Pedagogy for partisanship: research training for Black graduate students in the Black intellectual tradition

Current and former students of two professors in a southern research university and a community educator, all participants in an African-centered research collaborative/apprenticeship, describe what and how we study together and our struggle to use our knowledge and research in service to our community. We uplift the works of key Pan-African/Black/Africana Studies/Nile Valley scholars to illustrate the African epistemic foundation of our collaborative/apprenticeship. We describe how we utilized the methodology of narrative inquiry to explore our experiences as participants in the HeKA (Heritage Knowledge in Action) research collaborative and how HeKA has provided ways of knowing and being centered in our culture and heritage. We present our findings, which include some of the dilemmas of Black doctoral students and emerging scholars engaged in HeKA and how this collaborative/apprenticeship serves as an emancipatory praxis to enable the next generation to realize their goals of partisan research and pedagogy in higher education.     

Music learning and education: contributions from neuroscience / Aprendizaje musical y educación: aportaciones desde la neurociencia

Traditionally, the teaching of music has tended to be a professional subject within the training of virtuosos in conservatories or a playful subject taught in schools, without due consideration given to the potential it offers to developing cognitive capacities. Advances in neuroscience highlight the importance of learning music in relation to the cognitive benefits derived from its practice. Brain exploration techniques show that practising music places a significant demand on the most developed cognitive functions of the human being, confirming the intervention of different cerebral areas involving a large portion of the brain and an increase in attention and concentration levels. After carrying out a literature review of the current state of the question, some of the most common findings in all fields of musical education are cited, considering aspects that are of particular relevance today, such as interdisciplinarity, emotion, cooperative learning, self-regulation and creativity.     

Stylistic Variation at the "Single-Word" Stage: Relations between Maternal Speech Characteristics and Children's Vocabulary Composition and Usage

In this study we test a number of different claims about the nature of stylistic variation at the "single-word" stage by examining the relation between variation in early vocabulary composition, variation in early language use, and variation in the structural and functional propreties of mothers' child-directed speech. Maternal-report and observational data were collected for 26 children at 10, 50, and 100 words, These were then correlated with a variety of different measures of maternal speech at 10 words, The results show substantial variation in the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's vocabularies, and singficant relations between this variation and the way in which language is used by the child. They also reveal singficant relations between the way in whch mothers use language at 10 words and the way in chich their children use language at 50 words and between certain formal properties of mothers speech at 10 words and the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's early vocabularies, However, most of these relations desappear when an attempt is made to control for ossible effects of the child on the mother at Time 1. The exception is a singficant negative correlation between mothers tendency to produce speech that illustrates word boundaries and the percentage of unanalyzed phrases at 50 and 100 words. This suggests that mothers whose sprech provides the child with information about where new words begin and end tend to have children with few unanalyzed. phrases in their early vocabularies.     

Sources of errors by capuchin monkeys on delayed response

Six capuchin monkeys were trained on a series of indirect, delayed response problems with delay intervals ranging from 0 to 60 sec. Data were analyzed by sequential state theory in order to quantify random and nonrandom components of the subjects’ response sequences. A tendency of the subjects to repeat responses to the position chosen on the previous trial was a significant source of proactive interference even when effective orienting responses were elicited by the predelay cue. Changes in random and nonrandom response components with increasing delays suggested a two-phase process: the first for delays up to 7 sec characterized by increases in random and nonrandom error-producing responses, and the second for delays greater than 7 sec characterized by increases in random responding only.     

An Interactive Methodology for ‘Empowering’ Students to Deal with Controversial Environmental Problems

After a short introduction to the Italian context relating to science teachers’ training and updating course we explain the motives that led us to produce educational material based on interactive methodologies (role‐playing) and to present it to in‐service teachers during updating courses. The role‐playing activities that we prepared draw from specific historical and geographical situations in order to face the problems of global environmental issues, such as, for example, water resources management, waste‐disposal, reforestation techniques. Some observations on the didactic effect of our proposals and on the importance of encouraging a change in the teachers’ way of thinking are presented. The latter is a prerequisite for a correct use of the educational material supplied. This means introducing a problematic concept of scientific knowledge and stimulating new attitudes to establish less hierarchic inter‐relations in class.     

Envisioning a Culturally Imaginative Educational Psychology

Culture has mostly been neglected in mainstream educational psychology research. In this paper, we argued for the need to cultivate a cultural imagination and provided seven key recommendations for conducting culturally imaginative research. We explained how these recommendations could prove useful in avoiding the two types of errors that trap cross-cultural researchers. The first type is the cultural attribution error which pertains to attributing any observed difference to culture even if culture is not the relevant factor. The second type is the cultural blind spot error which pertains to the failure to see how culture influences psycho-educational processes and outcomes. We proffered seven recommendations to avoid these twin pitfalls. We reviewed the papers published from 2006 to 2016 in four flagship educational psychology journals including the Journal of Educational Psychology, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Cognition and Instruction, and British Journal of Educational Psychology. Our review focused on how educational psychologists have studied culture over the past decade and how the published studies aligned with our seven recommendations. The content analysis indicated that only a small percentage of the articles dealt with culture, most of the studies drew on Western samples, and that almost all studies relied on an etic approach with very few studies using an emic bottom-up perspective. We ended with a justification for why a culturally imaginative educational psychology is urgently needed in an increasingly diverse world.     

The relationship between grit,self-control,and early grade reading: a trial measuring soft skills in rural Tanzania

Abstract

Soft skills such as grit, self-control, and self-confidence have been shown to predict outcomes in school and in life. As such, their valid and reliable measurement is of substantial interest in educational research and policy circles. However, the vast majority of this research originates in Western countries; relatively little is known regarding the measurement of soft skills in developing country contexts and whether similar types of instruments can provide evidence of these skills. This paper presents a novel means of assessing grit, self-control, and self-confidence in rural Tanzania: through the use of scenario-based self-report questionnaires. Survey instruments were administered in three regions in Tanzania to 961 Standard 2 pupils. We found that scenario-based items provided valid and, in most cases, reliable estimates of the three tested soft skills. When comparing self-reported soft skills and reading ability, we found that both grit and self-control were significant predictors of reading and mathematics performance. After controlling for sex, region, and age, grit was found to have a stronger association with reading performance than socioeconomic status.     

Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect

Past research with the Berkeley Adult Attachment Interview demonstrates that retrospectively defined earned-secures (who coherently describe negative childhood experiences) parent as effectively as do continuous-secures (who coherently describe positive childhood experiences), but manifest liabilities in the form of depressive symptomatology. This article presents data from a 23-year longitudinal study that replicate and extend prior research, testing a key premise that earned-secures so defined actually have a history of insecure attachments that change over time and/or endure consistently harsh or ineffective parenting in their youth. Discrepant with assumptions, retrospective earned-secures were not more likely than continuous-secures to have been anxiously attached in infancy and were observed in childhood and adolescence to have encountered among the most supportive and structured maternal parenting in a high-risk sample. Prospectively defined earned-secures (operationalized using participants' infant attachment classifications) did indeed go on to have success in their close relationships, many without reporting relatively high levels of internalizing distress in adulthood.