The effectiveness of teaching science with pictorial analogies

This study used a conceptual problem solving test to investigate the effect of a series of pictorial analogies on the concepts of density, pressure, and atmospheric pressure in Year 8 classrooms. The analogies were taught following Glynn's teaching with analogies model. It was found that the students taught with the pictorial analogies scored significantly higher than their counterparts (p<01). In addition, the low achievers benefited more from this teaching strategy than did the high achievers. Further, qualitative analysis revealed that most of the students' alternative conceptions were from preexisting naive intuitions rather than arising from analog instruction.     

Angel: post-implementation evaluation at the Indiana University School of Medicine

With continued adoption of course management systems, librarians are assuming new roles and challenges with regard to providing information resources and library services in a digital environment. For approximately five years, the Indiana University School of Medicine has employed Angel as its online teaching environment, and the Ruth Lilly Medical Library has been actively involved in the adoption of Angel. As the implementation phase was completed, a post-implementation evaluation was due. The authors conducted an evaluation of the Angel system to evaluate utilization level, content types, and library resources/services integration. This article provides the findings of the post-implementation Angel Courses Evaluation.     

Variables affecting physics achievement

Much research has focused on student views about physics concepts, with an emphasis on the identification of alternative conceptions, and how curricula and professional development may ameliorate the situation. However, there has been little work on determining the extent of, and in separating, the student and teacher/classroom level variables that may impact student physics achievement. This study examined the effect of different student and teacher/classroom level variables on student understanding of physics concepts using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), a regression based technique. The data were collected from 68 different teachers and 3,119 students who were using a reform curriculum, Active Physics. Teachers and students completed surveys asking about their beliefs, their classes and their personal characteristics. Students also completed a physics achievement test. The data show that students of teachers who used Active Physics for a greater portion of the year scored higher on the achievement test than did students of teachers who did not use the curriculum as much. Furthermore, the data show that the achievement gap was narrowed between boys and girls and between students with different attitudes toward physics. Additionally teachers who received inservice instruction on how to implement Active Physics narrowed the gap between students with different views of their classroom involvement. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 961–976, 2009     

Developmental continuity in theory of mind: speed and accuracy of belief-desire reasoning in children and adults

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult participants completed simple, computer-based tests of belief-desire reasoning, which recorded response times as well as error rates. Both measures suggested that, like young children, older children and adults find it more difficult to reason about false belief and negative desires than true beliefs and positive desires. It is argued that this developmental continuity is most consistent with either executive competence or executive performance accounts of the development of belief-desire reasoning.     

Deaf and hard of hearing children and adolescents in China: their fears and anxieties

The study examined the fears and anxieties of Chinese deaf and hard of hearing children and adolescents, and the ability of parents and teachers to report the presence of these fears and anxieties. Chinese deaf youth are at risk due to a lack of trained teachers, an overemphasis on oral education in schools, negative stereotypes, and parental overprotectiveness. The deaf children and adolescents in the study reported significantly higher levels of total fears, total anxieties, fear of the unknown, fear of injury and small animals, fear of medical procedures, and concentration anxiety than their hearing counterparts. Girls reported more total fears, fear of the unknown, fear of minor injury and small animals, and fear of failure and criticism than boys. Parents showed a better ability than teachers to confirm these reports of fears and anxieties. Implications and directions for future studies are presented.     

Touch Rugby,Masculinity and Progressive Politics in Durban,South Africa, 1985–1990

Rugby is a sport frequently considered to be highly competitive and even violent. In the history of South Africa under apartheid it was a bulwark of white minority, authoritarian, nationalist rule. So was it possible for an alternative masculinity to develop and express itself on the country’s rugby playing field? This paper seeks to answer this question by examining an informal weekly game of touch rugby played in the five years prior to the unbanning of the liberation movements in 1990. The game was played largely by white men who were explicitly opposed to the system of apartheid and in most cases were actively working for its termination. What implications did their commitment to a non-racial democracy have for their participation in the game and particularly for their gendered relations? This paper argues that there was an alignment between their politics and their gendered behaviour but that such alignment was not exact and even though alternative masculinities were nascent, equally were expressed conventional passions for the game. But these passions were not violent or misogynistic even as they endorsed the male body as a site of physical sporting pleasure.