes a Community

CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a community-wide endeavor built upon the widely used LOCKSS system. CLOCKSS is working to guarantee long-term access to digital materials regardless of ability to pay. Two lively sessions led by Victoria Reich, Director of the LOCKSS Program at Stanford University Libraries, were packed to capacity. Librarian and publisher participants in CLOCKSS are implementing a shared solution to one of the most significant challenges of the digital era.     

Infant vocalizing and phenotypic outcomes in autism: Evidence from the first 2 years

Infant vocalizations are early-emerging communicative markers shown to be atypical in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but few longitudinal, prospective studies exist. In this study, 23,850 infant vocalizations from infants at low (LR)- and high (HR)-risk for ASD (HR-ASD = 23, female = 3; HR-Neg = 35, female = 13; LR = 32, female = 10; 80% White; collected from 2007 to 2017 near Philadelphia) were analyzed at 6, 12, and 24 months. At 12 months, HR-ASD infants produced fewer vocalizations than HR-Neg infants. From 6 to 24 months, HR-Neg infants demonstrated steeper vocalization growth compared to HR-ASD and LR infants. Finally, among HR infants, vocalizing at 12 months was associated with language, social phenotype, and diagnosis at age 2. Infant vocalizing is an objective behavioral marker that could facilitate earlier detection of ASD.     

Spoken vocabulary growth: Its role in the development of phoneme awareness and early reading ability

In this paper, two theoretical positionsregarding the developmental origins of thephoneme as a unit for lexical representationand processing are outlined – theaccessibility and emergent positions. OurLexical Restructuring Model (Metsala & Walley1998), which is consistent with the secondposition, focuses on the role of vocabularygrowth in prompting the implementation of morefine-grained, segmental representations forlexical items in childhood; this restructuringis viewed as an important precursor to theexplicit segmentation or phoneme awarenessskills implicated in early reading success.Empirical evidence that supports this model issummarized, including preliminary results fromone of our most recent studies. Severalsuggestions are made for future research thatwill lead to a better understanding of thedevelopment of spoken word recognition and thelinks between speech- and reading-relatedabilities.     

Using Natural Language Processing to Predict Item Response Times and Improve Test Construction

In this article, it is shown how item text can be represented by (a) 113 features quantifying the text's linguistic characteristics, (b) 16 measures of the extent to which an information‐retrieval‐based automatic question‐answering system finds an item challenging, and (c) through dense word representations (word embeddings). Using a random forests algorithm, these data then are used to train a prediction model for item response times and predicted response times then are used to assemble test forms. Using empirical data from the United States Medical Licensing Examination, we show that timing demands are more consistent across these specially assembled forms than across forms comprising randomly‐selected items. Because an exam's timing conditions affect examinee performance, this result has implications for exam fairness whenever examinees are compared with each other or against a common standard.     

Understanding the co‐construction of inquiry practices: A case study of a responsive teaching environment

We set out to understand how different instantiations of inquiry emerged in two different years of one elementary teacher's classroom. Longitudinal observations from Mrs. Charles' 5th grade science classroom forced us to carefully and deliberately consider who exactly was responsible for the change in the class activities and norms. We provide empirical evidence to show how a focus on the teacher can easily overlook the complex dynamics of the classroom. The data reveal that students had a substantive and generative role in the class's arrival at the different instantiations of scientific inquiry—the nature and form of inquiry—that were constructed each year. We argue that, in an environment where a teacher carefully attends and responds to student thinking, the nascent resources students have for reasoning about phenomena can affect not only the conceptual ideas that emerge, but also influence what inquiry activities or practices become established as normative and productive over time. Our work with Mrs. Charles illuminates an important methodological concern with research on teacher development as well as the construct of teacher learning progressions; research accounts that focus primarily on the teacher may overlook the classroom norms that are negotiated between teacher and student, and thereby provide an incomplete portrayal of the teacher's activity within one classroom and the teacher's progress across multiple years. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 429–464, 2012     

How teacher and students study ‘all that matters’ in high school chemistry

This study focuses on the relationships between meanings of science constructed in classrooms and sociocultural precepts of the wider society. Research presented is part of a larger study of the negotiation of knowledge and roles in high school science classrooms. The data presented document that what goes on in classrooms reflects and recreates societal attitudes towards work, in general, and teachers’ work, in particular. The teacher in this study reduces his demands for academic work in return for students’ cooperation and as a means of coping with negative aspects of teaching. Students, in turn, are not concerned about the specific subject matter of chemistry. What matters to them are the academic credentials that lead to success in the college and employment arenas. As a result, teacher and students construct school chemistry to be what you‐get‐through‐as‐you‐get‐along. The interdependence of the roles and actions of teachers and students suggests changes in policy and practice.     

Contrast in usage of FCAT‐approved anatomical terminology between members of two anatomy associations in North America

Almost 12 years since the publishing of Terminologia Anatomica (TA) by the Federative Committee on Anatomical Terminology (FCAT), there has yet to be a unified adoption of FCAT‐recommended anatomical terms by North American anatomists. A survey was sent to members of the Human Anatomy & Physiology Society (HAPS) to compare the frequency of FCAT term usage with a previous study involving the American Association of Anatomists (AAA). The HAPS differed from AAA in being composed mostly of biologists (56.5%) who teach anatomy with only 18.3% of respondents having terminal degrees in anatomy. The survey included the same 25 sets of synonymic names for selected gross anatomical structures or related terms used for the AAA survey. Overall results indicate that the FCAT preferred term had the highest frequency of usage in only 40.0% of the survey questions, demonstrating 4% lower compliance than AAA respondents. Compliance with FCAT preferred terms ranged from 92.2% to 1.7% usage. When compared with AAA anatomists, there were reversals in predominant usage between FCAT and non‐FCAT terms for six sets of anatomical structures: HAPS respondents predominantly used non‐FCAT terms for adrenal gland (88.7%), antecubital fossa (57.4%), patellar tendon (65.2%), ligamentum capitis femoris (36.5%), while preferring the FCAT anterior circumflex humeral artery (45.2%) and anterior/posterior preferred over ventral/dorsal (41.7%). Almost 54% of HAPS anatomists were not familiar with the FCAT, nearly 21% higher than the AAA. Anat Sci Educ 3:25–32, 2010. © 2009 American Association of Anatomists.     

Schooling and local environmental knowledge: Do they complement or substitute each other?

Schooling and the knowledge acquired at school have been considered both a cause of loss of indigenous knowledge (because it opens pathways to the non-indigenous world and worldviews) and a potential remedy to its demise (if educational curricula is aligned with indigenous realities by giving instruction in local languages and incorporating local knowledge in school content). We test the association between academic and local environmental knowledge using data from a society of forager-horticulturalists in the Bolivian Amazon who were exposed to a partially contextualized school curriculum. We found that although schooling and academic knowledge bear a negative association with local knowledge the magnitude is low, probably because schooling was partially contextualized. Contextualized learning might help avoid that the provision of universal education comes at the cost of humanity's cultural diversity.