A Minority View on Testing

Benevolent intentions do not always yield benevolent consequences. Describing the effects of testing on minorities as often detrimental, the authors challenge the measurement community to take greater responsibility for the use of its wares.     

The relevance of hedonic price indices

We argue that for the case of heterogeneous commodities with infrequent tradings, such as paintings, it is relevant to base a price index on hedonic regressions using all sales and not resales only. To support this conclusion we construct a price index for paintings by Impressionists and their followers and compare the various estimators using bootstrapping techniques.     

Moral Education in Early Childhood: The Limits of Constructivism

Broadly speaking there are two polar views on moral education - traditionalism and progressivism. Traditionalists tend to believe that moral values are eternal and universal. They prioritize such “hard” virtues as discipline, courage, restraint, and obedience, and believe in directive behavioral instruction with meaningful consequences for rule-following and rule-breaking. Progressives, the dominant voice in early childhood education, believe that moral values are variable, dependent on social context. They prioritize such “soft” virtues as unselfishness, caring, generosity, and tolerance, and believe virtues are acquired in a “sociomoral environment” of nurturing adults who stress cooperative interchanges and minimal authority. While most programs, despite their “tilt”, acknowledge the need for a balance, they do not specify criteria for making the pedagogical decisions. Without such explicit criteria, a “strong” version of constructivism may demand more of children than they can deliver given their developmental limitations. Two criteria are suggested for determining when traditional methods may usefully supplement constructivist ones: First, one must decide if the matter at stake is a bottom-line non-negotiable value such that a child's dissension is unacceptable. Second, one must determine if the preschooler, given her cognitive egocentricity, moral realism, and “romancing of reality” can make a rational (decentered) choice. There follows a more detailed discussion of blended approaches (traditional and constructivist) within the overall goal of helping children build a moral identity.     

Semiotic mediation in guiding interactions with young children: The role of context and communication handicap on distanciation in adult discourse

This paper pays attention to two factors often neglected in the studies of instructional or guidance interaction: the specifity of the child as interlocutor and the constraints exerted by the properties of the tasks on the semiotic means used to guide the child. Following Sigel’s ‘distanciation hypothesis’ we have studied the ‘distancing’ characteristics of the adult’s discourse adressed to the child in two groups of dyads, one with deaf (N=5), the other with hearing children (N=7) aged around 24 months, in two tasks: Symbolic Play and Picture — Book reading. The main results indicate a strong effect of the tasks, SP allowing more distanciation than PB for both categories. D-dyads show few differences in SP task but less ability to share references in Picture-Book reading. It appears also that with such young children, the distancing potential might be conveyed by the forms and pragmatic functions and not only by the semantic components of adult’s utterances.