THE IMAGERY OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

Communities of faith express in their worship the values and assumptions that shape their worldview. When those values and assumptions contradict or are in conflict with the values and assumptions of the surrounding culture, the act of worship can become an occasion for resistance against the hegemonic domination of that culture. Worship in the context of congregational life awakens peoples discontent, fosters skepticism toward prevailing assumptions, clarifies contradictions at the heart of the community's discontent, articulates ethical alternatives, and develops readiness for struggle and change. This research inquires into whether and how a congregation as a worshiping community functions as a community of resistance against the assumptions of modernity.     

The COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil: how statistics education may contribute to unravel the reality behind the charts

Educational Studies in Mathematics - The world is now facing the most severe health, social, and economic event of the last hundred years, which has made the need to acquire statistical thinking to...     

An individualised curriculum to teach numeracy skills to children with autism: programme description and pilot data

Teaching mathematics to children with autism is an area with limited research evidence. In this study we developed a teaching manual based on Maths Recovery, a numeracy programme designed for typically developing children. Six children with autism participated in the study and received daily numeracy teaching over a 20‐week period. Our aims were to explore whether Maths Recovery can be used as a numeracy curriculum for children with autism and to evaluate the progress the children make after a period of intensive teaching. Using a pre‐test post‐test design we found that the adapted Maths Recovery numeracy curriculum was successfully incorporated within each child's individualised teaching programme, and that all six children improved their mathematical ability over the course of the intervention. Our data show promising results and support the rationale for larger evaluation studies.     

Drop Out and “Disconnected” Young Adults: Examining the Impact of Neighborhood and School Contexts

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) this study compares if and how neighborhood effects on the likelihood to drop out and be “disconnected” from school and work in young adulthood change when schools are taken into account. As widely documented, I find that neighborhood socioeconomic status is associated with dropping out, but this effect is mediated by schools with high numbers of Latino or Black students. I find neighborhood socioeconomic status is not associated with being disconnected, yet, attending schools with high numbers of Black students is. This research draws attention for the need to account for neighborhood and school effects simultaneously to better understand contextual effects and to more carefully conceptualize how neighborhood and schools work together to produce these outcomes disproportionately impacting racial and ethnic minorities.     

Enhancing academic performance and social and emotional competence with the RULER feeling words curriculum

A pre- and post-test quasi-experimental design was used to test the impact of a 30-week, theoretically-based social and emotional learning (SEL) curriculum, The RULER Feeling Words Curriculum (“RULER”), on the academic performance and social and emotional competence of 5th and 6th grade students (N = 273) in fifteen classrooms in three schools. Academic performance was assessed by report card grades. Social and emotional competence was assessed with teacher reports of student behavior. Students in classrooms integrating RULER had higher year-end grades and higher teacher ratings of social and emotional competence (e.g., leadership, social skills, and study skills) compared to students in the comparison group. This study provides preliminary empirical evidence that SEL programs like RULER improve important student outcomes.     

Role of dual task design when measuring cognitive load during multimedia learning

This study assessed the role different kinds of secondary tasks play for researching the modality effect of cognitive load theory. Ninety-six university students worked with a computer-based training program for approximately 13?min and had to fulfill an additional secondary task. In a 2?×?2 factorial design, modality of information presentation (within factor) and design of secondary task (between factor) were varied. Students of both experimental groups learned with visual-only and audiovisual information presentation. The secondary task consisted of monitoring an object either displayed spatially contiguous (monitoring the screen background color, N?=?46) or spatially non-contiguous (monitoring a letter color in the upper part of the screen, N?=?50). Reaction times on this secondary task were used to measure cognitive load. Results show that the modality effect only appears with the spatially non-contiguous task but not with the spatially contiguous task. We interpret this effect as due to only partial utilization of working memory capacity by the combination of primary task and spatially contiguous secondary task. The results highlight the importance of an appropriate secondary task design when investigating the modality effect but also not to overgeneralize multimedia design guidelines.     

Hope and climate change: the importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people

Although many young people think climate change is an important societal issue, studies indicate that pessimism is quite common. Finding ways to instill hope could therefore be seen as vital. However, is hope positively related to engagement or is it only a sign of illusory optimism? The aim of the study was to explore if hope concerning climate change has a significant relation to pro-environmental behavior as well as an impact on behavior when controlling for already well-known predictors such as values, social influence, knowledge, and gender. Two questionnaire studies were performed, one with a group of Swedish teenagers (n?=?723) and one with a group of Swedish young adults (n?=?381). ‘Constructive’ hope had a unique positive influence on pro-environmental behavior. Hope based on denial, however, was negatively correlated with pro-environmental behavior in the two samples and was a significant negative predictor in the teenage group. The conclusion is that hope is not only a pleasant feeling but could also work as a motivational force, if one controls for denial. Implications for education concerning sustainable development are discussed.