Explaining student and home variance of Chinese reading achievement of the PIRLS 2011 Hong Kong

Hong Kong attained the top place in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2011, an international study of reading achievement, which arouses keen interest in understanding the reasons behind this remarkable achievement. Although factors associated with reading achievement in English have been widely studied, similar studies using Chinese as a different language system are limited. The present study proposes and tests a hypothetical model that attempts to explain the variance of reading achievement of Hong Kong pupils in the PIRLS 2011 study, focusing on parental and student factors. Data of 3,875 fourth graders from 132 primary schools and their parents or caregivers (n = 3,682) are involved in the analysis. Structural equation modeling supports the hypothesized model as tenable explaining 34% of the variance of reading achievement. Parental background acts as the fundamental factor that exerts an indirect effect on reading motivation, reading self‐efficacy, and reading achievement of students via books at home and early reading abilities. Reading motivation and reading self‐efficacy are found to be significant in influencing reading achievement. Implications for educational practices and future research are discussed.     

A conceptual framework for understanding children as agents in the transition from home to kindergarten

The transition from home to kindergarten, for most children, is the first and major ecological transition in their educational life. Kindergarten is the first educational setting in which children make sense about ‘school’ as a place to learn and about themselves as ‘pupils’. In this transition, children cross a cultural boundary from home to kindergarten and, in fact, they commute between the two cultural settings. In Vygotsky's view, children are active culture learners. How they cope with, and adapt to, the novel kindergarten is crucial to their ‘pupil career’ in their life‐long learning. Thus, this paper aims to provide early childhood education professionals with a framework to understand children as agents in the transition from home to kindergarten. This paper begins with a review of the concept of transition. It then presents a conceptual framework of the understanding of children as agents in the transition from home to kindergarten. Major elements of the conceptual framework are derived from sociocultural theory, and analyses of ‘rites of passage’ and ‘pupil career’. This highlights the relationships between layers of context, stages of transition, and adaptation outcomes.     

Constructing Meaning About Violence,School, and Community: Participatory Action Research with Urban Youth

In this paper, I describe how a group of young adolescents negotiate their daily lives within the seeming permanence of a toxic environment, limited social services, poverty, crime, drugs, and inadequate educational resources. The world that the young people described in this paper inhabit is a world of despair and hope, chaos and silence, violence and peace, struggle and possibility—a world in which they spend a good deal of time surviving violence while negotiating the psychosocial, economic, raced, gendered, classed, and sociocultural borders that inform and influence their lives.Through the use of participatory action research and community photography, we are problematizing those borders and creating spaces for young urban youth to engage in processes that position them as agents of inquiry and as experts about their own lives. As the data reveal, by listening to young people's stories, by giving them the opportunity to speak about their lives, and by collaborating with them in designing plans of action to address their concerns, we can more effectively frame research questions and teaching pedagogies around their understandings of violence and urban life. As important, by examining their lives via participatory action research, young people are provided with opportunities to take deliberate action to enhance community well-being.     

Simultaneous contrast in goldfish

Two groups of goldfish were trained to strike an illuminated target for food reward. The experimental group was reinforced with 10 worms for response to one color and with 1 worm for response to a different color. The control group was reinforced with 1 worm for response to each color. The experimental group gave clear evidence of discrimination of reward magnitude and also of simultaneous negative contrast. These results bear on the relation of the mechanisms of simultaneous and successive contrast.     

Navigating the divide between scientific practice and science studies to support undergraduate teaching of epistemic knowledge

There is an urgent need to strengthen undergraduate science students’ epistemic knowledge, which requires having the scientists qua teachers on board. The divide between scientists’ perceptions of science and the perceptions held by those who study science is in this context problematic. Even so, this remains a sorely understudied area. The aim of the study was to identify pragmatic ways that hold the potential to facilitate integration of scholarly studies of scientific knowledge production with experientially based knowledge held by scientists to support the teaching of epistemic knowledge content to undergraduate science students. Earlier studies suggest that trust building is a central component. Our exploratory case study focuses on instructor perceptions and is based on informal interviews, participatory observation and surveys with instructors in a first-year undergraduate science course under revision. We identified the following central components as central to successful navigation of the divide between the scientific practice and science studies: Explicit formulation of learning objectives tied to epistemic knowledge acquisition; Conscious attention to vocabulary that triggers scientists’ aversion to science studies; Careful selection of historic and contemporary cases; and Systematic scaffolding of course activities. The conclusion regarding a common vocabulary stands out: by ridding our instructions from the vocabulary that caused concern among science instructors we succeeded in engaging them in conversations with students about the knowledge-producing process and challenge the view of science as characterised by facts and truths, rather than a form of scholarly inquiry that aims to produce knowledge about the natural world.     

‘Formative good,summative bad?’ – A review of the dichotomy in assessment literature

The debate between summative and formative assessment is creating a situation that increasingly calls to mind the famous slogan in George Orwell’s (1945) Animal Farm – ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’. Formative assessment is increasingly being portrayed in the literature as ‘good’ assessment, which tutors should strive towards, whereas summative assessment is ‘bad’ assessment on which tutors should minimise their focus, instead moving towards formative assessment (Taras 2005). By revisiting the origins of formative assessment, this article aims to bring back to light that summative and formative assessment are connected at their inception. It highlights how research in the literature has unintentionally created a harmful dichotomy between summative and formative assessment, and it identifies some attempts in the literature to re-connect formative and summative assessment. This paper challenges the dichotomy in the literature and invites those in higher education to consider the fundamental idea that formative and summative assessment need to work in harmony and should not be seen as contrary to each other.     

Tools and machines

Tools and machines are a big part of children's daily lives. Everywhere they look they can see people using tools and machines to do household chores, to construct buildings, and to travel from place to place. Children, too, use tools when they eat, play, and help Mom and Dad around the house. The understanding of basic tools and simple machines helps children relate to the larger, more complex world of adults.Sandra Drake is the Director/Teacher at the Christ Community Nursery in Lansing, MI. Alice Whiren is Associate Professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing.     

The Introduction of a Computerised Network to Support Educational Change in Hong Kong

In 1998, there was a major shift in the medium of instruction in Hong Kong secondary schools from English to Chinese. This change had many educational advantages. However, its implementation was not without problems, and many of the problems were non-trivial. This article reports the work of a computer network, specifically established to support the educational change and discuss about the strategy to provide effective support to educational changes through computer networking, including issues on service positions, content provision and the development of network culture interaction.     

Teachers’ socio-spatial practice in innovative learning environments

ABSTRACT

Understanding the relationship between innovative learning spaces and teachers’ pedagogical and social practices is essential given the increasing investment in innovative learning spaces worldwide. This study examined the socio-spatial practices of a group of teachers at a secondary school in an innovative learning space. Interview responses from 21 teachers revealed that space and social practices co-became through the interplay of the school culture, the physical, social and curriculum structures, and individual teachers’ sense-making of the practice. The study found that the cultural and structural systems drove the initial becoming of social practices, and that the individual systems shaped the diversified nature of the becoming. The findings suggest the importance of supporting teachers’ sense-making in terms of conceptions of subject teaching, professional identity, the affordances and constraints of the space and confidence in and capacity of constructing and managing effective learning experience in the space, when effecting educational changes with space.     

Longitudinal effects of quality preschool programs

Conclusion Commitment to excellence in quality preschool education plus reach-out programs that help families enhance the learning careers of their children can ensure true TLC for every child born in America — Tender Loving Care in Total Learning Centers.Alice Sterling Honing teaches at Syracuse University in the Department of Child and Family Studies, College for Human Development, in Syracuse, NY. She is an editorial board member ofDay Care & Early Education.This research review is based on testimony presented May 1988 to Senator Ted Kennedy, Chair, United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources on behalf of Senator Chiles's Early Intervention and Dropout Prevention Act of 1988, Bill S2034.