La participation des parents a l'ecole primaire trente ans apres: un objectif encore a atteindre

This study examines the perceptions which teachers, head teachers and parents have of the participation of parents in the running of primary schools. While participation has been widely advocated (in North America, Europe and Africa), it appears that there are still tensions between the school and the family. The study shows that parents who are members of school councils state that they favour participation while teachers express some doubts on the positive aspects. Headteachers are more convinced, however. A number of variables help to differentiate the results, such as environment (rural, semi-urban or urban), and the sub-group to which the respondents belong (parents who are members or non-members of school councils, and teachers of different grades). The discussion considers the need for dialogue and consideration of each person's position in the interest of creating conditions favourable to children's development.     

The use of visual media in the service of enriching mental thought processes

Visual media of communication are not just convenient and indifferent technologies for the transmission of knowledge but also, and perhaps mainly, different languages for gathering, packaging and conveying knowledge. The real differences among the media are not so much in the kinds of knowledge they can convey, but rather in the languages, that is — the symbol systems — they uniquely employ. The experienced horrors of Clockwork Orange, or the possible better understanding of group processes after viewing Twelve Angry Men are greatly due to the visual mode and the unique languages of such films, not just the content (which can be read in a book).Media's different and often unique symbol systems have been studied in recent years. It has been found, for example, that different symbol systems call upon different kinds of mental skills and convey different meanings. But above all, media's unique symbol systems cultivate unique mental skills by either activating or overtly supplanting them. By doing so, these symbol systems offer new ways for internal, cognitive, representation. Thus, they can be seen as potentially serving as cultivators of mental abilities.This paper was presented at the IW APP Festival 1980, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, January 1980.     

Special District Libraries and Operating Costs: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with Discretionary and Non-Discretionary Inputs

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to assess the technical efficiency of special district libraries in the United States with respect to three cost-related outputs: operating cost per hour, program costs per visit, and program costs per attendance. A set of discretionary and non-discretionary inputs were used to obtain the technical efficiency scores of 999 special district libraries. The DEA input-oriented analysis shows that 30% of the libraries were technically efficient with respect to the use of the inputs to achieve their level of operating costs in 2015. The DEA analysis also shows that inefficient libraries need to make proportional reductions in the level of discretionary inputs to become technically efficient.     

Educational Media

Jay Stein's Mass Media Education, and a Better Society (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979---$ )

Gavriel Salomon's Interaction of Media, Cognition, and Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1079---$ )

Dennis D. McDonald et al, Directory of Public Broadcasting Information Resources (Washington: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1979--- free , paper)

Religious media communication, two recent titles     

The differential investment of mental effort in learning from different sources

It is argued that learning from different sources greatly depends on the differential way in which these sources are perceived, for these perceptions determine to an important extent the mental effort expended in the learning process. Two ideas are discussed in some detail: (a) amount of mental effort investment (AIME), defined as the number of nonautomatic elaborations applied to a unit of material, and measured by self reports; it is seen as capturing the essence of such constructs as depth of processing and mindful processing, and (b) the role played by perceptions, beliefs, and preconceptions which pertain to the nature of a particular class of materials and the effort it demands. Evidence is provided from studies that examined the ways in which TV is perceived, in comparison to print, and how these perceptions affect the actual ways of handling specific materials from each medium. The case is then generalized to other kinds of sources.     

Science,Technology and Democracy

Science and the institutions of science are far from democratic systems,and yet they are the most democratic of regimes. This essay examinesthe demand for transparency and public participation. One can distinguishseveral levels of public influence. Their function suggests thatdecision-makers, both scientists and technocrats, are being obligedto accept and work with rules which are no longer laid down by themselves.     

The Graphic Arts

Max Gallo's The Poster in History (New York: American Heritage/McGraw- Hill, 1974—$22.95)

Erich Salomon's Portrait of an Age ((New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1974—$7.50, paper)

M. Thomas Inge's “American Comic Art: A Bibliographic Guide,” Choice XI:1581-1593

Stan Lee's Origins of Marvel Comics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974—$5.95, paper)

John Hedgecoe and Michael Langford's Photography: Materials and Methods published by Oxford University Press. Apparently Focal Press picked it up in London, and now a new smaller format but hardcover edition is just out from Hastings House (N.Y.) for $12.95     

New Challenges for Educational Research: studying the individual within learning environments

Human behavior cannot and should not be studied independently of the social and cultural context in which it occurs. This is particularly true when it comes to the study of classroom projects or to the implementation of new technologies, since their true target is the whole classroom ‐‐ the cloud of interrelated activities, curricula, social interactions, teacher's actions, learning tasks and more. To understand learning in innovative classrooms one needs to study the whole classroom learning environment and the way it and the individuals in it interactively change. Unfortunately, due to tradition, to the absence of a coherent theory of classrooms as units of analysis, and the absence of a rigorous methodology, the target of research is still the individual. I present here a systemic view of classrooms and a tentative list of its seven generic components. The emphasis, though, is on their interrelations, that is on their configuration. The approach proposed here complements the one commonly employed. Whereas research is usually concerned with patterns of differences among group means or individuals, I propose to examine differences in patterns, whereby interventions affect the configuration of components, not just their isolated contents. To do that, I propose the employment of Guttman's Small Space Analysis, and illustrate the case with a science teaching project and some of its ‘systemic’ data. The challenge I present is to shift our foci from the sole study of the individual to the rigorous study of individuals in interaction with whole learning environments.