Errata

Abstract

One hundred and eighteen national collegiate fencers engaged in the first round competition in the 28th annual NCAA Fencing Championships held at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus. After the first day of competition, the field size was reduced to 72 fencers or 24 fencers per weapon. Through the use of a unique scoring device, response times and accuracy measurements were recorded for each fencer. The fencers then engaged in their respective round robin tournament according to class of weapon; epee, sabre, or foil. Two criterion measures of fencing success were then correlated with response times and accuracies. Correlation coefficients for sabre fencemen were slightly better than 0. Criterion measures for epee fencers showed a low relationship with response time and accuracies while those of foil showed a slight to fair relationship.     

Twenty years of research on advance organizers: Assimilation theory is still the best predictor of results

Forty-four published research studies involving advance organizers were reviewed. Twenty-seven studies included an advance organizer vs. a control group (standard advance organizer study) and 17 studies included an advance organizer vs. a post organizer group (modified advance organizer study). Results of the studies were compared to the predictions of several theories. In addition, four specific predictions of assimilation theory were evaluated: that advance organizers should have a stronger effect for poorly organized text than for well organized text, that advance organizers should have a stronger positive effect for learners lacking prerequisite knowledge, that advance organizers should have a stronger effect for learners lacking prerequisite abilities, and that advance organizers should have an especially strong effect on measures of transfer rather than retention.     

An assessment of the validity and discrimination of the intensive time-series design by monitoring learning differences between students with different cognitive tendencies

Intensive time-series designs for classroom investigations have been under development since 1975. Studies have been conducted to determine their feasibility (Mayer & Lewis, 1979), their potential for monitoring knowledge acquisition (Mayer & Kozlow, 1980), and the potential threat to validity of the frequency of testing inherent in the design (Mayer & Rojas, 1982). This study, an extension of those previous studies, is an attempt to determine the degree of discrimination the design allows in collecting data on achievement. It also serves as a replication of the Mayer and Kozlow study, an attempt to determine design validity for collecting achievement data. The investigator used her eighth-grade earth science students, from a suburban Columbus (Ohio) junior high school. A multiple-group single intervention time-series design (Glass, Willson, & Gottman, 1975) was adapted to the collection of daily data on achievement in the topic of the intervention, a unit on plate tectonics. Single multiple-choice items were randomly assigned to each of three groups of students, identified on the basis of their ranking on a written test of cognitive level (Lawson, 1978). The top third, or those with formal cognitive tendencies, were compared on the basis of knowledge achievement and understanding achievement with the lowest third of the students, or those with concrete cognitive tendencies, to determine if the data collected in the design would discriminate between the two groups. Several studies (Goodstein & Howe, 1978; Lawson & Renner, 1975) indicated that students with formal cognitive tendencies should learn a formal concept such as plate tectonics with greater understanding than should students with concrete cognitive tendencies. Analyses used were a comparison of regression lines in each of the three study stages: baseline, intervention, and follow-up; t-tests of means of days summed across each stage; and a time-series analysis program. Statistically significant differences were found between the two groups both in slopes of regression lines (0.0001) and in t-tests (0.0005) on both knowledge and understanding levels of learning. These differences confirm the discrimination of the intensive time-series design in showing that it can distinguish differences in learning between students with formal cognitive tendencies and those with concrete cognitive tendencies. The time-series analysis model with a trend in the intervention was better than a model with no trend for both groups of students, in that it accounted for a greater amount of variance in the data from both knowledge and understanding levels of learning. This finding adds additional confidence in the validity of the design for obtaining achievement data. When the analysis model with trend was used on data from the group with formal cognitive tendencies, it accounted for a greater degree of variance than the same model applied to the data from the group with concrete cognitive tendencies. This more conservative analysis, therefor, gave results consistent with those from the more usual linear regression techniques and t-tests, further adding to the confidence in the discrimination of the design.     

New roles for teachers unions? Reform unionism in school decentralization

Of late, teachers unions have worked together with district management in new and notable ways. This paper examines the role of teachers unions in shaping the Together Initiative (TI), which seeks to increase autonomy and broaden decision making in urban schools in one northeastern state. In general, state-level union leaders have taken more consistently reform-oriented stances than those adopted by their district-level counterparts. We found that district-level union leaders supported TI’s growth and were willing to work with district leaders to reform schools in districts where labor-management relations had been collaborative in recent years and in schools where union leaders trusted the principal. Where labor-management relations were less positive and the union viewed principals as more arbitrary, union leaders practiced more industrial-style leadership.     

Learning how to see and feel: Alfred Lichtwark and his concept of artistic and aesthetic education

Abstract

Focusing on Lichtwark’s concept of museology, this article shows what role he envisaged for art in public life at a time when the rise of mass consumption and popular culture created new lifestyles. Lichtwark’s concept of artistic and aesthetic education did not only extend to museums and classrooms but also to dilettantism as a basis for educating taste and developing an appreciation of the arts that would have a positive economic impact. The article looks at the contemporary entanglements and different contexts of Lichtwark’s ideas and relates them to recent approaches to cultural learning. Generally speaking, it argues that concepts of cultural learning are a bundle of entangled threads that connect and concern not only the sphere of art but also contradictory values and norms, economic production, and the emergence of new important status groups such as consumers.     

Living at the Border: between multiculturality,complexity and action research

The author looks into the phases of her personal experience in order to present the difficulties as well as the richness of ‘living at the border’ and of building bridges between different worlds. The prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture, above all in the world of research, obliges those who do not belong to this culture to undergo a form of tension between adaptation to language rules and ways of thinking that are foreign to them, and the need to maintain cultural and personal differences while trying to communicate. The experience of ‘contagion’ between ideas and ways of representing the world, that was seen within the Environment and School Initiatives Project (ENSI) project and that the author had the opportunity to share with John Elliott, shows the possibilities offered by these encounters. Issues such as those of the complexity and quality of learning have interweaved with those of action research and evaluation, and have crossed and enriched the values and cultures of which we were implicitly and explicitly the bearers. In the final section the author makes an attempt to illustrate the risks of today's globalisation and the tendency to eliminate borders, viewed as obstacles to individual freedom, for a kind of equalisation which, by eliminating the differences, also eliminates the possibility of development and of creativity.