Priorities for primary education? From subjects to life-skills and children's social and emotional development

To what needs and purposes should the primary curriculum be chiefly directed in the coming decades? In a first step towards revising the primary curriculum, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) invited responses to an open online call to ‘have your say’ on priorities for primary education. Respondents were asked to share their views in 100 words or less. Six priorities for primary education were identified across the 960 responses. These focused on developing children's life-skills; communication skills; well-being; literacy and numeracy skills; motivation and engagement; and their sense of identity and belonging. Across the priorities, there is recognition that skills learned in the primary years are related to one another and the extent to which children develop these is likely to have wide-ranging effects on their future experience as learners. Findings call for a revision of traditional, content-based curriculum subjects towards a better alignment with the needs of today's primary school children beginning with a more explicit focus on life-skills, and children's social and emotional development. Finally, we note the common ground across early childhood, primary and post-primary sectors and highlight the potential to align our values and vision for children and young people's education from the earliest years through adulthood.     

Constructing men who teach: research into care and gender as productive of the male primary teacher

This paper argues that in order to begin loosening the ties that bind care and gender in primary education, we need to re-examine the knowledge sought and found by educational research about teachers. The focus is primarily on how we understand men who teach. Through an examination of two scholarly texts – Ashley, M., and J. Lee [2003 Ashley, M., and J. Lee. 2003. Women Teaching Boys: Caring and Working in the Primary School. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. [Google Scholar]. Women Teaching Boys: Caring and Working in the Primary School. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham] and King, J. [1998 King, J. 1998. Uncommon Caring: Learning from Men Who Teach Young Children. New York: TCP. [Google Scholar]. Uncommon Caring: Learning from Men Who Teach Young Children. New York: TCP] – I argue that we must be mindful that our research can effectively produce and reiterate common-sense understandings of men that binds them to the hegemonic masculine ideal. It is argued that mixed-method qualitative research that untangles the layers of context influencing the lives of men who teach is important. The paper also suggests that the study of male teachers' emotions, as at once individual and social, and private and public, can disrupt the rational–emotional binary that cements care to gender and reveal new configurations of the gender order.     

The Legacy of Early Insecurity Histories in Shaping Adolescent Adaptation to Interparental Conflict

This study tested whether the mediational pathway involving interparental conflict, adolescent emotional insecurity, and their psychological problems was altered by their earlier childhood histories of insecurity. Participants included 230 families, with the first of the five measurement occasions occurring when children were in first grade (M_age = 7 years). Results indicated that interparental conflict was associated with increases in adolescent emotional insecurity that, in turn, predicted subsequent increases in their psychological problems. Childhood insecurity predicted adolescent maladjustment 5 years later even after considering contemporaneous family experiences. Moderator findings revealed that adolescents with relatively higher levels of insecurity in childhood evidenced disproportionately greater and reduced levels of insecurity in the context of high and low levels of interparental conflict, respectively.     

SUPERVISION IN SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY: THE DEVELOPMENTAL/ECOLOGICAL/PROBLEM‐SOLVING MODEL

Effective supervision models guide the supervisory relationship and supervisory tasks leading to reflective and purposeful practice. The Developmental/Ecological/Problem‐Solving (DEP) Model provides a contemporary framework for supervision specific to school psychology. Designed for the school psychology internship, the DEP Model is also applicable to all pre‐service and advanced field‐based training, as well as career‐long continuing professional development. The Developmental domain initiates training at the functioning skill level of the supervisee and progresses toward independent competency. The Ecological domain addresses the multiple systemic contexts that influence school psychology practice and prepares the intern to intervene within both individual and systemic contexts. The Problem‐Solving domain focuses on the application of data‐based decision making and evidence‐based interventions to the full range of school psychology activities. It provides a systematic schema to address student, family, and school needs.     

Wigner’s Symmetry Representation Theorem

This article elucidates the important role the notion of symmetry has played in physics. It discusses the proof of one of the important theorems of quantum mechanics, viz., Wigner’s Symmetry Representation Theorem. It also shows how the representations of various continuous and discrete symmetries follow from the theorem and at last provides an explicit form of the anti-unitary time-reversal operator.     

Exploring the limits of spatial memory in rats,using very large mazes

In Experiment 1, rats foraged for food in six successive phases with 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, and 48 arms attached in random locations to a large radial maze. The percentage of novel choices appeared to be determined more by spatial proximity than by number of arms. In Experiment 2, rats foraged for food in four successive phases with 8, 16, 24, and 48 arms attached to the maze in spread-out or tight configurations. Performance was poor in the tight configurations regardless of the number of arms. Performance was excellent in the 8-arm spread-out condition but declined as 16 and, then again, 24 arms were added. Thus, spatial separation, not number of locations, was the chief determinant of performance in the first two experiments. In Experiment 3, in successive phases, 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, 48, 16, and 8 food towers were set in a circle on the floor, with the spatial separation between adjacent towers held constant at 33 cm. The percentage of novel choices declined as 8 towers became 16 and did not change again with 24, 32, 40, or 48 towers in place but then increased again as 16 towers became 8. In Experiment 4, in successive phases, 8, 16, 24, and 32 food towers were set in a circle, with the spatial separation between adjacent towers held constant at 66 cm. The percentage of novel choices declined as 8 towers became 16 and again as 16 towers became 24 but did not decline further. These data were discussed in terms of the fundamental problems posed by variations in the number of food locations in the pursuit of the limit of spatial memory in rats.     

The nature and development of preservice science teachers' conceptions of subject matter and pedagogy

The purpose of this study was to assess the development and changes in preservice science teachers' subject matter and pedagogy knowledge structures as they proceeded through a professional teacher education program. Twelve secondary preservice science teachers were asked to create representations of their subject matter and pedagogy knowledge structures periodically (four times spanning the entirety of their subject-specific teacher education program) and participate in a videotaped interview concerning the eight knowledge structure representations immediately following student teaching. Qualitative analyses of knowledge structure representations and transcribed interviews within and between subjects were performed by one of the researchers and “blindly” corroborated by the other two researchers. Initial knowledge structure representations were typically linear and lacked coherence. Both types of knowledge structure representations were highly susceptible to change as a consequence of the act of teaching. Although there was some overlap between subject matter and pedagogy knowledge structures, they were reported to exert separate influences on classroom practice, with the pedagogy knowledge structure having primary influence on instructional decisions. Furthermore, the complexity of one's subject matter structure appeared to be a critical factor in determining whether the structure directly influences classroom practice.