Beyond words: the importance of gesture to researchers and learners

Gesture has privileged access to information that children know but do not say. As such, it can serve as an additional window to the mind of the developing child, one that researchers are only beginning to acknowledge. Gesture might, however, do more than merely reflect understanding-it may be involved in the process of cognitive change itself. This question will guide research on gesture as we enter the new millennium. Gesture might contribute to change through two mechanisms which are not mutually exclusive: (1) indirectly, by communicating unspoken aspects of the learner's cognitive state to potential agents of change (parents, teachers, siblings, friends); and (2) directly, by offering the learner a simpler way to express and explore ideas that may be difficult to think through in a verbal format, thus easing the learner's cognitive burden. As a result, the next decade may well offer evidence of gesture's dual potential as an illuminating tool for researchers and as a facilitator of cognitive growth for learners themselves.     

Histories of Romani Education in Slovakia: A Kazamian Perspective

Using the critical work of Andreas Kazamias on the history and methods of comparative education as conceptual framework, we investigate the education (over a 200-year period) of the Slovak Roma. We position our story as paradigmatic of the dual processes of enlightenment and obscurantism with which we are familiar in thinking about the history of racial violence. The article describes the encounter of a young British doctor, Richard Bright, with Roma and Slovaks in 1814, and explores the Enlightenment thinking about Roma in specific, and race in general, in Bright’s travelogue. We juxtapose these historical investigations with qualitative findings from research conducted recently in the same region of Slovakia. Our goal is to show that Kazamias’s calls for a return to the historical in educational research, and greater attention to the “paideia of the soul,” have relevance in considering the discouraging past and present of Roma in Slovak schools and society.     

THE DELPHI: EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT IN INSTITUTIONAL GOAL SETTING

This paper describes and analysies the use of a delphi research methodology to assess faculty perceptions of institutional needs and goals in an osteopathic medical education program. Use of the delphi to educate faculty in the administrative and political functioning of the institution as well as to involve all faculty in the refinement of specific needs and goals is discussed. Full‐time clinical and basic science faculty of the New Jersey School of Osteopathic Medicine provided an example of the varied uses of the delphi research methodology in higher education and specifically in profesiional higher education. The three rounds of the delphi procedure produced faculty consensus on the following institutional variable items: (a) the philosophical and functional orientation of the curriculum; (b) location and design of the physical campus facilities and environment; (c) faculty issues of tenure, promotion, salary and merit; (d) teaching, and the evaluation of teaching; (e) student characteristics and admissions policies; and (f) administrative structure and communication networks.     

Vocational-technical programs: follow-up of students with learning disabilities

Recent research has examined the role of vocational-technical training in facilitating the transition from school to work of adolescents with learning disabilities. The present study provided 6-, 12-, and 24-month follow-up data on such students who had attended vocational-technical programs. Matched groups of students without disabilities from vocational-technical programs, as well as randomly selected students without disabilities from regular high schools, were also included for comparisons. Results of the study raised several questions about the value and purpose of vocational-technical training for adolescents with learning disabilities.     

Effects of reward amount and reward omission on short-term retention

A series of four experiments studied the retention of the response made on a just-preceding trial as a function of the presence, and amount, of food reward given on that trial. Rats were trained to alternate arm choices in a T-maze, and then were tested for alternation with 5- or 30-sec delays between runs. When the subjects had received prior experience with the reward amounts used in testing, larger rewards led to better retention than did small or no rewards. However, when reward omission first occurred during the test phase, it produced more alternation on the following trial than did reward presence. The results suggest that both reward amount and surprisingness determine short-term retention of responses paired with the rewards.