Preschoolers' Classroom Activities and Interactions with Peers and Teachers

The present study was designed to investigate whether or not preschool children's classroom activities and interactions vary according to the power structure of their relationships. We examined the frequencies of children's play and problem-solving activities, and management, collaboration, and assistance interactions in these activities as a function of children's relationships with their teachers and peers. We had two expectations: 1) Preschool children would engage in problem-solving activities with their teachers, who are inherently more powerful; but they would engage in play activities with their peers with whom they share power. 2) Teacher-child interactions would involve primarily management and assistance but child-peer interactions would involve collaborations. We observed 55 children during their free-activity, noting partners, and narrating the actions and utterances of all the participants in writing during the observations. Our analyses were based on the coding of narratives, and they revealed that the power structure of children's relationships plays a role in their activities and interactions. We found that children's problem-solving occurred with both teachers and peers. Play activities occurred overwhelmingly with peers. Management and assistance took place mostly in teacher-child interaction, but collaboration occurred primarily with peers. These findings support the developmental theory that adults and peers contribute to children's development and education through different kinds of activities and interactions.     

Making Real Analysis Relevant to Secondary Teachers: Building Up from and Stepping Down to Practice

Future teachers often claim that advanced undergraduate courses, even those that attempt to connect to school mathematics, are not useful for their teaching. This paper proposes a new way of designing advanced undergraduate content courses for secondary teachers. The model involves beginning with an analysis of the curriculum and practices of school mathematics and its teaching, and then using those to build up to the advanced mathematics – in this case, real analysis. After developing definitions, examples, theorems, and proofs, the model then reconnects to practice, asking the teachers to translate ideas from real analysis in ways that are appropriate for teaching high school content to students. To illustrate the model, we provide and discuss two example tasks.     

Social Interactions in the Home and the Development of Young Children's Conceptions of the Personal

Observations and interviews of 20 middle-class 3- and 4-year-olds and their mothers were conducted to examine the emergence of the personal domain. Interviews with children showed that 3- and 4-year-olds make a conceptual distinction between personal, and moral or conventional issues. Interviews with mothers indicated that they viewed it as important for young children to have freedom of choice over personal issues to develop a sense of autonomy and individuality. Observations in the home revealed that mothers tended to give direct social messages to children about moral, conventional, and prudential events, and were more likely to give indirect social messages in the form of offered choices to children in response to personal issues. Mothers were more likely to negotiate with children over personal than other social events. These data revealed a pattern of social interactions concordant with event domain, which included a reciprocal system along the border between the personal and the conventional.     

The Impact of Relational Characteristics and Reasons for Topic Avoidance on Relational Closeness

Although research suggests that the act of topic avoidance itself has consequences for romantic partners, it seems equally likely that the antecedent conditions underlying these decisions to avoid certain topics also lead to important relational outcomes. Framed by communication boundary management theory, relationship characteristics, motivation for topic avoidance, and implications for relational closeness were examined. Findings indicate that relational commitment characteristics and individuals' reported rationale for topic avoidance are related to perceptions of relational closeness. These results illustrate the importance of understanding the underlying factors that motivate the decision to engage in topic avoidance and their impact on romantic relationships.     

Aufbau und Realisierung des MeDoc-Volltextspeichers

Zusammenfassung.   Ziel von MeDoc war der Aufbau eines verteilten Informationsdienstes, über den eine kritische Masse an Informatik-Literatur im Volltext nachgewiesen, langfristig vorgehalten, recherchiert und beschafft werden kann. Bei einem Teil der angebotenen Literatur handelt es sich dabei um elektronische Versionen des regul?ren kommerziellen Angebots der beteiligten Verlage. Aus diesem Grund war ein wichtiges Teilziel von MeDoc die Entwicklung eines Volltextspeichers, der solche kostenpflichtigen Dokumente abrechenbar und sicher nachweist, liefert und zum Browsen zur Verfügung stellt. Der Artikel beschreibt die Konzeption und Architektur dieses Volltextspeichers. Eingegangen am 17. April 1998 / Angenommen am 21. Juli 1998     

The relationship of interest to internal and external motivation

This study was conducted to examine the relationship between student interest and motivation. Previous studies have shown that measures of interest have attained positive relationships with global measures of motivation (Frymier, Shulman & Houser, 1996; Weber & Patterson, 2000). Additionally, even though a number of instructional researchers have speculated that interest is related to motivation through intrinsic means (Brophy, 1983; Mitchell, 1993; Schiefele, 1991; Schraw, Brunning & Svoboda, 1995; Stipiek, 1996; Tobias, 1994), there has been no systematic effort to provide any empirical evidence to these claims. Results indicate that interest is significantly related to intrinsic, but not extrinsic, motivation.     

Professional learning between past experience and future work

This paper deals with the professionalization of human service work. It analyses learning processes and identity development in the emerging profession of child care with concrete examples from empirical research, based on a life history approach. It discusses examples of careers mainly based on students’ life experience, pointing out that their immediate success in the workplace may inhibit an even better qualification they had been spurred to critical reflection. It further follows a sample of students through their theoretical education and trainee periods, illuminating their changing identification with and understanding of their future work, and their learning of professional knowledge and competences. The conclusion is that the new 3.5 year education in child care pedagogy clearly improves the professional competences of child care, but it also identifies a set of further specific challenges to be met for the development of real professional competences.