Using iPad tablets for self‐modeling with preschoolers: Videos versus photos

As technology becomes more accessible and acceptable in the preschool setting, teachers need effective strategies of incorporating it to address challenging behaviors. A nonconcurrent delayed multiple baseline design in combination with an alternating treatment design was utilized to investigate the effects of using iPad tablets to display video self‐modeling and activity photos for three preschoolers during circle time. During baseline, all three children demonstrated low levels of engagement and high levels of off‐task behavior compared to peers. The intervention phase consisted of alternating between showing the child the self‐video and photos prior to circle time. A child preference phase was conducted whereby each child self‐selected the video or photo prior to circle time. For all three children both videos and photos led to increased engagement and decreased off‐task behaviors. During the child preference phase, all three children selected the video most frequently. Social validity data demonstrated teacher and child preference for the video self‐modeling condition.     

The emergence of the quantified child

Using document analysis, this paper examines the historical emergence of the quantified child, revealing how the collection and use of data has become normalized through legitimizing discourses. First, following in the traditions of Foucault's genealogy and studies examining the sociology of numbers, this paper traces the evolution of data collection in a range of significant education policy documents. Second, a word count analysis was used to further substantiate the claim that data collection and use has been increasingly normalized through legitimizing discourses and routine actions in educational settings. These analyses provide evidence that the need to quantify educational practices has been justified over long periods of time through a variety of documents and that the extent to which data governs educators’ thoughts, discourses, and actions has dramatically increased during the past century.     

Through the Dąbrowski Lens: A Fresh Examination of the Theory of Positive Disintegration

D?browski’s theory of positive disintegration is an emotion-centered, nonontogenetic, five-level theory of personality development where the experience of all emotions is essential for the process of growth. In this article, we examine the complexities of the three factors of development, which are essential to the notion of development within the theory of positive disintegration. We elaborate on the relationships between these factors, depict the processes and interactions in a new graphical framework, provide associated explanations, and support these by additional references to D?browski’s original writings.     

Children’s rights in education research: from aims to outcomes

One approach to children’s rights in research is to adopt a methodology that focuses on eliciting children’s perspectives. Ensuring representative participation from all children allows a diversity of contexts to be reflected in the results, and points to ways in which improvements can be made in specific settings. In cultural contexts where participation in decision-making is not a traditional role for children, their viewpoints are likely to provide results that highlight differences between cultural norms and children’s rights, and can offer an important focus of dialogue among stakeholders. It is proposed that children’s rights can therefore become integral to the whole process of a quantitative research project. This paper describes such an approach used in a Pacific Islands study, which investigated the quality of schooling through a probability-based sample survey of 1560 children in the first three years of formal education in 55 schools in Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati.     

Partnerships in Learning: A Collaborative Project between Higher Education Students and Elementary School Students

Higher education and K-12 school partnerships are typically designed with an end-goal that serves the instructional needs of one group over the other. For this project, a university professor and elementary school instructor used problem-based and project-based learning strategies to design a curriculum that served the academic needs of both groups of students. Undergraduate students in an urban planning course partnered with elementary students from a local school to work on an interdependent civic engagement project. The partnership provided innovative, twenty-first teaching for both groups of students while also reinforcing public service.     

The postmodern perfectionist,the pragmatic hedonist and the materialist maximalist: understanding high school students’ profile choices towards or away from mathematics,science and technology (MST) fields in the Netherlands

This study focuses on high school students’ profile choices and the choice for or against the Nature and Technology (NT) profile in the Netherlands. A mixed-methods approach is used to study cultural values that affect this choice. The quantitative part of the study shows that being female is negatively correlated with the choice for the NT-profile, irrespective of the grade average for mathematics, chemistry and physics. It further shows that students’ ethnic background does not have a significant effect on this choice. The qualitative part of the study reveals that students’ choice processes towards or away from NT can be categorised in three ideal types: the postmodern perfectionist, the pragmatic hedonist and the materialist maximalist. Gender differences appear to be more pervasive across these types than differences in ethnic background.     

Teaching Criminal Justice Online: Current Status and Important Considerations

The most significant change to impact the pedagogy of criminal justice students in recent years has been the development of online classes. Online coursework is now a commonly accepted method of accessing criminal justice students and the sustained growth in online classes is expected to continue in the future. However, there is currently a lack of research that focuses on online classes in criminal justice. In response, we present and assess the modest literature regarding criminal justice online classes and highlight important themes. This leads into a presentation of important considerations along the following pedagogical continuum: Planning the online course (i.e. asynchronous timing, technological developments), implementing the online course (i.e. maintaining an online presence, managing student interactions and expectations), and identifying effective means to measure learning outcomes (i.e. measuring success, quality matters). Policy implications for online coursework that are likely to impact future criminal justice educational practices are then discussed.     

Temperament Dimensions in Preschool Children: Links With Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind

Research Findings: The present cross-sectional study investigated the question of whether 6 different temperament dimensions (inhibition to novelty, social orientation, motor activity, positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and attention) influenced cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM) in 168 children (86 three/four-year-olds and 82 four/five-year-olds). Temperament was measured via a parent-report questionnaire, cognitive ToM via a classical false-belief task, and affective ToM via a comprehensive test tapping 3 levels of emotion comprehension (external, mental, and reflexive). In addition, language competence was assessed with a direct test evaluating both receptive and expressive language. The results showed that after we controlled for language ability, inhibition to novelty predicted higher levels of cognitive ToM in 4/5-year-old children. In addition, higher levels of social orientation predicted better comprehension of the external aspects of emotion in both younger and older children. Practice or Policy: Our results highlight the importance of the early identification of less sociable children, who might benefit from training interventions aimed at increasing their affective ToM abilities. At the same time, they are also consistent with previous evidence indicating that an inhibited approach to social interaction can promote false-belief understanding.     

Propagation from the start: the spread of a concept-based instructional tool

We describe the propagation of a technology-based educational innovation through its first 3 years of public use. The innovation studied is the Concept Warehouse (CW), a database-driven website developed to support the use of concept-based pedagogies. This tool was initially developed for instructors in undergraduate chemical engineering courses, but has spread to other disciplines as well. In this time, it has grown to over 650 registered instructors representing over 170 institutions. While this study is specific to a particular case, the intent of this article is to provide an exemplar of real-time propagation that informs other researchers and developers. We frame our analysis with Diffusion of Innovation Theory and use a design research methodology that focuses on communication channels, types of knowledge, and stages of the innovation-decision process. Data sources include usage records and survey responses which are analyzed with network diagrams and non-parametric statistics. We find that in comparison to mass media, interpersonal communications tended to result in higher proportions of how-to knowledge and implementation. Three types of opinion leaders were identified through user data and network diagrams. All played critical roles in the tool’s propagation, especially the project collaborators—opinion leaders who actively promoted the CW, in part, because it also propagates their own innovations. Finally, users with self-identified prior principles knowledge showed statistically significantly greater progress in gaining how-to knowledge, but no significant difference in progressing to the implementation stage of the innovation-decision process when compared to users without.