Nurturing Emergent Readers Through Readers Theater

Readers theater is a familiar literacy strategy for children who can read independently; however, it can also be used with younger children who have not yet developed independent reading skills. The purpose of this article is to adapt the concept of readers theater for use with emergent readers. It focuses first on defining readers theater and its many benefits, particularly in the areas of literacy development. Finally, it includes suggestions for successfully implementing a readers theater program with young children.     

拒绝毒品--服用摇头丸,引发抑郁症

Just two tablets enough to cause long-term health problems, psychologists (心理学家) are told Ecstasy (摇头丸), the so-called (所谓的) love drug taken by hundreds of thousands each weekend, can result in crippling depression after just a couple of tablets, a study revealed.     

Changing the Minds of New College Students

Tertiary Education and Management - With the unprecedented expansion of access to higher education internationally, today’s students enter university with a broader range of expectations,...     

The Australian national exceptional teaching for disadvantaged schools programme: a reflection on its first 8 years

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the aims, origins and principles of the Australian National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools programme and reflects on findings from its first eight years. As a well-established, mainstream university-based initial teacher-education programme designed to prepare social justice teachers for low socio-economic or high-poverty schools, NETDS has had significant impact on recruiting and retaining high-performing teachers in the schools that need them most. In this paper we discuss how it works, but also outline some of the complexities that arose in trying to design a teacher-education programme with equity at the centre and some of the changes we made along the way.     

Theory-building and theory-confirming observation in science and science education

A paper by Norris presents scientific observation as a highly inferential activity in which human senses have become secondary to instrumentation. Norris takes examples from elementary and secondary curricula to support his position. This paper examines Norris's contentions from two perspectives, that of cognitive psychology and that of the philosophy of science. It is argued here that Norris has discussed only one aspect of observation, theory-confirming observation. Another, pretheoretic or theory-building observation, is more closely related to the curriculum activities he criticized. From a cognitive psychology perspective the theory-confirming observation is of use to the expert, but for novices the absence of domain-specific knowledge and of sophisticated problem-solving processes may render theory-building observation more meaningful for instruction.     

Going to action? A literature review on educational proposals in formal Environmental Education

The current state of the planet’s environmental deterioration calls for formal educational contexts to implement effective environmental proposals which nurture action competence. The aim of this paper is to examine the educational proposals in formal contexts that have been published in the two research journals of greatest impact on Environmental Education during the period 2008–2013, and to analyse how they contribute to the development of action competence. Special attention is paid to research (i) based on real participation by students; (ii) promotes reflection on the complexity of environmental issues; (iii) facilitates critical thinking; (iv) encourages autonomous and responsible decision-making and (v) involves communities. Our results show that these approaches can help improve the development of action-focused environmental education and bring to light a series of challenges for future research.     

A developmental investigation of word length effects in reading using a new on-line word identification paradigm

Third and fifth grade children (average age 8.6and 10.6 years) and adult participants weretested with printed words of varying length ina new on-line identification task (theluminance increment paradigm, LIP) and aspeeded naming task. Effects of general length(length in letters, phonemes and syllables)were shown to decrease systematically with agein both tasks. Third grade children showedsubstantial effects of word length while theeffect practically disappeared in adults. Ingeneral, this developmental pattern was alsofound when separately examining effects ofphonological length (with length in lettersheld constant) and small unit length (withnumber of syllables held constant), althoughsome differences were observed in performancein the identification and the naming task. Thetwo tasks also showed different developmentalpatterns, with the greatest gain in performancearising between 3rd and 5th grade inthe naming task, and the largest improvementoccurring between 5th grade and adults inthe identification task. The results suggestthat the new luminance increment paradigm canbe usefully applied as an on-line measure ofprinted word perception in beginning readers.