Education,democracy and development in a period of revolutionary change

The observation of the present global scene raises questions about the socioeconomic, political and cultural framework laying the ground for a constructive interaction between the three forces which greatly determine people's existence and survival, namely Development, Democracy and Education. In this approach reference is made to John Dewey's classical remarks about the interrelation between Democracy and Education. They are examined in the light of specific historical conditions which are exemplified by references to the history of the Bohemian Lands and the first Czechoslovak Republic as well as by a critical view of current events, revealing the anti-human perversion of Dewey's model.

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Zusammenfassung Ein Blick auf die gegenwärtige weltweite Szene wirft Fragen auf nach dem politischen und sozio-ökonomischen Rahmen, der Grundlage einer konstruktiven Interaktion der drei Kräfte ist, die vor allem die Existenz und das Überleben der Menschen bestimmen, nämlich Entwicklung, Demokratie und Bildung und Erziehung. Dieser Ansatz bezieht sich auf John Deweysklassische Bemerkungen über die Wechselwirkung von Demokratie und Bildung und Erziehung. Diese werden im Lichte spezifischer historischer Bedingungen untersucht, welche gleichermaßen am Beispiel der Geschichte der Böhmischen Länder und der ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik veranschaulicht werden, wie durch einen kritischen Ausblick auf zeitgenössische Ereignisse, die die menschenfeindliche Perversion von Deweys Modell offenbaren.

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Résumé L'observation de la scène actuelle soulève des questions au sujet du cadre socio-économique, politique et culturel qui constitue le fondement d'une interaction constructive entre les trois forces qui déterminent essentiellement l'existence et la survie des peuples, à savoir le développement, la démocratie et l'éducation. Cette approche se réfère aux remarques classiques de John Dewey sur l'interrelation entre la démocratie et l'éducation. On les examine en fonction de conditions historiques spécifiques illustrées par l'histoire des pays de la Bohème et de la première République tchécoslovaque ainsi que par une vue critique des événements actuels, qui révèlent la perversion misanthropique du modèle de Dewey.

     

The role of IQ, expertise, and motivation in the recall of familiar information

High- and low-IQ children in the first, third, and fifth grades performed two free-recall tasks: a sort-recall task with sets of categorically related pictures, and a class-recall task, with children recalling the current members of their school class. All children were deemed to be experts concerning the composition of their school class, but, unlike experts in other domains, had no special motivation associated with their expertise. Recall and clustering on both tasks were high. The high-IQ children performed better than low-IQ children only on the sort-recall task. IQ was significantly correlated with measures of performance on the sort-recall task but not on the class-recall task. The results reflect the fact that the memory benefits associated with being an expert (here, elimination of IQ effects) are related to the greater knowledge the expert possesses and not to factors of motivation.     

Predictors of reading literacy

Two reading literacy/text comprehension tests with different demands (on-line comprehension vs. memory-based comprehension) were administered to 6,104 15-year-old students from all German states and school types. The combined and specific effects of proximal and distal variables from small-scale psychological research as well as from large-scale educational studies on each text comprehension measure were investigated. Metacognitive knowledge, decoding speed, and the number of books at home (as an indicator for family background) were found to have specific and large effects on on-line comprehension and accounted for 46 percent of the variance with the highest effects for metacognition. Metacognitive knowledge was also highly predictive when the effects of specific prior knowledge and thematic interest on memory-based text comprehension were estimated simultaneously. In addition, students who showed relative strength in building up a coherent representation of specific texts (memory-based text comprehension) were characterised by high amounts of prior knowledge and thematic interest thereby underlining the importance of these student characteristics for learning.     

The Impact of Science Fiction Film on Student Understanding of Science

Researchers who have investigated the public understanding of science have argued that fictional cinema and television has proven to be particularly effective at blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. The rationale for this study lies in the notion that to teach science effectively, educators need to understand how popular culture influences their students’ perception and understanding of science. Using naturalistic research methods in a diverse middle school we found that students who watched a popular science fiction film, The Core, had a number of misunderstandings of earth science concepts when compared to students who did not watch the movie. We found that a single viewing of a science fiction film can negatively impact student ideas regarding scientific phenomena. Specifically, we found that the film leveraged the scientific authority of the main character, coupled with scientifically correct explanations of some basic earth science, to create a series of plausible, albeit unscientific, ideas that made sense to students.