Separation — Between 9 and 5

Goodbye, says Chris, mother of two-year-old Harry, I must go to work now. I will come back after you play with your friends and take a nap and go out to the park. Then we will go home together. Harry cries as his mother kisses him and walks out the door.Amy Laura Dombro is a freelance writer specializing in the field of infant/toddler development and day care.     

The city as a context for scientific activity: creating the Mediziner-Viertel in fin-de-siècle Vienna

At the turn of the 19th century, a surprisingly dense network of academic institutes and medical facilities developed on the margins of Ringstrasse, the impressive boulevard that surrounded the old city of Vienna. Enmeshed, socially and culturally in the life of the city, that area known as the Mediziner-Viertel grew out of the needs of natural scientists and physicians as much as it was shaped by the liberal ideology, feminists' petitions for women's acceptance to university studies, Vienna's intellectuals and Kaffeehaus culture. Recovering the city behind the structure of modern academic institutes tells us a good deal about the context in which intellectual work was developed and its impact on the production of scientific knowledge.     

Validating culturally diverse students: Toward a new model of learning and student development

Conclusion This study demonstrated that nontraditional students, no matter how fragile, can be transformed into full members of the college academic and social community. The importance of this finding cannot be over stated, for it points to real hope for students who do not see themselves as college material or who feel that college life has little or nothing to do with the realities from which they come. What is needed to transform these students is for faculty, administrators, and counselors to fully engage in the validation of students and to recognize that not all students can be expected to learn or to get involved in institutional life in the same way. Diversity in nature is a strength. So is diversity among college students. The challenge is how to harness that strength, and how to unleash the creativity and exuberance for learning that is present in all students who feel free to learn, free to be who they are, and validated for what they know and believe.Laura Rendon has a Ph.D from the University of Michigan. She is currently an associate professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Arizona State University. She studies instructional and institutional issues related to the success of minority students, particularly Hispanic students and two-year colleges.     

Portuguese science teachers' education,attitudes, and practice relative to the issue of alternative conceptions

Many studies have shown that students of all school levels hold alternative conceptions that differ from the scientific conceptions transmitted by the school. These results raise some questions about the efficacy of traditional teaching and stress the need for using teaching strategies that explicitly take into account the alternative conceptions that students bring to the science classes. This issue has recently been raised and widely discussed throughout Portugal and the proposals for the new science syllabuses advise teachers to take it into account. However, the number of studies investigating both the teachers' attitudes towards this issue and the use of teaching strategies based on students' alternative conceptions is very limited. This article aims to present the results obtained from science teachers about their attitudes towards students' alternative conceptions and the use of teaching strategies based on these conceptions. The results may contribute to the planning of in-service courses.     

How has Mexican faculty been trained? A national perspective and a case study

This article depicts how faculty members at Mexican higher education institutions have been prepared in order to assume their professional responsibilities. It relies on three elements: First, a secondary analysis of a national faculty survey composed of 3,861 faculty members from 65 institutions; second, 34 interviews conducted in eight higher education institutions; third, a primary analysis of an institution faculty survey in a public autonomous university. Results are presented regarding the following issues: first, the central traits of anticipatory or formative in-site faculty socialization; second, the changes in the highest degree faculty obtained at entry into academic life as compared to the obtained degree at the time of the survey; third, the formative time patterns during faculty’s higher education training, fourth, the conditions of study under which faculty members obtained their graduate degrees; and fifth, the academic inbreeding phenomenon.     

Visual Attention Preference for Intermediate Predictability in Young Children

How do children allocate their attention? There is too much information in the world to encode it all, so children must pick and choose. How do they organize their sampling to make the most of the learning opportunities that surround them? Previous work shows infants actively seek intermediately predictable information. Here we employ eye-tracking and computational modeling to examine the impact of stimulus predictability across early childhood (ages 3–6 years, n = 72, predominantly Non-Hispanic White, middle- to upper-middle-income), by chronological age and cognitive ability. Results indicated that children prefer attending to stimuli of intermediate predictability, with no differences in this pattern based on age or cognitive ability. The consistency may suggest a robust general information-processing mechanism that operates across the lifespan.     

Advancing opportunities for children’s informal STEM learning transfer through parent–child narrative reflection

This study examined whether families’ conversational reflections after a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)-related experience in a museum promoted learning transfer. 63 children (M = 6.93 years; 30 girls; 57% White, 17.5% Latinx, 8% Asian, 5% African American, 9.5% mixed, 3% missing race/ethnicity) and their parents received an engineering demonstration, engaged in a building activity, and either recorded a photo-narrative reflection about their building experience or not at the museum. Thirty-six of these families completed a building activity with different materials weeks later at home, and the majority (77%) evidenced learning transfer of the building principle demonstrated at the museum. Those who participated in the photo-narrative reflection at the museum also showed learning transfer by talking more about STEM during the home building activity.     

Error handling in the classroom: an experimental study of teachers’ strategies to foster positive error climate

European Journal of Psychology of Education - The present research investigated the possibility to foster positive classroom climate, achievement emotions, and adaptive beliefs about errors by...     

Writing expository essays from social studies texts: a self-regulated strategy development study

Reading and Writing - This study examined the effectiveness of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) to improve students’ ability to write expository essays after reading social studies...