Hirsch,Brett D (2012) Digital humanities pedagogy http://openbookpublishers.com/ isbn 978‐1‐909254‐25‐1 426 pp £14.95

This interesting book, the target audience of which is teachers of digital humanities at university level, highlights the need to teach methodological approaches and not simply technological skills. Thus we nurture scholars who are culturally literate as well as digitally adept, and foster the development of critical thinking skills. If the content of this book is likely to be relevant to you, I recommend that you buy a copy for your own use. Giuliana Dettori     

Memory suggestibility and metacognition in child eyewitness testimony: The roles of source monitoring and self-efficacy

Children can easily be made to believe that they have seen or experienced something that they never did. This phenomenon is called the misinformation effect. In this paper I examine the mechanisms underlying the misinformation effect in 6- and 9-year-old children, by investigating the influence of two metacognitive variables, source monitoring and self-efficacy, on child suggestibility (Experiment 1). Several investigations have reported that source monitoring is one factor at play in creating the misinformation effect. As for self-efficacy, this is the first attempt to investigate its relationship with memory suggestibility. It is demonstrated that source monitoring is related to memory suggestibility in younger children, whereas self-efficacy plays a role in suggestibility mainly in older children. This indicates that suggestibility may be due to two different mechanisms at the two ages examined. Experiment 2 was designed to test this age-interactive hypothesis. Results confirmed that the misinformation effect in younger children was mainly due to genuine memory errors, whereas in older children it was mainly due to acceptance of the misleading information.     

Building on the Hopes and Dreams of Latino Families with Young Children: Findings from Family Member Focus Groups

In the past, Latino families were often regarded as being uninvolved in their child’s education, particularly within the parent involvement literature. More recently, authors are encouraging educational professionals to look at a family’s “funds of knowledge” to encourage their involvement. This expression takes into account the knowledge a teacher can gain from a family and child, including awareness of culture, familial background, and other contributions the family can add to the child’s education. This article reviews findings from the analyses of focus groups conducted with Latino family members who have a child(ren) enrolled at a Head Start Center. Findings indicate that Latino families openly communicated strengths, interests, aspirations and learning opportunities for their child and family yet often faced barriers in conveying these to teachers and other staff in their child’s life. Implications for using inquiry-based approaches to bridge this gap in family-school communication are discussed.