Parents' involvement in children's learning in the United States and China: implications for children's academic and emotional adjustment

This research examined parents' involvement in children's learning in the United States and China. Beginning in seventh grade, 825 American and Chinese children (mean age=12.74 years) reported on their parents' involvement in their learning as well as their parents' psychological control and autonomy support every 6 months until the end of 8th grade. Information on children's academic and emotional adjustment was obtained. American (vs. Chinese) parents' involvement was associated less with their control and more with their autonomy support. Despite these different associations, parents' heightened involvement predicted children's enhanced engagement and achievement similarly in the United States and China. However, it predicted enhanced perceptions of competence and positive emotional functioning more strongly in the United States than China.     

Children's and Adolescents' Accounts of Helping and Hurting Others: Lessons About the Development of Moral Agency

This study examined children's and adolescents' narrative accounts of everyday experiences when they harmed and helped a friend. The sample included 100 participants divided into three age groups (7‐, 11‐, and 16‐year‐olds). Help narratives focused on the helping acts themselves and reasons for helping, whereas harm narratives included more references to consequences of acts and psychological conflicts. With age, however, youth increasingly described the consequences of helping. Reasons for harming others focused especially on the narrator's perspective whereas reasons for helping others were centered on others' perspectives. With age, youth increasingly drew self‐related insights from their helpful, but not their harmful, actions. Results illuminate how reflections on prosocial and transgressive experiences may provide distinct opportunities for constructing moral agency.     

The development of a model of culturally responsive science and mathematics teaching

This qualitative theoretical study was conducted in response to the current need for an inclusive and comprehensive model to guide the preparation and assessment of teacher candidates for culturally responsive teaching. The process of developing a model of culturally responsive teaching involved three steps: a comprehensive review of the literature; a synthesis of the literature into thematic categories to capture the dispositions and behaviors of culturally responsive teaching; and the piloting of these thematic categories with teacher candidates to validate the usefulness of the categories and to generate specific exemplars of behavior to represent each category. The model of culturally responsive teaching contains five thematic categories: (1) content integration, (2) facilitating knowledge construction, (3) prejudice reduction, (4) social justice, and (5) academic development. The current model is a promising tool for comprehensively defining culturally responsive teaching in the context of teacher education as well as to guide curriculum and assessment changes aimed to increase candidates’ culturally responsive knowledge and skills in science and mathematics teaching.     

Microform—Not extinct yet: Results of a long-term microform use study in the digital age

This paper presents results taken from 2008 to 2010 of an ongoing microform use study. The number of titles used is evenly distributed over time with microfilm being the most used format and newspapers accounting for half of all usage. When publications are available electronically, users may still use the microform version. This study illustrates how microform and electronic collections are complementary—electronic materials provide better access but microform is better for preservation. Users prefer electronic materials but will also use microform when there is no online version available or when the online version is not an exact copy of the original.     

Learning to play in a goal-directed practice

This study concerns the relationship between learning and play. On the basis of sociocultural theory, some ideas are put forward about how this relationship can be conceptualised in the context of goal-directed practice. Empirical data from primary school with children 6–8 years old are used to illustrate and discuss this conceptualisation. It is suggested that learning and play need to be seen as intrinsically interwoven, and that children’s play is contingent on their learning, more particularly the cultural tools they have appropriated or are in the midst of appropriating.     

Assessment for community service types of experiential learning in the engineering discipline

While experential learning has been increasingly explored and adopted by higher education institutions, few have researched the appropriate assessment methods that can be aligned with the learning outcomes of experential learning. A literature review on the diverse forms of assessment currently used for community service types of experiential learning in higher education is presented in this paper to review their appropriateness in assessing experential learning. The paper also describes the assessment framework of the University of Hong Kong Sichuan Reconstruction Community Service Project, which is incorporated into a multidisciplinary community service learning project. Feedback from students and teachers are reviewed to gauge their preferences towards these assessments, as well as their opinions on assigning academic credits to experential learning projects.     

Lines of Force: Faraday's and Students' Views

In this work we analyzed how electric and magnetic lines of force were conceived byFaraday and how they are understood by a group of Argentine university studentsafter receiving instruction. Our results show that many students possess ideas similarto those of Faraday in that lines of force are conceived as real physical entities responsible for the transmission of the electric action. These results are in accordance with the interpretation of physical entities as ``matter-based' suggested by Chi et al. (1994). It is suggested that emphasis on the geometrical character of these lines seems imperative in basic electromagnetism classes in order to avoid this kind of confusion.