The Royal Statistical Society Schools Lecture 2004: ‘Lies and Statistics’, Part 2

This article concludes the serialization of the Royal Statistical Society's Schools Lecture for 2004, on ‘Lies and statistics’.     

The relationship between bilingual proficiency and self-esteem

Proposing that bilingual proficiency should produce a more favorable attitude toward bilingualism and should enhance one's self-esteem, the authors compared 57 bilingual and 67 unilingual students from grades 9, 10, and 11, measuring their opinions about bilingualism and their self-esteem. The bilingual students are substantially more favorably disposed toward bilingualism than the unilingual students are. On the Janis-Field scale of self-esteem, the bilingual students show greater self-esteem than the unilingual students. The largest differences between the groups are on questions that measure self-confidence and social ease; differences are less pronounced on questions about self-worth and about shyness. We speculate that bilingual proficiency offers some psychological advantages to students who achieve it.     

Piagetian structuralism and learning: Reflections on two decades of educational application

In light of salient measurement and evaluation issues a content analysis approach was chosen to assess the value and problem of applying Piagetian theory to early childhood education. Focal changes in implementation were analyzed with emphasis upon the so-called unique contributions of the theory to teaching goals, beliefs, understandings, and practices. Structuralism was compared favorably with learning theory in providing a conceptual basis for educational application. The inherently dialectical nature of Piaget's views of knowledge presents an intuitively appealing albeit conceptually and methodologically abstract approach to educational innovation. It was concluded that applying Piagetian theory to education, in agreement with these special developmental dynamics, involves an interactively changing theory and data base as teachers and children develop over time.     

Children’s reactions to failure: Implications for education

European Journal of Psychology of Education -     

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY: ETV IN AN AUSTRALIAN COLLEGE

This paper is a case‐study of the development of educational television in a college of advanced education in Australia. It describes the key decisions in that development, and explores the significant variables which affected them, including both pragmatic factors, such as the availability of equipment and finance, and the skills and preferences of the people involved, and theoretical factors, such as the way in which certain attributes of the media interact with the individual differences of learners to effect particular types of learning

Implicit in the discussion is a number of philosophical questions, to do with the relationship between science and technology, with the notion of science and research, and with the nature and power of the human mind