Mother–Child Attachment From Infancy to the Preschool Years: Predicting Security and Stability

Relations between maternal mind‐mindedness (appropriate and nonattuned mind‐related comments), children's age‐2 perspective‐taking abilities, and attachment security at 44 (n = 165) and 51 (n = 128) months were investigated. Nonattuned comments predicted insecure preschool attachment, via insecure 15‐month attachment security (44‐month attachment) and poorer age‐2 perspective‐taking abilities (51‐month attachment). With regard to attachment stability, higher perspective‐taking abilities distinguished the stable secure groups from (a) the stable insecure groups and (b) children who changed from secure to insecure (at trend level). These effects were independent of child gender, stressful life events, and socioeconomic status (SES). The contribution of these findings to our understanding of stability and change in attachment security from infancy to the preschool years is discussed.     

The development of beginning mathematics teacher pedagogical content knowledge

Recent research efforts (Schmidt et al. in The preparation gap: teacher education for middle school mathematics in six countries, MSU Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education, 2007) demonstrate that teacher development programs in high-performing countries offer experiences that are designed to develop both mathematical knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. However, identifying the nature of the mathematical knowledge and the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) required for effective teaching remains elusive (Ball et al. in J Teacher Educ 59:389–407, 2008). Building on the initial conceptual framework of Magnusson et al. (Examining pedagogical content knowledge, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp 95–132, 1999), we examined the PCK development for two beginning middle and secondary mathematics teachers in an alternative certification program. The PCK development of these two individuals varied due to their focus on developing particular aspects of their PCK, with one individual focusing on assessment and student understanding, and the other individual focusing on curricular knowledge. Our findings indicate that these individuals privileged particular aspects of their knowledge, leading to differences in their PCK development. This study provides insight into the specific aspects of PCK that developed through the course of actual instructional practice, providing a lens for future research in this area.     

Investigating the effects of multimedia input modality on L2 listening skills of Turkish EFL learners

The present study examined whether or not different input delivery modes have an effect on listening comprehension of Turkish students learning English at the university level. It investigated the effect of one single mode, which is audio-only, and three dual input delivery modes, which were audio-video, audio-video with target language subtitles and audio with PowerPoint presentation, on listening comprehension. The data have been gathered through: a listening proficiency exam, a topic familiarity questionnaire, listening comprehension tests, think-aloud protocols and a semi-structured focus group interview. Analysis of data demonstrated that the students’ listening comprehension scores were significantly lower in audio-video with subtitles mode. In addition to this, the students stated that they experienced most confusion and anxiety in understanding through audio-video with subtitles. Moreover, the students mentioned that they were most successful in the audio with PowerPoint presentation mode. Results also indicated that the students were influenced by their pre-university listening class experiences, meaning that they were most accustomed to the audio-only mode, and therefore felt most relaxed when they listened only.     

Grade level, study time, and grade retention and their effects on motivation, self-regulated learning strategies, and mathematics achievement: a structural equation model

The present study complements previous research findings with new data to improve our understanding of the relationship between motivational variables and academic performance in math mediated by self-regulated learning (SRL). A structural equation model with predictor (i.e., grade retention, grade level, and study time), process (i.e., perceived usefulness of SRL strategies, self-efficacy for the use of SRL strategies, and reported use of SRL), and product variables (i.e., academic achievement in mathematics) is proposed. The model was analyzed in two samples of data (calibration and validation samples). The first sample served to fit and respecify the model, and the second one was used to analyze the consistency of the findings of the first sample. A sample of 756 middle school Portuguese students participated in the current study. The results indicate that SRL is positively and significantly related to academic achievement and that the latter is, in turn, powerfully determined by perceived usefulness and self-efficacy, although students’ reported use of SRL strategies decreases from 7th to 9th grades. Self-efficacy and perceived usefulness of SRL strategies were also found to decrease as grade retention increased. These results are discussed with regard to the relevance of self-efficacy and perceived usefulness of SRL strategies in increasing academic achievement.     

Using information and communications technology as a pedagogical tool: a survey of initial teacher education in Scotland

Abstract

In common with other parts of the United Kingdom, teacher education in Scotland is facing a period of rapidly changing demands with respect to the use of information and communications technology (ICT), together with high levels of investment, rising expectations, and increased scrutiny and accountability. In this article, we present an account of a national survey of the ICT skills and attitudes of students entering and exiting from the teacher education institutions in Scotland in the session 1996-97. The students are extremely positive in their attitudes, their enthusiasm for ICT use in education is high and their aspirations clear – they expect ICT to permeate their professional work now and in the future. Their experiences during their period of training fall considerably short of their expectations. We discuss the reasons for some of the difficulties and consider the challenges faced by tutors in initial teacher education courses who must now ‘model the message’ of a learner-centred approach to the education of their students.     

Neonatal Stress Reactivity: Predictions to Later Emotional Temperament

To investigate the relations among popular measures of neonatal stress and their link to subsequent temperament, 50 full-term newborns from a normal care nursery were examined responding to a heelstick blood draw. Baseline and heelstick measures of behavioral state, heart period, vagal tone, and salivary cortisol were obtained. Recovery measures of behavioral and cardiac activity were also analyzed. Mothers completed Rothbart's Infant Behavior Questionnaire when their infants reached 6 months of age. Baseline vagal tone predicted cortisol in response to the heelstick, suggesting that baseline vagal tone reflects the infants' ability to react to stressors. Greater reactivity to the heelstick (more crying, shorter heart periods, lower vagal tone, and higher cortisol) was associated with lower scores on "Distress-to-Limitations" temperament at 6 months. This finding was consistent with the expectation that the capacity to react strongly to an aversive stimulus would reflect better neurobehavioral organization in the newborn. Recovery measures of cardiac activity approximated and were correlated with baseline measures indicating the strong self-righting properties of the healthy newborn. Finally, vagal tone and salivary cortisol measures were not significantly related, suggesting the importance of assessing both systems in studies of the ontogeny of stress-temperament relations.     

History of education in Brazil: the construction of a knowledge field

This article analyses the general characteristics of the construction of the field of history of education in Brazil. To do so, it highlights the existing historiography and aims to describe the process of institutionalisation of this knowledge field, which, in general terms, has been focused on the area of teacher training. Since the nineteenth century, however, it has also been possible to identify systematic historiographical efforts in Brazil that are not directly related to the school system, but rather to the teaching of and research into the history of education within Brazilian universities. The article addresses the organisation of the field, the ways in which it has been structured and the strategies of academic legitimisation employed to achieve this. These include the regular production of dissertations and doctoral theses, the publication of books and journals, academic events and the creation of research groups and scientific associations, through which research findings have found national and international circulation. This set of indicators creates conditions for an understanding of the expansion and reconfiguration of the field of history of education that began in the 1980s, as well as of the challenges this phenomenon presents to current historiography and teacher training in Brazil.     

Improving document clustering in a learned concept space

Most document clustering algorithms operate in a high dimensional bag-of-words space. The inherent presence of noise in such representation obviously degrades the performance of most of these approaches. In this paper we investigate an unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique for document clustering. This technique is based upon the assumption that terms co-occurring in the same context with the same frequencies are semantically related. On the basis of this assumption we first find term clusters using a classification version of the EM algorithm. Documents are then represented in the space of these term clusters and a multinomial mixture model (MM) is used to build document clusters. We empirically show on four document collections, Reuters-21578, Reuters RCV2-French, 20Newsgroups and WebKB, that this new text representation noticeably increases the performance of the MM model. By relating the proposed approach to the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) model we further propose an extension of the latter in which an extra latent variable allows the model to co-cluster documents and terms simultaneously. We show on these four datasets that the proposed extended version of the PLSA model produces statistically significant improvements with respect to two clustering measures over all variants of the original PLSA and the MM models.