The Effect Teaching Experience Has on Perceived Effectiveness of Interactive Television as a Distance Education Model for Elementary School Science Teacher’s Professional Development: Another Digital Divide?

The first year of a 5 year professional development project for elementary teachers in two mid-western states integrated a bridge of two distinctly different distance education networks (T-1 and fiber optics) to provide science professional development for elementary school teachers in rural communities. Interactive television (ITV), the title given to the distance component, consisted of a series of twenty-four, 2 h presentations by scientists and content specialists. It provided expansion to the science pedagogical content knowledge of the elementary teachers involved. Eighty-five teachers in 38 school districts from the two states completed individual surveys following the final ITV session. Analysis of variance of participants post-session survey scores yielded differences (p < 0.05) on the subscales measuring perceived effectiveness of using distance education for professional development purposes and years of teaching experience. Teachers with over 20 years of classroom experience perceived the use of distance education technologies for science professional development to be more effective than teachers with 16–20 years of classroom experience. These results might suggest another digital divide.     

Personality and attainment: An application of psychological principles to educational objectives

In education it is important for applied research systematically to apply and test current psychological theories. However oversimplification of a theory will generally lead to inappropriate hypotheses and hence to inconclusive or inconsistent results. In research on personality and academic attainment it has been common to derive hypotheses about the effect of neuroticism directly from an early Hullian formulation. Examples in terms of the academic behaviour of students are used to explain recent adaptations of this basic theory. In particular it is necessary to distinguish between trait and state anxiety and to incorporate allowances for the effect of previous habit systems. Strongly established habits will control the type of behaviour elicited by drive stimuli, such as imminent examinations.Anxiety, even as a trait variable, can be seen as operating in opposite directions, facilitating or debilitating performance according to the nature of the individual and of the drive stimuli. In the progression from primary to higher education there will be a tendency for individuals whose high neuroticism adversely affects their performance to be eliminated; hence a positive correlation between achievement and neuroticism at this level might be anticipated.While there is considerable complexity in the relationship between anxiety and achievement, it is clear that introversion is consistently linked with success in higher education. This high performance is probably due to the introvert's better study habits and his ability to become conditioned easily to the predominant academic mores. In addition the build-up of reactive inhibition in extraverts during lectures or prolonged periods of study is likely to lead to avoidance symptoms in time.

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Résumé Dans l'enseignement il importe que la recherche expérimentale applique avec méthode les théories psychologiques classiques pour les mettre à l'épreuve. Pourtant, la simplification abusive d'une théorie mène souvent à des hypothèses inadéquates et à des résultats non concluants ou incompatibles. Dans la recherche sur la personnalité et la réussite universitaire on a souvent voulu tirer directement d'une formulation ancienne de Hull des hypothèses sur les effets du caractère névrotique. On cite des exemples de conduite scolaire des étudiants, pour montrer quelques adaptations récentes de cette théorie fondamentale. Il faut distinguer en particulier entre l'anxiété comme trait et l'anxiété comme condition, et prendre en compte l'effet du système antérieur des habitudes. Les habitudes qui sont fermement établies modèlent les types de conduite provoqués par les stimuli significatifs, tels que, par exemple, les examens imminents.On peut voir la variable de l'anxiété, considérée comme trait, agir de façons opposées en facilitant ou en entravant la réussite en fonction des caractéristiques de l'individu et des stimulants significatifs. Dans la progression de l'enseignement primaire à l'enseignement supérieure on observe une élimination progressive des individus dont le caractère névrotique exerce un effet défavorable sur la réussite; on peut par conséquent prédire une corrélation positive entre les résults et le caractère névrotique au niveau universitaire.Bien que les rapports entre l'anxiété et la réussite soient des plus complexes, il est évident que, au niveau de l'enseignement supérieur, il y a une liaison assez forte entre l'introversion et le succès. Il est probable que le niveau élevé de réussite est dû aux meilleures habitudes de travail de l'introverti et à sa capacité de s'adapter facilement aux moeurs universitaires dominantes. En outre, l'accumulation d'une inhibition réactive chez les extrovertis, pendant les cours ou les périodes d'étude prolongées tend à produire des symptômes d'annulation.

     

Infant search and object permanence: a meta-analysis of the A-not-B error

Research on Piaget's stage 4 object concept has failed to reveal a clear or consistent pattern of results. Piaget found that 8-12-month-old infants would make perserverative errors; his explanation for this phenomenon was that the infant's concept of the object was contextually dependent on his or her actions. Some studies designed to test Piaget's explanation have replicated Piaget's basic finding, yet many have found no preference for the A location or the B location or an actual preference for the B location. More recently, researchers have attempted to uncover the causes for these results concerning the A-not-B error. Again, however, different studies have yielded different results, and qualitative reviews have failed to yield a consistent explanation for the results of the individual studies. This state of affairs suggests that the phenomenon may simply be too complex to be captured by individual studies varying 1 factor at a time and by reviews based on similar qualitative considerations. Therefore, the current investigation undertook a meta-analysis, a synthesis capturing the quantitative information across the now sizable number of studies. We entered several important factors into the meta-analysis, including the effects of age, the number of A trials, the length of delay between hiding and search, the number of locations, the distances between locations, and the distinctive visual properties of the hiding arrays. Of these, the analysis consistently indicated that age, delay, and number of hiding locations strongly influence infants' search. The pattern of specific findings also yielded new information about infant search. A general characterization of the results is that, at every age, both above-chance and below-chance performance was observed. That is, at each age at least 1 combination of delay and number of locations yielded above-chance A-not-B errors or significant perseverative search. At the same time, at each age at least 1 alternative combination of delay and number of locations yielded below-chance errors and significant above-chance correct performance, that is, significantly accurate search. These 2 findings, appropriately elaborated, allow us to evaluate all extant theories of stage 4 infant search. When this is done, all these extant accounts prove to be incorrect. That is, they are incommensurate with one aspect or another of the pooled findings in the meta-analysis. Therefore, we end by proposing a new account that is consistent with the entire data set.     

The Impact of the Home Instructional Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) on School Performance in 3rd and 6th Grades

A post hoc matching design was used to compare children who participated in the Home Instructional Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) throughout Arkansas to children from the same classrooms who had no preschool experience and children who had other preschool experiences in the third and sixth grades. The program showed modest positive impact on school suspensions, grades, classroom behavior, and achievement test scores at both grade levels.     

How New Caledonian crows solve novel foraging problems and what it means for cumulative culture

New Caledonian crows make and use tools, and tool types vary over geographic landscapes. Social learning may explain the variation in tool design, but it is unknown to what degree social learning accounts for the maintenance of these designs. Indeed, little is known about the mechanisms these crows use to obtain information from others, despite the question’s importance in understanding whether tool behavior is transmitted via social, genetic, or environmental means. For social transmission to account for tool-type variation, copying must utilize a mechanism that is action specific (e.g., pushing left vs. right) as well as context specific (e.g., pushing a particular object vs. any object). To determine whether crows can copy a demonstrator’s actions as well as the contexts in which they occur, we conducted a diffusion experiment using a novel foraging task. We used a nontool task to eliminate any confounds introduced by individual differences in their prior tool experience. Two groups had demonstrators (trained in isolation on different options of a four-option task, including a two-action option) and one group did not. We found that crows socially learn about context: After observers see a demonstrator interact with the task, they are more likely to interact with the same parts of the task. In contrast, observers did not copy the demonstrator’s specific actions. Our results suggest it is unlikely that observing tool-making behavior transmits tool types. We suggest it is possible that tool types are transmitted when crows copy the physical form of the tools they encounter.     

How Globalization Can Cause Fundamental Curriculum Change: An American Perspective

Globalization, unlike 20th century social and economic developments, will cause fundamental rather than merely incremental educational change. `Globalization' refers to a complex of technological and economic factorsincluding the global spread of communicationtechnology networks, and the global integration ofproduct and labor markets.I argue that (1) there is a powerful new alliance among elites and educational consumers for fundamental change; (2) globalization destabilizes the internal processes of school organizations that constrain fundamental change,motivating educators to innovate; (3) globalization erodes the institutional categories of public discourse that hold standard school practice in place, allowing a `shadow institution' of non-standard educational agencies to form; and (4) new synthetic visions of educational institutions in better accord with models of rational action in networked environments, are being formulated; and (5) these are now guiding a convergence of piecemeal innovations towards a fundamentally transformed institutional pattern.     

Components of attention during infants' manipulative exploration

The purpose of the project was to investigate attention in infants as they manipulate objects. It was hypothesized that examining, in contrast to other activity, reflects focused attention and active intake of information. The first study with 7- and 12-month-olds supported the hypothesis; examining declined with increasing familiarity, while other behaviors, such as mouthing and banging, did not, and examining occurred before other behaviors temporally. The latency to examine declined significantly with age. The second and third studies investigated the effects of age and familiarity on both latency to and duration of examining. Latency again decreased with age but did not change with increasing familiarity. In contrast, duration of examining did not vary systematically with age but declined sharply with familiarity. In a fourth study, latency to examine and duration of examining were related to different measures of attention at 3 1/2 years. The combination of results suggests that the latency and duration measures reflect different aspects of attention--a short-term reaction to object novelty and a more sustained response to the object and its characteristics.     

Counseling and information services for adult learners in the English-speaking Caribbean

Conclusion The preceding overview of counseling and information services for adults in the English-speaking Caribbean indicates that there is a considerable amount of activity which varies, of course, from country to country. What is also evident is that such services are rarely offered in a very formal way, that often they are voluntary, that there is at present very little coordination of activity, and that, except in very few cases, those providing such services have not been specifically trained for this task. The thrust for the future must be toward securing personnel trained to provide service of this kind and toward developing better coordination among the agencies and individuals involved, while at the same time seeking to expand such services and increase the number of persons with whom direct contact is made.