Curriculum Perceptions: a multivariate analysis

The curriculum decision‐making perceptions of a pilot sample of 75 American kindergarten through twelfth grade teachers doing graduate work in education were surveyed with a 42 item questionnaire. The first four questions established the demographics of the respondents and the next three items indicated that Americans feel more constrained in making curriculum decisions than their British counterparts. The cross‐cultural comparisons are based on the findings of Doherty & Travers (1984).

The final 35 items, adapted from the instrument developed by Doherty & Travers, were subject to a factor analysis. Five interpretable factors were extracted.

The factors were labelled (1) External Monitory, (2) External Professional, (3) Internal Professional, (4) Facilitative‐Constraining, and (5) Internal Professional Peers. These factors represented 32 items with three items unassignable to any factors. Interitem reliability of the factors was judged good. Though the British study also extracted five factors (from a 30 item pool), dissimilarities in labelling and ranking importance occurred. Some of the key differences were traced to the structure of the American educational setting.     

Growth in emotion understanding across early childhood: A cohort-sequential model of firstborn children across the transition to siblinghood

Emotion understanding develops rapidly in early childhood. Firstborn children (N = 231, 55% girls/45% boys, 86% White, 5% Black, 3% Asian, 4% Latinx, M_age = 29.92 months) were recruited into a longitudinal study from 2004 to 2008 in the United States and administered a series of tasks assessing eight components of young children's emotion understanding from ages 1 to 5. Cohort sequential analysis across three cohorts (1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds) demonstrated a progression of children's emotion understanding from basic emotion identification to an understanding of false-belief emotions, even after controlling for children's verbal ability. Emotion understanding scores were related to children's theory of mind and parent reports of empathy, but not emotional reactivity, providing evidence of both convergent and discriminant validity.     

A person‐in‐context approach to student engagement in science: Examining learning activities and choice

Science education reform efforts in the Unites States call for a dramatic shift in the way students are expected to engage with scientific concepts, core ideas, and practices in the classroom. This new vision of science learning demands a more complex conceptual understanding of student engagement and research models that capture both the multidimensionality and contextual specificity of student engagement in science. In a unique application of person‐oriented analysis of experience sampling data, we employ cluster analysis to identify six distinct momentary engagement profiles representing different combinations of the behavioral, cognitive, and affective dimensions of student engagement in high school science classrooms. Students spend a majority of their classroom time in one of several engagement profiles characterized by high engagement on one dimension, but low levels on the others. Students exhibited low engagement across all three dimensions of engagement in about 22% of our observations. Full engagement, or high levels across all three dimensions, is the least frequent profile, occurring in only 11% of the observations. Students’ momentary engagement profiles are related in meaningful ways to both the learning activity in which students are engaged and the types of choices they are afforded. Laboratory activities provided especially polarized engagement experiences, producing full engagement, universally low engagement, and pleasurable engagement in which students are affectively engaged but are not engaged cognitively or behaviorally. Student choice is generally associated with more optimal engagement profiles and the specific type of choice matters in important ways. Choices about how to frame the learning activity have the most positive effects relative to other types of choices, such as choosing whom to work with or how much time to take. Results are discussed in terms of implications for practice and the utility of the methodological approach for evaluating the complexities of student engagement in science classrooms. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 88: 19–43, 2018     

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy: medical diagnostic criteria

Medical diagnostic criteria for Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy are presented. The strength of the known facts may vary from case to case, and thus there may be different degrees of diagnostic conviction. Therefore, diagnostic criteria for a definitive diagnosis, and a possible diagnosis of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy are provided. Because the gathering of evidence in a case may, ultimately, diminish or exclude the diagnosis of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, diagnostic criteria for the inconclusive determination and the definitely excluded diagnosis are also enunciated.     

Education as habitus transformations

Unlike a conventional reading of Bourdieu, this article focuses on his work with regard to the transformation of social structure. In the context of a rereading, from an educational theory perspective, the article proposes an approach that allows for the linking of empirically informed social theory, on the one hand, and biography research oriented to educational theory, on the other. Education, here, is generally conceived of as habitus transformation. For reconstructing the societal conditions of the possibility of education one needs to go beyond the habitus theory and its focus on actors and groups of actors. From the perspective of a theory of practice as proposed by Bourdieu, the concept that comes to mind is that of social field, largely neglected in the theory-of-education discourse. Based on a combination of biography analysis and discourse analysis is, then, presented as a perspective for a relational theory of education. The article aims to outline an empirical reconstruction of transformation processes between habitus and field.