‘Sent out’ and Stepping Back In: stories from young people ‘placed at risk’

This paper invokes the voices of young people who had been separated from mainstream schooling because they were positioned as ‘disengaged’ and ‘at risk of failing’. The authors argue that streaming students out of schooling needs serious questioning as an escalating number of young people are framed as non-performers within a globally competitive educational market. Throughout the paper we use critical ethnographic slices to expose the experiences of the 24 young people interviewed who together with mentors shared personal insights whilst attending a re-engagement programme in Australia in the year 2010. Their responses unearth a ‘wickedness’ and a preoccupation during their schooling with performance and school improvement. In response, we privilege student interpretations of their own marginalisation as an activist form of ‘speaking back’ to the social and economic conditions and limitations dominating their lives.     

远程开放教育:蒙古游牧生活妇女的非正规教育

B·罗宾逊女士,一位关心社会弱势群体教育问题的教育专家,联合国教科文组织的项目执行官,在远程教育和学习支持服务方面享有很高的威望,她时常关心着中国的远程教育事业。今天我们总在讨论远程教育的学习支持服务,不少同志有幸到国外考查或接受培训,B·罗宾逊女士作为中国赴英培训项目的学术负责人之一接见过我们的学员。她的想法、做法代表着国外和国际专门机构(如联合国教科文组织)的基本观点。这里介绍的是她刚刚完成的一个针对经济迅速发展环境下开展开放式远程教育的项目。尽管中国与文中的蒙古在经济和政治结构上有着根本差异,但其根据实际情况开展远程教育和学习支持服务的经验是发展有中国特色的远程教育的一个绝好的借鉴。受版面的限制,本文仅对报告中涉及学习支持服务的理念和方法问题进行了摘译。     

A model of student approaches to learning encompassing ways to influence and change approaches

The tems surface and deep are widely used to describe student approaches to studying and learning. Different writers have attributed different shades of meaning to the terms, as the categories have resulted from the work of a number of groups or individual researchers. There are greater divergences of opinion on the question of how students can be influenced to adopt either a surface or a deep approach. This paper attempts to synthesise some of the divergent positions into a simple model of student approaches to learning which concentrates on the ways that students may be influenced to adopt either surface or deep approaches. The model recognises the existence of predispositions to either deep or surface approaches, and the use of strategies for particular tasks. A number of contextual variables seem to influence students with a deep predisposition to adopt surface strategies. The transition between surface and deep predispositions is seen as difficult to influence, but three types of intervention are discussed.     

自我调控学习的课堂教学设计理论

培养学生掌握自我调控学习的技能就是教给学生在未来社会生存的本领。本介绍了如何在课堂进行学科内容教学的同时进行自我调控学习策略的教学，并提出了一个在课堂教学环境下同时提高老师自我调控学习技能的新型教师专业学习模式：     

Temperament, Emotion, and Cognition at Fourteen Months: The MacArthur Longitudinal Twin Study

200 pairs of twins were assessed at 14 months of age in the laboratory and home. Measures were obtained of temperament, emotion, and cognition/language. Comparisons between identical and fraternal twin correlations suggest that individual differences are due in part to heritable influences. For temperament, genetic influence was significant for behavioral observations of inhibition to the unfamiliar, tester ratings of activity, and parental ratings of temperament. For emotion, significant genetic influence was found for empathy and parental ratings of negative emotion. The estimate of heritability for parental report of expression of negative emotions was relatively high, whereas that for expression of positive emotions was low, a finding consistent with previous research. For cognition and language, genetic influence was significant for behavioral indices of spatial memory, categorization, and word comprehension. Shared rearing environment appears influential for parental reports of language and for positive emotions, but not for other measures of emotion or for temperament.     

Teaching High School Students with Learning and Emotional Disabilities in Inclusion Science Classrooms: A Case Study of Four Teachers' Beliefs and Practices

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

An Empirical Investigation of the Efficacy of Multimedia Instruction in Counseling Skill Development

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of multimedia instruction on students' counseling skill development. The participants were 73 beginning‐level counselor education students (20 men and 53 women, ages ranging from 24 to 47 years). Ratings of students' pre‐ and posttest video counseling tapes were used to assess the effects of the multimedia approach. The results found that there was no statistically significant difference among the levels of students' counseling skill development across the 3 (high‐tech multimedia, low‐tech multimedia, and traditional instruction) treatment groups.     

Computational Efficiency through Visual Argument: Do Graphic Organizers Communicate Relations in Text Too Effectively?

Previous research on graphic organizers has found that they facilitate memory for corresponding text. This study investigated why one type of graphic organizer (a matrix) may communicate interconcept relations more effectively than an outline or text. In three experiments, college students judged the accuracy of interconcept relations after they read a text and studied a matrix, an outline, or the text again. We also measured students′ performance when study time was reduced and testing delayed. Results indicated that even when study time was reduced, viewing a matrix helped students make more accurate judgments of interconcept relations. We conclude that a matrix is more computationally efficient than an outline or text, enabling readers to compute interconcept relations more quickly and easily (Larkin & Simon, 1987), due to a communicative process called visual argument (Waller, 1981). However, this advantage disappeared when testing was delayed, which, ironically, may have been due to computational efficiency.     

Maternal intrusiveness, maternal warmth, and mother-toddler relationship outcomes: variations across low-income ethnic and acculturation groups

The present study investigated the extent to which maternal intrusiveness and warmth during play, observed in 579 European American, 412 African American, and 110 more and 131 less acculturated Mexican American low-income families when children were approximately 15 months old, predicted 3 dimensions of the mother-toddler relationship 10 months later. Intrusiveness predicted increases in later child negativity in all 4 groups. Among African Americans only, this association was moderated by maternal warmth. Intrusiveness predicted negative change in child engagement with mothers only in European American families. Finally, near-significant trends suggested that intrusiveness predicted later decreased dyadic mutuality in European American and more acculturated Mexican American families, but not in African American or less acculturated Mexican American families.     

The influence of collaborative language learning on cognitive control in unbalanced multilingual migrant children

In this study, (N62) 5- to 6-year-old English monolingual and unbalanced multilingual children attending public primary school education in Scotland became involved in collaborative Narrative Format (Taeschner, 2005) modern language activities in Spanish, both at school and at home. These activities were redesigned and adapted to serve as a quasi-experimental tool to provide a highly structured and intense linguistic input. The main purpose was to explore whether cognitive advantages previously found in balanced bilinguals and second-language-learning monolingual children involved in language immersion programmes could be extended to different types of beginning language learners in a non-immersion context. Depending on the monolingual vs bilingual ratios of children in the classroom, we distinguished between homogeneous groups (characterised by a ratio of 95% of first-language English-language monolinguals) and heterogeneous groups (children from both Scottish and migrant homes in roughly equal proportions). Using a standard task of early cognitive control, we found not only that unbalanced multilinguals perform above chance but also that there was a developing trend of enhanced performance for monolinguals learning languages in the heterogeneous groups. This suggests that not only the length of exposure and intensity of input but also the social classroom environment where children develop their language skills may also play an important role in the effects of bilingualism on executive functions.