Student Teacher Attitudes to Sex Role Stereotyping: some Australian data

The sex role attitudes of 461 teacher education students were measured on a 32‐item questionnaire. Chi‐square analyses produced significant effects for gender on 22 of the items, showing that the females were more egalitarian than the males. However, most of the students adopted an egalitarian stance on many, though not all, of the items. Responses to some items (women getting drunk and swearing, corporal punishment, boys doing heavy chores, and boys dressing up and playing with dolls) suggest that some traditional stereotypes may be particularly resistant to change. The data also suggest that students may adopt egalitarian attitudes out of self‐interest rather than as a matter of principle, and are more accepting of general principles of gender equity than of specific practices designed to achieve it. Finally, although there is some evidence of ambivalence among the students, particularly the males, it is more accurate to characterise these students as definite in their gender attitudes.     

Reading and Writing: Digital Directions

The authors show that IT hardware and software are having an effect on literacy. As well as being aware of those changes, English teachers, they argue, should be exploiting IT for the development of those reading and writing skills necessary for the future. The article goes on to exemplify, through an exploration of how it came to be written, some of the processes and opportunities identified earlier.     

Relationship between cooperation in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game and the discounting of hypothetical outcomes

A number of authors have proposed that preference for a larger, delayed reward in delay discounting is similar to cooperation in a repeated prisoner's dilemma game versus tit-for-tat. This proposal was examined by correlating delay-discounting (Experiment 1) and probability-discounting (Experiment 2) rates for hypothetical monetary gains and losses with performance in a repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Correlations between rate of delay discounting (discounting parameters and area under the curve) and proportion of cooperation in the repeated prisoner's dilemma game versus tit-for-tat were significant across three magnitudes, and correlations were generally higher with discounting for losses than with that for gains. As was expected, correlations between rate of delay discounting and performance versus a random strategy in the prisoner's dilemma game were not significant. Correlations between rate of probability-discounting and cooperation rate in a repeated prisoner's dilemma game versus neither a tit-for-tat nor a random strategy were significant.     

History,Pending

Tesconi-Warren collaborations began 50 years ago at the University of Illinois-Chicago, then abbreviated fondly as “Chicago Circle,” perhaps the only American institution of higher learning named for a traffic-control installation. We offered Foundations courses in teacher preparation programs of the College of Education, occasionally as a team. Our wives and children became friends. Van Cleve Morris was our dean and president of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) around the time Tesconi brought Warren into the young association early in the 1970s. We jointly designed a PhD specialization in education policy studies and secured grants to support multicultural curriculum development and recruitment of American Indian students from Chicago's Native community. Later, we went separate ways. Our work became more administrative, Tesconi as dean of education and social services at the University of Vermont and American University and Warren in a similar capacity at Indiana University.

?This article relies extensively on personal memories, refreshed and fact-checked through AESA archives. Readers may find it fantastical and on some points mistaken. But the want of a history of AESA makes searching its past for coherence a stagger through patchy recollections. Believing is seeing.

?Although our association experiences have extended across 5 decades, the ones we emphasize here occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. All had rippling effects. Specifically, we cite Pride and Promise, an AESA-sponsored publication in 1984; enactment of standards for assessing Foundations courses and sequences in professional education programs; and the AESA campaign to establish what was originally called the Council of Learned Societies in Education, a bonding of Foundations-related associations subsequently renamed the Council for Social Foundations of Education (American Educational Studies Association, 2017 American Educational Studies Association. (2017, May 6). Weekly Roundup. Retrieved from http://www.educationalstudies.org/executivecouncilstatementofconcern [Google Scholar], sec. 1978; Tozer, Gallegos, Henry, Greiner, & Price, 2011 Tozer, S., Gallegos, B. P., Henry, A., Greiner, M. B., & Price, P. G. (Eds.). (2011). Handbook of research on the social foundations of education. New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar]).

An AESA narrative should be constructed as multiple stories with shifting centers of gravity, a design permitting transdisciplinary understanding of how diversity can grow as one without compromising unique traits and histories. Sturdy purposes, reinterpreted and reaffirmed, injected the powerful secret ingredients. The association has always been hydra-headed, but united nonetheless. Membership analyses would confirm whether the guesses have merit. AESA has changed without coherently pinpointing when, how, and why. It devised long-range plans but did not follow them religiously. The flexibility may well have proved to be an asset.