The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — A Dialogue with Memory

This article describes the author's personal/professional experience in designing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a building that must “fit” in the context of the National Mall, express the spirit of the Holocaust, and become a permanent, living memorial. “The [building] did not pose the familiar problem of the container and the contained. This [must be] a building where the contained (the historical exhibition) works on the container (the architectural shell) and where the container has to join with the contained.”     

Intrachild variabilities: Will curtailment of testing harm minority children?

Compared intrachild variability of five-year-old children (49 black, 34 white) on the Primary Mental Abilities Test when subjects reached their fifth birthday after completing at least two years of preschool enrichment. Conclusions, although qualified on the basis of limited sample size, revealed wider intrachild variability with minority children. This suggests that abandonment of testing may increase instructional problems and possibly lower the quality of instruction provided minority and poor children.     

Cognitive and perceptual measures as predictors of fourth-grade achievement

This study used a multivariate approach and longitudinal design to examine the relationship of early perceptual and cognitive development to later school achievement. The extent to which a set of 4th-grade achievement measures could be predicted from a set of variables collected when the students were in first grade was determined through a series of canonical and multiple correlation analyses. These results were compared to results of an earlier phase of the study. Similarities between the two phases indicated that: (a) A measure of visual perception added significantly to the prediction of achievement afforded by consideration of sex and academic aptitude. (b) The variables used to predict achievement may differ somewhat between boys and girls. (c) The usefulness of sex as a predictor of school achievement depends upon the specific achievement area under consideration. Differences in the two phases involved the extent to which sex was a predictor of a specific achievement area.     

The historicality of cognition: Implications for science education research

This article discusses the growing consensus across diverse educational research domains that the historical aspects of cognition are important for understanding not only how individuals but also disciplines know what they know. After proposing and defining the new superordinate concept of historicality, fundamental interrelationships between time, events, memory, meaning, personal knowledge, public knowledge, and the histories of the sciences are explored. Relevant research findings that demonstrate the confluence of scholarly thought concerning historicality across five educationally important domains are presented for the reader's consideration. Using the historicality concept, it is suggested that the histories of the sciences be considered as “the collective mind of scientists” and viewed as vital to developing students' knowledge about science by building upon the critical distinctions drawn by Duschl (1990). The author's science teaching technique, based upon construction of historical vignettes, is introduced here because of the relationship between history and story and the documented educational effectiveness of the story format. Finally, the author adds several cautionary notes about the validity of explanations based upon historicality and anticipates future advances in our understanding of the historicality of cognition.