Responses to Educational Television: a case‐study

The paper focuses on the need to evaluate responses to educational television despite the difficulties involved. Case‐study and survey methods were used in one Local Education Authority and responses to a documentary schools' broadcast by 129 pupils in four schools examined in detail. Pupils who engaged in spoken or written follow‐up activities to the programme were more prone to change attitudes as a result when compared with a control group who experienced no follow‐up. Greater tentativeness was shown by the group engaging in extensive follow‐up (talking and writing) and this group also achieved higher essay marks than pupils who had not engaged in discussion follow‐up. Implications for classroom practice in relation to ETV are considered.     

The Reliability of the [Vdot]O2-HR Relation during Graded Treadmill Exercise in Prepubertal Boys and Adult Men

Abstract

When subjects make simultaneous aiming movements of the upper limbs over different distances, assimilation effects are shown; the shorter distance limb overshoots when paired with a longer distance limb. However, it is not known whether assimilation effects are due to variations in distance per se or to variations in target location. To separate the possible influences of distance and location, 60 subjects made rapid bimanual aiming movements in one of four conditions. The two different-distance groups made a 20° movement in the left hand and a 60° movement in the right hand to either the same or different target locations. The comparison groups moved 20° in each limb. Somewhat surprisingly, spatial assimilations were greater when moving different distances to the same, rather than different, target locations, which suggests interlimb differences in distance mediate assimilation effects rather than target location. Temporal assimilations were greater when distance and location were varied, but the assimilations were not related to interlimb differences in velocity, as predicted by Marteniuk and MacKenzie (1980).     

Teacher training in early childhood education: The case of Ghana,West Africa

Abstract

Teacher training in early childhood education in Ghana, West Africa is more of a grassroots effort rather than a formal system that is fully supported financially by the Ministry of Education. Formal teacher‐training college or university‐based early childhood teacher training has yet to be realized for the thousands of teachers of children 3–5 years old in government or government‐supported primary schools. This work chronicles the past and present teacher‐training programs available in this country that reports approximately 4.3 million children in its population under the age of 6 years.     

A tale of two worlds: the interstate system and world society in social science textbooks, 1950–2011

There is a great and longstanding divide in visions of the international arena. Some assert that states are the most relevant actors in international politics, and others emphasise the importance of non-state actors as vehicles through which shared ideas and identities are enacted. Typically, cross-national scholarship adopts one of these positions and seeks to support the attendant theoretical claims; our approach is entirely different. We treat these varied conceptions of the international arena not as antecedent explanatory frameworks, but rather as outcomes to be explained in their own right. To this end, we draw on data consisting of 539 high-school social science textbooks (history, civics, social studies, and geography) from 73 countries published between 1950 and 2011, coded to shed light on how the international arena is discussed in national education systems. We use multilevel modelling to determine how characteristics of textbooks and countries are linked to different visions of the international arena. Stronger national emphases in books promote a vision of the interstate system, as does a country’s level of democracy. Emphases on world society emerge particularly in recent decades and in books and countries most exposed to educational and social globalisation. Our findings provide initial support for arguments that world society and the interstate system are distinct, leading to multiple forms of inequality in the international arena.     

The St Francis mission Indians and the National Interscholastic Catholic basketball tournament, 1924–1941

Organizers of the National Interscholastic Catholic Basketball Tournament in Chicago consistently extended bids to a tribal team from St Francis Mission during the 1920s and 1930s. The authors argue that they did so because putting a ‘real’ Indian team on the court drew crowds that helped the tournament compete with a rival ‘anti-Catholic’ public school tourney at the University of Chicago. Jesuit educators at St Francis and the tribal athletes agreed to take part for other reasons, the Jesuits hoping to advance their mission goals and the players finding an opportunity to excel at a game they loved. The team's triumphs on the court thus involved them in political, interuniversity and cultural battles being waged by others off the court.     

Improving search via personalized query expansion using social media

Social tagging systems have gained increasing popularity as a method of annotating and categorizing a wide range of different web resources. Web search that utilizes social tagging data suffers from an extreme example of the vocabulary mismatch problem encountered in traditional information retrieval (IR). This is due to the personalized, unrestricted vocabulary that users choose to describe and tag each resource. Previous research has proposed the utilization of query expansion to deal with search in this rather complicated space. However, non-personalized approaches based on relevance feedback and personalized approaches based on co-occurrence statistics only showed limited improvements. This paper proposes a novel query expansion framework based on individual user profiles mined from the annotations and resources the user has marked. The underlying theory is to regularize the smoothness of word associations over a connected graph using a regularizer function on terms extracted from top-ranked documents. The intuition behind the model is the prior assumption of term consistency: the most appropriate expansion terms for a query are likely to be associated with, and influenced by terms extracted from the documents ranked highly for the initial query. The framework also simultaneously incorporates annotations and web documents through a Tag-Topic model in a latent graph. The experimental results suggest that the proposed personalized query expansion method can produce better results than both the classical non-personalized search approach and other personalized query expansion methods. Hence, the proposed approach significantly benefits personalized web search by leveraging users’ social media data.     

CONNECTING MATHEMATICS IN PRIMARY SCIENCE INQUIRY PROJECTS

Science as inquiry and mathematics as problem solving are conjoined fraternal twins attached by their similarities but with distinct differences. Inquiry and problem solving are promoted in contemporary science and mathematics education reforms as a critical attribute of the nature of disciplines, teaching methods, and learning outcomes involving understandings, attitudes, and processes. The investigative and quantitative processes involved in scientific inquiry include seeking problems, identifying researchable questions, proposing hypotheses, designing fair tests, collecting and interpreting data as evidence for claims, constructing evidence-based arguments, and communicating knowledge claims. Within this empirical context, science and mathematics come together to solve problems with evidence, construct knowledge claims, communicate claims, and persuade others that the claims are valid and useful. This study examined the intersection of inquiry and problem solving and the use of mathematics in 26 extracurricular open science inquiries. The category and the appropriateness of the mathematical procedures revealed these students used measurement, numeracy skills of counting and calculation, and tables and graphs in their science inquiries. It was found that most measurements in the science inquiries were used appropriately, but there is room for improvement with other mathematical procedures that involve higher-level thinking skills, such as analyzing and calculating numerical data and interpreting graphs and tables. The findings imply that mathematics and science are connected in inquiry and should be extended to solve real-life problems and that instruction should emphasize comprehending and interpreting data.     

The Music Industry

After finding that factor analysis is used extensively in the journal of Broadcasting &; Electronic Media, and further finding that there is little consistency to how the analysis is used, this article proposes some standards which authors ought to consider when using factor analysis, especially releasing the limits on the number of factors in exploratory analysis, and using structural models for confirmatory analysis.     

Action Learning Circles: action learning in theory and practice

ABSTRACT

This paper is a commentary on how action learning circles can be effectively used (to offer experiential and emancipatory learning for students. The focus is on the preparation of students for health care education, and its value in the context of professional client‐based teaching and learning. The concept of action learning is described, and its role in promoting learning from practice explored using student and teacher evaluation evidence. An outline of the use of action learning circles in practice and the subsequent learning is analysed using evaluation data to inform our discussion, which gives the perspective of both learner and teacher.