Community,culture and identity: geography,the National Curriculum and Wales

ABSTRACT

The 1988 Education Reform Act legislated for a National Curriculum not for one nation but for two, Wales and England. This article reviews the way in which attempts to develop a distinctive curriculum in Wales for one subject, geography, were thwarted by the dominance among key policy‐makers in England of views about the study of place which were unsympathetic to the idea of the school curriculum being a vehicle for the development of a sense of community and national identity. Drawing on evidence from a survey of secondary school geography teachers in Wales, it considers the extent to which the teaching of geography is seen by teachers as a means of achieving such educational goals.     

Preventing Problem Behaviors in Young Children with Disabilities

Young children with disabilities acquire behavior problems as a result of many factors. When planning interventions, it is important to remember that all children may display stages of inappropriate behaviors at various times during their early development. In most cases, the problems are short-lived and typically improve with guidance and age. There are children with continuing or increasing problem behaviors that result in injury to self or others or that cause damage to the environment; interfere with development, learning, and acquisition of new skills; or socially isolate the child. We discuss interventions and prevention strategies for young children with persistent and consistent behavior problems and present directions for future research.     

The cognitive and academic profiles of reading and mathematics learning disabilities

The purpose of this study was to examine the cognitive and academic profiles associated with learning disability (LD) in reading comprehension, word reading, applied problems, and calculations. The goal was to assess the specificity hypothesis, in which unexpected underachievement associated with LD is represented in terms of distinctive patterns of cognitive and academic strengths and weaknesses. At the start of 3rd grade, the authors assessed 684 students on five cognitive dimensions (nonverbal problem solving, processing speed, concept formation, language, and working memory), and across Grades 3 through 5, the authors assessed performance in each academic area three to four times. Based on final intercept, the authors classified students as LD or not LD in each of the four academic areas. For each of these four LD variables, they conducted multivariate cognitive profile analysis and academic profile analysis. Results, which generally supported the specificity hypothesis, are discussed in terms of the potential connections between reading and mathematics LD.     

Entrepreneurialism and critical pedagogy: reinventing the higher education curriculum

This paper presents an analysis of the ways in which UK higher education (HE) has become increasingly commercialised and commodified in the post-1980s. It critiques the strategies adopted by successive UK governments to reinvigorate the relationship between educational and economic life, and to facilitate a more corporate and entrepreneurial spirit within the academy in line with the pressures of a ‘knowledge-based economy’. Arguing for a more critical exploration of teaching and learning within HE, the paper presents evidence from work carried out by the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research, a Centre for Excellence in Teaching in Learning (CETL) which adopts a research-based learning approach to teaching and learning at undergraduate level.1 1. The Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research is a collaborative Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) based between the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and the School for the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University. In 2005 the Centre was awarded £500,000 recurrent over five years, and £800,000 capital funding. The recurrent funding covers staff and running costs. Capital expenditure has covered the design and development of new social teaching and learning spaces at both Warwick and Oxford Brookes. Further information on the Reinvention Centre is available at www.warwick.ac.uk/go/reinvention/. The Reinvention centre covers a range of progressive pedagogies. This article represents the specific views of the authors. Within the context of ongoing debates surrounding the relationship between teaching, learning and research in UK HE, the paper advocates a reinvention of curriculum design through an engagement with the broader principles of critical pedagogy, and in so doing, presents a critical engagement with the commercialisation of HE.     

University Students’ Conceptualization and Interpretation of Topographic Maps

This study investigates the strategies and assumptions that college students entering an introductory physical geology laboratory use to interpret topographic maps, and follows the progress of the students during the laboratory to analyze changes in those strategies and assumptions. To elicit students’ strategies and assumptions, we created and refined a topographic visualization test that was administered before and after instruction to 26 students during the first semester of the study and to 92 students during the second semester. To more deeply understand how students think about and conceptualize topographic maps, we focused on eight individual students who were interviewed about their pretest and posttest answers as well as videotaped during three laboratory sessions. We found that even students who claim never to have worked with topographic maps often perform impressively on their pretests by making useful assumptions about symbolic topographic information. Some students, however, begin with less productive assumptions that may be unfamiliar to some instructors (e.g., thinking that the spacing of contour lines indicates elevation instead of slope). Initial success should not be misinterpreted, however, as an integrated understanding of topographic maps. Only in posttest interviews do most students express explanations integrating multiple normative assumptions. In addition to highlighting the strategies and assumptions that college students use to interpret topographic maps, we outline the implications of these findings for the design of learning objectives, curricular activities, and assessments for topographic lessons in introductory college geology courses and the training of future geoscientists.     

Teacher Perceptions of Intra-Occupational Status Relationships among Elementary,Junior High,and Senior High School Teaching Positions

Correlation matrices having linear dependencies are a common occurrence in educational research. For such matrices there is no unique solution for the multiple regression coefficients; however, there is an infinity of solutions which satisfy the least squares criterion and yield the identical multiple-R and R-square. Traditional strategies for deriving the multiple regression coefficients do not ordinarily function in the presence of linear dependencies. The common practice is to use an iterative technique in which a series of approximations is carried out repeatedly until a solution is achieved. The authors have modified the Gauss-Jordan procedure to function in the presence of linear dependencies. The modified procedure is much simpler than the iterative procedure and has the added advantage of identifying each redundant variable with a zero regression coefficient.     

Climate Change in the Preservice Teacher’s Mind

Given the recent media attention on the public’s shift in opinion toward being more skeptical about climate change, 154 preservice teachers’ participated in an intervention in an elementary science methods course. Findings indicated that students developed a deeper level of concern about climate change. Their perceptions on the evidence for climate change, consensus of scientists, impacts of climate change, and influence of politics also changed significantly. The curriculum and instruction appear to be an important factor in increasing understanding of climate change and developing perceptions more aligned to those of climate scientists. More broadly, this study provides preliminary support for the value of providing a careful framing of the topic of climate change within the context of science methods courses.