Understanding How the Arts Can Enhance Learning

Understanding how the arts can enhance learning has long been discussed and debated among educators, students, parents, artists, art historians, and philosophers. Many anecdotal examples reference the value and benefits of the arts in a range of fields and learning domains. Emerging methodologies in the brain sciences have added new perspectives and research‐based approaches to better understand the role the arts might play in learning. Psychologists, cognitive scientists, and now neuroscientists are approaching this topic by exploring memory, sensory systems, and other biological measures. The interdisciplinary and potentially interdependence of these fields to work together to identify the neurological mechanisms involved in the arts may offer educators, parents, and child care providers with important information about how we learning takes place. By bringing together uncommon and divergent thinking from a wide range of disciplines, there is an opportunity to change the way we teach, parent, and serve children using the arts to help enhance learning. This issue of Mind, Brain, and Education celebrates the range of approaches that are emerging to shed light and insight in this field.     

Supervision and evaluation: The Wyoming perspective

The intent of this study was to assess the perceptions and actions of Wyoming principals concerning their role in supervising and evaluating teachers. A survey was sent to all 286 principals in the state of Wyoming, of which, 143 returned surveys, a response rate of 50%. Findings suggested that principals utilized supervisory behaviors more often than evaluative behaviors. Elementary principals perceived their evaluative practices as significantly more prevalent than secondary principals. Furthermore, principals indicated that their greatest frustrations in supervising teachers were time, the evaluation instrument, and teachers’ unwillingness to change. Additionally, findings suggested that Wyoming principals utilized classroom walkthroughs because they provided a snapshot of teaching and provided a medium for providing feedback. In regards to developmental supervision, principals indicated that novice teachers received much more supervision than veteran teachers. However, their reported use of differentiated supervision only applied to teacher autonomy concerning professional development goals. Principals reported that teachers had little input concerning the methods by which they were supervised. Finally, a majority of the Wyoming principals felt that improvement plans were effective at changing mediocre teaching behaviors, but 40% were speculative that such plans truly remediated poor teachers.     

Relationship Reciprocation Modulates Resource Allocation in Adolescent Social Networks: Developmental Effects

Adolescence is characterized as a period of social reorientation toward peer relationships, entailing the emergence of sophisticated social abilities. Two studies (Study 1: N = 42, ages 13–17; Study 2: N = 81, ages 13–16) investigated age group differences in the impact of relationship reciprocation within school‐based social networks on an experimental measure of cooperation behavior. Results suggest development between mid‐ and late adolescence in the extent to which reciprocation of social ties predicted resource allocation. With increasing age group, investment decisions increasingly reflected the degree to which peers reciprocated feelings of friendship. This result may reflect social‐cognitive development, which could facilitate the ability to navigate an increasingly complex social world in adolescence and promote positive and enduring relationships into adulthood.     

Exploring anomalies in Indigenous student engagement: findings from a national Australian survey of undergraduates

Increases in participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in higher education across Australia continue to be promising. However, it is also known that Indigenous students' attrition, retention and completion rates remain areas of concern. In this paper, we report our findings from an analysis of Indigenous student responses to the 2009 Australasian Survey of Student Engagement. Overall, Indigenous Australian students express positive responses in relation to engagement, but are more likely than non-Indigenous students to be planning to depart. We explore this somewhat unexpected anomaly, whilst also suggesting that much more needs to be known about our Indigenous students, including, for example, whom they may interact with at university; where they turn for support; and why they may decide to leave. Our findings strongly indicate that better national and institutional data are needed to address the current gaps in knowledge relating to Indigenous student populations in Australia and around the world.? In this paper, the term ‘Indigenous’ refers to Australian students who are of self-declared Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander background, while ‘non-Indigenous’ refers to all other Australians.     

论苏童笔下的“颂莲”式女性

苏童是少数几个尤其擅长写女性的男性作家。他对女性的心理描写和细节把握都处理得恰到好处,非常自然。他笔下的女性一改过往的温柔善良、知书达理,相反的,大多都阴暗猥琐、粗俗野蛮、善于妒忌,非常具有特色,成为中国当代女性小说的独有景观。苏童的几个从女性视角描写的女主人公具有很多的共同特征,他将这些女性称为“颂莲”式女性。     

Strategies that promote historical reasoning and contextualization: a pilot intervention with urban high school students

Reading and Writing - The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two types of historical problem-solving instruction with advanced urban high school students’...     

Interactional power and support in digital inclusion of an adult with intellectual disabilities: a case study analysis

Digital inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities is not commensurate with those without disabilities. Societal, political, financial, individual and interpersonal barriers help explain this disparity. Caregivers can act as both support and gatekeeper to internet access and use by adults with intellectual disabilities. This study investigated micro-level interpersonal factors influencing access and use of the internet by an adult with intellectual disabilities to explore the balance and interplay of power and support around the processes of digital inclusion and online risk taking. Taking a case study approach, perspectives of three key stakeholders were gathered via interviews: the person with intellectual disabilities, his mother and a paid support worker. Perspectives and experiences were contrasted using systemic functional linguistic analysis of discourse to explore the ways power and support were represented in the language of negotiated digital inclusion. Dynamics between the parent and person with intellectual disabilities and between the parent and paid staff clearly influenced processes of digital inclusion and were affected by varying priorities, positions and perceptions of power to allow, disallow and monitor access and use of the internet. These had the power to shape and drive internet access. Language choices by the person with intellectual disabilities showed that he was not fully aware of the risks involved in engaging with certain aspects of digital inclusion but how he spoke about the internet indicated some autonomy in technology use. Supporting the development of digital competence, confidence and resilience in people with learning disabilities should be combined with support to increase self-awareness regarding digital risk. Those supporting people with intellectual disabilities towards digital inclusion need additional guidance on how to do this effectively for the people they support.     

Hands-On: Investigating the role of physical manipulatives in spatial training

Studies show that spatial interventions lead to improvements in mathematics. However, outcomes vary based on whether physical manipulatives (embodied action) are used during training. This study compares the effects of embodied and non-embodied spatial interventions on spatial and mathematics outcomes. The study has a randomized, controlled, pre-post, follow-up, training design (N = 182; mean age 8 years; 49% female; 83.5% White). We show that both embodied and non-embodied spatial training approaches improve spatial skills compared to control. However, we conclude that embodied spatial training using physical manipulatives leads to larger, more consistent gains in mathematics and greater depth of spatial processing than non-embodied training. These findings highlight the potential of spatial activities, particularly those that use physical materials, for improving children's mathematics skills.     

Learning the rules of the game: The role of generic “you” and “we” in shaping children's interpretations of norms

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns “you” and “we,” which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to 9-year-old primarily living in the midwestern U.S. (N = 146, 75 girls, 71 boys, M_age = 7.14, SD = 1.69, 82% White) interpreted actions described with generic pronouns (vs. “I”) as normatively correct and selected the speaker who used generic pronouns as the rule-follower, particularly when generic pronouns were presented first. There were no significant effects of age. These results illustrate how generic pronouns influence how children discern unfamiliar norms and form interpersonal judgments.