Ethnicity and image: correlates of crowd affiliation among ethnic minority youth

Because ethnicity is a basis for defining peer crowds in ethnically diverse American high schools, some may question whether crowds foster discrimination and stereotyping or affirm minority youths' positive ties to their ethnic background. Through examination of both self- and peer ratings of crowd affiliation among 2,465 high school youth aged 14–19 years, this study assesses the likelihood that African American, Asian American, Latino, and multiethnic adolescents are associated with ethnically defined crowds. Crowd affiliations are related to friendship patterns among all groups, positive features of ethnic orientation for Asian and Latino youth, but also some aspects of stereotyping and discrimination for Latinos. Results emphasize ethnic diversity in the role that peer crowds play in minority adolescents' social experiences.     

Using Our Understanding of Families to Strengthen Family Involvement

The purpose of this article is to help teachers become more responsive to the changing needs and contexts of families in their efforts to establish relationships and encourage family participation. Through this article, the authors describe the changing landscape of parenting and the stressors experienced by contemporary families. The authors then provide a review of research that describes strategies that have been successfully employed by teachers of young children to foster increased communication and family involvement. The article concludes with suggestions to help early childhood professionals change their paradigm of parent involvement from a school-centric perspective to one that is more family-centric.     

Investigating the dynamics of formative assessment: relationships between teacher knowledge,assessment practice and learning

This exploratory study of elementary school science examines questions central to policy, practice and research on formative assessment: What is the quality of teachers’ content-pedagogical and assessment knowledge? What is the relationship between teacher knowledge and assessment practice? What is the relationship between teacher knowledge, assessment practice and student learning? Drawing on multiple measures, hierarchical linear modelling and path analysis, results suggest that despite weaknesses in teachers’ content-pedagogical and assessment knowledge, teachers’ formative assessment practices are positively related to student learning. Relationships between teachers’ knowledge and assessment practices are mixed. Findings underscore both the potential and challenge of bringing effective formative practice to fruition as well as the need for continued research.     

The Learning Intention of Low-Qualified Employees: A Key for Participation in Lifelong Learning and Continuous Training

In our continuously changing society, a need for updating one’s skills and knowledge puts pressure on safeguarding the labour market position of low-qualified employees. However, prior research and official statistics show that employees with a lower level of education tend to participate less in training than highly-educated individuals. This limited participation is associated with employers offering fewer opportunities to low-qualified employees, but also with the fact that low-qualified employees themselves might be less willing to participate. In other words, their learning intentions are assumed to be weaker and more restricted than the learning intentions of highly-educated employees. The article reports on a quantitative survey research on the learning intentions of 406 low-qualified employees. The results showed that employees who participated in formal job-related learning activities during the last 5 years had a stronger learning intention than those who did not. Next, the results of the stepwise regression showed that self-directedness, financial benefits, self-efficacy, and autonomy were significant positive predictors of the learning intentions of low-qualified employees. Also, the limited number of possibilities or opportunities to learn was not significant. The results indicated that a learning intention can lead towards the participation in learning activities, but participation is not merely initiated by offering opportunities for learning. Organisational aspects such as job autonomy and financial benefits can stimulate the learning intention of an employee. Finally, regarding the socio-demographic variables, only limited differences were found. In short, employees with no educational qualifications and a full-time contract had the lowest intention to learn.     

A psychometric evaluation of the digital logic concept inventory

Concept inventories hold tremendous promise for promoting the rigorous evaluation of teaching methods that might remedy common student misconceptions and promote deep learning. The measurements from concept inventories can be trusted only if the concept inventories are evaluated both by expert feedback and statistical scrutiny (psychometric evaluation). Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory provide two psychometric frameworks for evaluating the quality of assessment tools. We discuss how these theories can be applied to assessment tools generally and then apply them to the Digital Logic Concept Inventory (DLCI). We demonstrate that the DLCI is sufficiently reliable for research purposes when used in its entirety and as a post-course assessment of students’ conceptual understanding of digital logic. The DLCI can also discriminate between students across a wide range of ability levels, providing the most information about weaker students’ ability levels.     

Teachers’ Longitudinal NOS Understanding After Having Completed a Science Teacher Education Program

The study reported here investigated experienced teachers’ views on several nature of science (NOS) issues 2 to 5 years after they completed a demanding secondary science teacher education program in which the NOS was an extensive and recurring component. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed to determine study participants’ NOS understanding. Study participant’s NOS views were determined to be generally accurate and robust, suggesting that experiences in their science teacher education program had a long-lasting positive impact on NOS understanding. The preservice program that study participants completed has several unique features that may account for that long-lasting impact and has implications for preservice and inservice science teacher education professional development.     

The bottlenosed dolphin’s (Tursiops truncatus) understanding of gestures as symbolic representations of its body parts

We assigned gestural symbols to nine body parts of a bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). The dolphin was first trained to touch any floating object it chose with the body part indicated by a gestural symbol. In Experiment 1, we tested the dolphin’s ability to now touchspecific gesturally referenced objects using specific gesturally referenced body parts. In Experiment 2, we tested its ability to either touch or toss gesturally referenced objects with gesturally referenced body parts or to simply display those body parts or shake them back and forth. The acts of touching, tossing, displaying, and shaking were each associated with specific gestures and appeared in random sequences within test sessions. The results demonstrated highly significant levels of performance throughout these tasks, including many successes on the first occasions of new body-part uses. These findings provided strong evidence that the gestural symbols we used for body parts were semantically processed and understood by the dolphin as representing those body parts.     

The management of diversity in schools — A balancing act

The authors contend that diversity and its counter-pole universality as such cannot be managed in the normal sense of the word. What can be managed though is the balance between these two poles. Over-emphasis of the one to the detriment of the other will in the long run somehow be penalized. A conceptual-theoretical framework is provided in which the delicate ontic balances that have to be maintained is explained (pedagogically managed). The results of three focus group discussions in which the participants express their opinions about these balances and the possibility of managing diversity are reported and interpreted.