Games and simulations: Creative educational alternatives

Summary Active participation is the foundation of learning through the media of games and simulations. The actual doing by the students is the important element. Games and simulations, if properly designed and applied, can meet a variety of classroom objectives. A vast array of educational games and simulations has been designed and many are available commercially. However, a skilled and innovative instructor can apply certain guidelines to custom design activities for the individual classroom. Involving students in the design and modification of games and simulations is recommended.     

Fighting for Desired Versions of a Future Self: How Young Women Negotiated STEM-Related Identities in the Discursive Landscape of Educational Opportunity

In this article, we investigate how the national imperative to increase opportunities for young women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and to broaden their participation was taken up locally at two high schools in one school district. Using ethnographic and longitudinal data, we focus on four young women of color (two at each school) as they negotiated STEM-related identities in the discursive and practice contexts of their lives at school. Using Holland and Lave’s concept of history in person, we view the young women as fighting for particular versions of a future self while entangled in discursive and social relations that threatened to position them differently than they wished to be. We find that their fight for future selves was not—for them—with the national narrative about women of color in STEM but with local school narratives that negatively positioned students of color more broadly and remained silent on issues of gender, the intersection of gender and race, and the implications for STEM. High school success in STEM came as a hopeful but potentially fragile byproduct of struggles to differentiate themselves from people like them (other Blacks, Latinas, the poor). Implications of these findings are discussed.     

A New Approach to Avoiding Problems of Scale in Interpreting Trends in Mental Measurement Data

Extracting policy-relevant information from large national surveys of educational achievement is ordinarily a nontrivial task. It is made more treacherous when the data are expressed on scales that are not uniquely determined. The paper begins with a critical analysis of a recent attempt to interpret the findings on reading achievement obtained by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It then describes a new approach to the quantification and interpretation of change and demonstrates its appropriateness for repeated cross-sectional designs such as NAEP. Limitations imposed by the survey design and the nature of the measurements are highlighted     

How do instructional designers evaluate? A qualitative study of evaluation in practice

This study employed a qualitative research design to investigate how instructional designers use evaluation in everyday design practice. While past research has examined how designers spend their time, how they generally make decisions, and expert-novice differences, little attention has been paid to use of context, input, process, or product evaluation, from the perspective of practicing designers. Based on interviews of practitioners, our findings included ten themes regarding how designers use evaluation to improve their products. While these results substantiate to some degree the claim that practitioners believe clients will not pay for formal evaluations, they also suggest that practitioners use evaluation in important but less formal ways. Other conclusions regarding the role of evaluation in design are provided and future directions for training and research are discussed.     

The effects of child maltreatment on language development

The separate effects of child neglect, abuse, and their interaction upon language development as measured by the Preschool Language Scale were examined in four groups of children (n = 79) in a quasi-experimental design. There were three groups of maltreated subjects, all drawn from a treatment center: an abused only group (n = 13), a neglected only group (n = 7), and an abused and neglected group (n = 31); a non-maltreated group (n = 28) was drawn from a day care center. Abuse, neglect, and their interaction were used to predict both auditory comprehension and verbal ability as separate criteria in two stepwise multiple regression equations, where the variance attributable to gender and mother's status on Aid to Dependent Children had been removed. Child neglect was found to predict significantly both auditory comprehension and verbal ability. Neither child abuse nor the interaction between abuse and neglect significantly predicted either dependent variable. These findings suggest that child neglect may be the critical type of maltreatment associated with language delay.     

Developmental issues in cognitive mapping: the selection and utilization of environmental landmarks

2 studies were conducted to investigate developmental differences in the ability to select and use environmental landmarks for cognitively organizing distance information from a walk. In experiment 1, second-grade, fifth-grade, and college subjects viewed a simulated walk and selected scenes that were high in potential landmark value. In experiment 2, children from the same grade levels first viewed the walk and then ranked distances among either the test scenes most frequently selected by their peers or those selected most frequently by adults. Results indicated that (a) adults and children may not spontaneously select the same features as real-world landmarks; (b) children are less capable than adults in judging the value of potential landmarks as distance cues; and (c) the ability to use environmental landmarks as cues for distance information developmentally precedes the ability to assess this potential information value.