The Me in Memory: The Role of the Self in Autobiographical Memory Development

This article tests the hypothesis that self-development plays a role in the offset of childhood amnesia; assessing the importance of both the capacity to anchor a memory to the self-concept, and the strength of the self-concept as an anchor. This research demonstrates for the first time that the volume of 3- to 6-year old's specific autobiographical memories is predicted by both the volume of their self-knowledge, and their capacity for self-source monitoring within self-referencing paradigms (N = 186). Moreover, there is a bidirectional relation between self and memory, such that autobiographical memory mediates the link between self-source monitoring and self-knowledge. These predictive relations suggest that the self-memory system is active in early childhood.     

The legend of Texas Western: journalism and the epic sports spectacle that wasn’t

This essay interrogates journalistic accounts of Texas Western College’s 1966 college basketball championship, a game in which an all-Black team defeated an all-White team. The analysis traces the evolving portrayals of the game over 45 years. In 1966 American journalists did not emphasize the racial aspects of the game and it was largely forgotten. Twenty-five years later, however, journalists reconstructed the game as a racialized legend, and this account evolved into an epic American narrative. The author argues that the epic portrayals, although aesthetically appealing, reflect problems with accuracy, appropriation, and commercial exploitation. The latter factor led to the legend’s motion picture adaptation as part of a troublesome “White Savior” cinema genre.     

Designing your sample efficiently: clustering effects in education surveys

Background:?Education, and information about education, is highly structured: individuals are grouped into classes, which are grouped into schools, which are grouped into local authorities, which are grouped into countries. The degree of similarity among members of a group, such as a school or classroom, is a very important factor in the design and analysis of studies in education.

Purpose:?The aim of this article is to provide information on this degree of similarity within schools to enable those involved in carrying out surveys of schools to do so most efficiently in terms of resources and minimum disturbance of schools.

Sources of data:?This paper uses data from 13 studies at primary and secondary level conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales.

Main argument:?The degree of similarity among members of a group is measured by two statistics, the intra-cluster correlation and the design effect. The study described here classifies outcomes into a number of categories and estimates intra-cluster correlation and design effect. The relevance of the results to survey design and analysis is discussed, and examples of how to use these are given.

Conclusions:?The main findings of this study, rather than conclusions as such, are the intra-cluster correlations for each topic category. However, the paper reaches some tentative conclusions about the degree of clustering by topic. Using Hox's convention (Multilevel analysis: Techniques and applications, Lawrence Erlbaum, London, 2002) for the size of intra-cluster correlations, it was found that the degree of clustering of achievement was high, while ethnic and language variables were highly clustered in secondary but not primary. By contrast, attitudes towards school, educationally relevant home characteristics, and perception of school policies have quite low values of ρ (mean < 0.05), defined as small.     

The Feasibility of Using Virtual Professional Development to Support Teachers in Making Data-Based Decisions to Improve Students’ Writing

Rubrics can be used to give students targeted feedback on their writing and, therefore, teachers should be able to use them as a type of formative assessment to guide writing instruction. This article describes an exploratory study of how three teachers provided instruction for fourth, fifth, and seventh graders with learning disabilities and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in using a technology-based graphic organizer (TBGO) to compose persuasive essays. Given professional development inclusive of online modules, long-range plans, and virtually facilitated professional learning communities, the teachers used a digital dashboard to (a) monitor students’ writing progress with a genre-specific analytic rubric, (b) target a specific instructional skill, and (c) document their instructional decision(s). The article illustrates how educators can effectively use genre-specific writing rubrics in practice to make data-driven decisions about student writing.     

Magic Windows and the Serious Life: Rituals and Community in Early American Local Television

This historical study addresses the social impact of early local television by examining the ritual aspects of its now-extinct entertainment programming genres. The study assimilates several theories of ritual and collective memory to explain how this programming shaped the daily lives of television viewers in postwar America. It examines both the nature and form of this programming and how viewers remember it, largely via Internet-based tribute venues. This perspective helps better explain how such programming created a sense of community among technologically determined viewing audiences, and why it continues to structure the collective and individual memories of former viewers.     

MEDIA STUDIES AND TELEVISION STUDIES IN SCOTTISH SCHOOLS

Despite recommendations, dating from many years ago, that Media studies, and in particular television studies, should form part of the normal schools curriculum in Britain, progress has been haphazard. The author argues that the centrality and the artificiality of the television viewing experience in the child's life means that the subject of television studies should be an important feature of the curriculum of Scottish schools.     

A labour of love: mothers,emotional capital and homework

This paper develops a new analysis of homework by building on feminist scholarship which documents the invisible labour done by women in support of their children's education. While numerous studies have examined the relationship between homework and achievement, little attention has been paid to the largely gendered and potentially stressful nature of ‘parental involvement’. The analytic focus in this paper is on the complex emotional and pedagogical dimensions of homework and the ways it is shaped by socio-cultural contexts. Videotaped homework interactions between one working-class and two middle-class mothers and their children are examined using Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital. The analysis distinguishes between productive pedagogical relationships and those that promote extensive anxiety and are counterproductive to learning. The paper argues that the reserves of cultural and emotional capital required for homework completion are significant and that class position does not necessarily guarantee the ways in which these capitals are mobilised.