Learning history through textbooks: are Mexican and Spanish students taught the same story?

Teaching history, compared to other school subjects is characterised from country to country by widely varying content. This has been commented on by both historians (Ferro and Ahonen) and psychologists ( J of Narrative and Life History 4 (1994) 295). In this paper, some of the events that occurred in 1492 and their representation in history textbooks have been selected in order to analyse the content of Mexican and Spanish textbooks. These two countries have been selected because it is anticipated that they will offer very different views about these controversial historical topics and some of the characters involved, such as Columbus. The analysis of textbook content indeed showed two different views of the same event by Mexico and Spain. This paper discusses the influence of these views in the formation of different national identities.     

A “conditional” sense of fairness in assessment

Standardizing aspects of assessments has long been recognized as a tactic to help make evaluations of examinees fair. It reduces variation in irrelevant aspects of testing procedures that could advantage some examinees and disadvantage others. However, recent attention to making assessment accessible to a more diverse population of students highlights situations in which making tests identical for all examinees can make a testing procedure less fair: Equivalent surface conditions may not provide equivalent evidence about examinees. Although testing accommodations are by now standard practice in most large-scale testing programmes, for the most part these practices lie outside formal educational measurement theory. This article builds on recent research in universal design for learning (UDL), assessment design, and psychometrics to lay out the rationale for inference that is conditional on matching examinees with principled variations of an assessment so as to reduce construct-irrelevant demands. The present focus is assessment for special populations, but it is argued that the principles apply more broadly.     

Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: spanish, dutch, French, hebrew, italian, korean, and american english

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.     

Exploratory analysis of decentralized governance and its implications for the equity of early childhood education services in four countries of Europe and Central Asia

We conducted a qualitative study in four countries of the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region and explored the Early Childhood Education (ECE) policy landscape with an emphasis on the challenges and opportunities decentralization has presented for the provision of services. We content-analyzed ECE policies and documents to map national approaches to ECE. Key informant interviews were conducted to assess the implementation of decentralized ECE governance. An analytical framework that combined core constructs of ECE systems and key domains of decentralization (autonomy, institutional capacity and accountability) was developed and applied. Our analysis points to four overarching processes that contribute to the perpetuation and possible increase of inequitable ECE including (1) sparse mechanisms for participatory and autonomous policy formulation, with few systematic efforts to strengthen local institutional capacities; (2) fragmented policy approaches to promote the assessment and strengthening of quality at scale; (3) funding frameworks and financing schemes that tend to benefit enrolment in contexts of higher levels of economic development; and (4) few mechanisms for coordination to ensure operational coherence across the ECE sector.     

Statement of American Social Scientists of Research on School Desegregation to the U.S. Supreme Court in Parents v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County

In June 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review two related cases originating from school districts in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington that involved voluntarily adopted racial integration plans. Concerned about the outcome of these cases, 553 social scientists submitted a social science statement to the Supreme Court summarizing the large body of social science research supporting the school districts’ policies relevant to the Court’s determination. The statement, reprinted here, supports three interrelated conclusions: (1) racially integrated schools provide significant benefits to students and communities; (2) racially isolated schools have harmful educational implications for students; and (3) race-conscious policies are necessary to maintain racial integration in schools. Because of the overwhelming amount of scholarly data, social scientists argued, as the lower courts had found, that the schools boards have a compelling interest to promote racial integration and prevent racial isolation through choice-based school assignment policies that consider race as a factor. On June 28, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the school assignment plans on the grounds that the plans were not narrowly tailored to the interests that the school districts had asserted. In addition to affecting the ability of school districts to maintain racially diverse schools, the decision has broad implications for researchers who seek to help school districts in these efforts.

Invented spelling activities in small groups and early spelling and reading

Our aim was to assess the impact of an invented spelling programme conducted in small groups on children’s written language acquisition in Portuguese. We expected the experimental group to have better post-test results than the control group in spelling and reading. Participants were 160 preschool-age children who were randomly divided into an experimental and a control group. Their age, cognitive ability, knowledge of letters and phonological abilities were controlled. Children’s spelling and reading were evaluated in a pre- and a post-test. In-between, experimental group participated in an invented spelling programme in small groups and the control group in story readings. The experimental group showed better results in spelling and reading in the post-test than the control one. Different dynamics occurred in the small groups which had different impacts on children’s acquisitions. These results provide empirical support for the proposal that invented spelling should be incorporated into early literacy instruction.     

The Critical Role of Stereopsis in Virtual and Mixed Reality Learning Environments

Anatomy education has been revolutionized through digital media, resulting in major advances in realism, portability, scalability, and user satisfaction. However, while such approaches may well be more portable, realistic, or satisfying than traditional photographic presentations, it is less clear that they have any superiority in terms of student learning. In this study, it was hypothesized that virtual and mixed reality presentations of pelvic anatomy will have an advantage over two-dimensional (2D) presentations and perform approximately equal to physical models and that this advantage over 2D presentations will be reduced when stereopsis is decreased by covering the non-dominant eye. Groups of 20 undergraduate students learned pelvic anatomy under seven conditions: physical model with and without stereo vision, mixed reality with and without stereo vision, virtual reality with and without stereo vision, and key views on a computer monitor. All were tested with a cadaveric pelvis and a 15-item, short-answer recognition test. Compared to the key views, the physical model had a 70% increase in accuracy in structure identification; the virtual reality a 25% increase, and the mixed reality a non-significant 2.5% change. Blocking stereopsis reduced performance on the physical model by 15%, on virtual reality by 60%, but by only 2.5% on the mixed reality technology. The data show that virtual and mixed reality technologies tested are inferior to physical models and that true stereopsis is critical in learning anatomy.     

Associations Between Perceived Material Deprivation,Parents’ Discipline Practices,and Children's Behavior Problems: An International Perspective

This study investigated the association between perceived material deprivation, children's behavior problems, and parents’ disciplinary practices. The sample included 1,418 8- to 12-year-old children and their parents in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. Multilevel mixed- and fixed-effects regression models found that, even when income remained stable, perceived material deprivation was associated with children's externalizing behavior problems and parents’ psychological aggression. Parents’ disciplinary practices mediated a small share of the association between perceived material deprivation and children's behavior problems. There were no differences in these associations between mothers and fathers or between high- and low- and middle-income countries. These results suggest that material deprivation likely influences children's outcomes at any income level.     

What do business models do?: Innovation devices in technology entrepreneurship

Building on a case study of an entrepreneurial venture, we investigate the role played by business models in the innovation process. Rather than debating their accuracy and efficiency, we adopt a pragmatic approach to business models — we examine them as market devices, focusing on their materiality, use and dynamics. Taking into account the variety of its forms, which range from corporate presentations to business plans, we show that the business model is a narrative and calculative device that allows entrepreneurs to explore a market and plays a performative role by contributing to the construction of the techno-economic network of an innovation.     

Do teachers, principals, and superintendents perceive leadership the same way?

Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used in this study to determine the extent to which teachers, principals, and superintendents perceive the leadership construct in the same way. The researchers found that the two-factor model fits the principal group and particularly the superintendent group better than does the four-factor model. The principals and particularly the superintendents appear to have a more tightly focused mental model of leadership than teachers. The test of structural invariance across the three groups indicated that there was configural and weak invariance, but not strong or strict invariance. It appears that the item-loading patterns and item loadings are invariant, but the intercepts are different, which suggests that the groups put different emphases on the importance of the factors. The study affirms the importance of determining and reporting the extent to which comparison groups share the same mental model for leadership.