Universities and National Development: an introduction

Volume 23 (1) of this journal was a special issue on Education and Development guest-edited by Fred Lazin (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel), Samuel Aroni (University of California at Los Angeles, USA) and Yehuda Gradus (Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel). The guest editors comment in this article on the issues which arise from the papers they selected for inclusion in the special issue. In developing countries higher education has to face the problems associated with nation-building and the drive towards fast economic growth; in more developed countries there is the challenge implicit in the social and economic changes necessarily associated with the transition to post-industrial societies. Further comments are made on each of the articles in the special issue.     

Effects of Cooperative Concept Mapping Teaching Approach on Secondary School Students’ Motivation in Biology in Gucha District, Kenya

This study investigated the effects of using the cooperative concept mapping (CCM) teaching approach on secondary school students’ motivation in biology. A non equivalent control group design under the quasi-experimental research was used in which a random sample of four co-educational secondary schools was used. The four schools were randomly assigned to four groups. Each school provided one Form Two class. The study sample comprised of 156 second grade students in the secondary school cycle (Form Two students) in Gucha District, Kenya. Students in all the groups were taught the same biology content but two groups, the experimental groups, were taught using the CCM approach while the other two, the control groups, were taught using regular teaching methods. Two groups, one experimental and one control, were pre-tested prior to the implementation of the CCM intervention. After four weeks, all four groups were post-tested using the students motivation questionnaire (SMQ). Data were analysed using the t-test, ANOVA and ANCOVA. The results show that students exposed to the CCM approach have significantly higher motivation than those taught through regular methods. The results further indicate that there is no statistically significant gender difference in motivation towards the learning of biology among secondary school students exposed to CCM. The researchers conclude that CCM is an effective teaching approach, which biology teachers need to incorporate in their teaching.     

The school as a workplace: Extending democracy to schools

The author has a thorough knowledge of the educational scene in the USA. His critical analyses of the “modern” educational theories developed by J. Holt, H. Kohl, Ch. Silbermann, I. Illich and others, and of their — as yet unresearched — application to institutionalized learning and socialisation processes provide very informative insights into the on-going discussion on reform, even outside his own country. Stopsky points to four factors which have had a pronounced influence on the objectives, direction and progress of curriculum reform:

1. The student movement and the stimuli it generated in the civil rights movement and the relations with the “Third World”.
2. The subculture of youth, accompanying this protest movement and partly caused by its lack of success, with its typical phenomena of drug consumption and social disintegration.
3. The disappointment at the failure of the propagated educational reform to establish, e.g., equality of chances and improve the quality of life, and the effects of raising the standards of performance demanded of under-privileged pupils by means of drastic restrictions on admission and entrance examinations implying social selection for higher educational courses.
4. The development of “anti-curricula” in the form and content of “open” or neohumanist education. The favourable reports on experiments with these “pupil-centred” curricula in British schools created a fascinating response from teachers and pupils in the USA, but most colleges rejected the innovation as being anti-intellectual and decided in favour of a “competency based” or “performance based” curriculum.

In this future-oriented paper F. Stopsky attempts to free school from the odium of suffering individual oppression and the resulting fear of the pupils, and to turn it instead into a place where children and adults will work without repression.     

What the rat’s nose tells the rat’s mouth: Long delay aversion conditioning with aqueous odors and potentiation of taste by odors

In Experiment 1, olfactory bulbectomized and control rats were trained using operant conditioning to determine the taste threshold of aqueous amyl acetate. Concentrations below gustatory threshold were used in Experiments 2–5 to compare the effectiveness of odors with various concentrations of saccharin as cues for illness. The results showed the following: (1) The effectiveness of odor and taste was directly related to concentration; (2) the strength of an aversion to a concentration of taste could be matched by an appropriate concentration of an odor; (3) odor was as effective as taste with CS-US delays of 4 h; and (4) an effective odor potentiated an aversion to an otherwise ineffective taste. The results challenge the privileged role accorded tastes in food aversion learning and the manner in which tastes are held to interact with odors according to the sensory-and-gate channeling analysis of potentiation (Rusiniak, Hankins, Garcia, & Brett, 1979).     

Assessment of Teacher Trainees

Deciding whether a teacher trainee is ready to become an effective member of the teaching profession is an expected responsibility of any teacher training institution. In many cases, more is expected. Discrimination is required toward teacher trainees in deciding who is able, who is adequate, or better or best. These expectations have necessitated institutions formulating and improving a number of methods for making such decisions. As part of the commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of the Institute of Education, this paper is being presented as a focus on the assessment of teacher trainees for accreditation in becoming part of the task force of teachers in Singapore.     

A Proposal for a Teaching Strategy Based on Preinstructional Ideas of Pupils. Environmental Education: The use of pupils’ ideas about cycles of nature and health

Twenty years after the statements of Ausubel, much research has been done on pupils’ ideas but little has been done on strategies that make use of these ideas in teaching, especially in biology education. Moreover little research, up until now, concentrates on concepts regarding Environmental Education. For Environmental Education the concepts of Cycles and Health are important. In this paper pupils’ ideas on these concepts are assessed and represented and common pupil ideas between the two concepts are discussed. A teaching strategy based upon pupils’ ideas is elaborated.     

Case study of an adolescent Cambodian refugee: A clinical,developmental and cultural perspective

This paper reports the case study of one Cambodian adolescent unaccompanied minor refugee who had experienced severe trauma and was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Treatment of PTSD in this case has implications for therapy with similar clients. The impact of the client's cultural background, relocation and acculturation is examined from clinical, developmental and cross cultural perspectives.     

Multivariate analyses of performance in a DRL paradigm

Multivariate analyses were used to explore the interrelations between response measures used in a DRL-20 schedule. A principal components analysis revealed two major components which accounted for a majority of the variance in all measures. One component included responses, reinforcements, efficiency, and a decrease in short-latency interresponse times; it could be viewed as supporting the previous use of the construct inhibition in the interpretation of DRL results. The other component was primarily associated with increased responding in the first period in which reinforcement was available; it could be viewed as a measure of temporal discrimination. A discriminant function, with blocks of trials as the criterion, was used to obtain from IRT/OP data a single measure summarizing change in behavior as a function of experience. The discriminant function incorporated both of the above sources of variance. The findings indicate that currently used summary measures do not fully reflect changes that occur under the DRL schedule.     

Motivational vs. associative role of the US in classical conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response

Two experiments tested the motivational role of the US in classical conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane (NM) response. In Experiment 1, subjects were trained to an intermediate performance level and then given a series of (1) CS-US trials, (2) “backwards” US-CS trials, (3) CS-alone trials, (4) US-alone trials, or (5) no-stimulus presentations. Interpolated presentations of the US, either alone or in a backwards contingency, tended to produce an impairment of subsequent acquisition. In Experiment 2, subjects were trained with strong or weak US intensity on paired or interpolated trials. US intensity on interpolated trials had only a very small effect, whereas the effect of US intensity on paired trials was quite large. Shifts in paired-trial US intensity produced corresponding shifts in performance, but shifts in the intensity of the interpolated US produced no apparent effect. We conclude that the arousal of motivation is not sufficient to maintain performance in classical NM conditioning.