Grounding development in cognitive processes

Developmentalists have made remarkable progress over the last several decades in detailing what children know at various points in development. Less progress has been made, however, in detailing the processes through which knowledge is realized in real-time tasks, or in detailing the processes of developmental change. We argue that the operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering provide a foundation for making progress on these issues in the next century. We include three examples applying these ideas to specific phenomena in early word learning. These examples illustrate how forming developmental hypotheses in terms of perceiving and remembering may bring new insights into specific phenomena as well as into how the ordinary operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering serve as bootstraps to more specialized and more abstract kinds of knowledge.     

Challenges and Achievements: Teaching Shakespeare''''s Sonnet 34 to a Third Year "English Literature" Class

In the course offerings to students in the Foreign Languages College here atGuangxi Teachers'University,I had noted what was in my opinion an overemphasis onprose at the expense of poetry;and also a dearth of courses thatwentdeeply into a singlesubject,period,or writer.In place of this,courses tended to be survey,background,criticism,or history.After discussing this with my colleague,Professor Zheng Shuning,here at the Uni-versity,I determined to take a different approach in my Fall Term,…     

Conditioned cardiac and behavioral response topography to an olfactory CS dissociates with age

Conditioned cardiac and behavioral responses to an olfactory stimulus (CS) paired with electric shock (US) were studied in 16-, 23-, and 75-day-old rats. Heart rate and behavior were recorded during a single 15-trial training session in which a 10-sec olfactory stimulus (amyl acetate) was either paired or explicitly unpaired with the US. In the preweanling rats, the conditioned cardiac response consisted of anincrease in heart rate (tachycardia) and a slight increase in investigatory behaviors. In contrast, the conditioned cardiac response in the adult rats consisted of adecrease in heart rate (bradycardia) and a striking increase in behavioral immobility (freezing). The 23-day-old rats showed a dichotomous pattern of responding; some showed preweanling-like conditioned responses and some showed adultlike responses. Developmental changes in neural organization and degree of learning are discussed as possible determinants of the transition from infant to adult modes of responding.     

Critical action learning – rituals and reflective spaces

This paper is written to outline our ideas on rituals and reflective places and how this thinking has emerged through our writing, facilitation and reflections around critical action learning and critical leadership. We attempt to show the conceptual framework that underpins our vision of Critical Leadership and how out of this work we have begun to develop new action learning techniques which we believe help to make the action learning we teach and practise, more critical. In describing these concepts of criticality we consider the tripartite elements of each of the three concepts we call Critical Leadership. That is ‘knowing, being, doing’; ‘space, place and pace’ and ‘thinking, feeling, willing’. We then go on to demonstrate how these three concepts helped us to shape our new action learning technique entitled ‘The Coliseum’. We believe that this new action learning technique enhances the likelihood of critical action learning taking place by underscoring key elements such as encouraging feedback, initiating deep listening, promoting challenge and, perhaps, in the end, precipitating enlightenment.     

Home and Parental Influences on the Achievement of Lower Primary School Children in Singapore

This study investigated the effects of home environment and parental involvement in the achievement of pupils in the lower primary classes in nine schools found in four zones in Singapore. In total, 3,759 pupils and their parents participated in the study. The study was designed to answer four main questions relating to the effects of the home environment (SES, time engaged in television viewing, reading, school work and ethnicity of parents) and parental involvement in the children's school work and in other school matters. The findings indicated that significant differences in achievement were found for all combinations of SES categories and between most ethnic groups. A higher percentage of high-achieving pupils spent more time on television viewing, reading and school work. Parents of high-achieving children were more anxious about maximising every opportunity for their children including those not directly related to school work.     

Understanding Categorical Hierarchies: The Earliest Levels of Skill

2 categorization skills necessary for understanding hierarchies are the ability to form categories at different levels of generality and the ability to include the same objects into multiple categories. 2-year-olds appear to have the first skill, but some theoretical and empirical work suggests that the second may be a later acquisition. Yet, in 3 studies, 2- and 3-year-olds applied familiar basic level and superordinate labels to the same objects, even when reminded of basic labels before being tested with superordinates. They did not reserve superordinates for objects with unfamiliar basic level names (Study 2), and they were willing to apply superordinates to objects presented singly rather than in groups (Study 3). Thus, contrary to the implications of some previous work, 2- and 3-year-olds appear to have both of the categorization skills necessary for forming categorical hierarchies.     

Gaps in Mind: Problems in environmental knowledge-behaviour modelling research

For decades, researchers in the social sciences and in education have sought to understand and map the factors that lead people to move (or to fail to move) from environmental knowledge to 'pro-environmental behaviour'. In this article, we explore some conceptual, epistemological, methodological and practical 'gaps' that seem to reproduce themselves in successive instantiations of this quest. The purpose of this article is to help build the critical perspective that comes with problematizing the very project of knowledge-behaviour modelling, identifying the positivistic residues still present in the enterprise, and suggesting that modelling may be more useful in domains of greater scale. Focusing on the 'Mind Gap' model developed by Kollmus and Agyeman (2002), we discuss the 'gap' between contemporary educational research and knowledge-behaviour modelling research that is the cumulative effect of (1) the critical thinking - 'behaviour change' gap; (2) the 'reflective practitioner - 'researcher as authority' gap; (3) the two literatures gap; (4) the conscious - non-conscious gap (tied to reason and habit in moral agency); (5) the direct action - indirect action gap (tied to privatizing environmental morality); (6) the gender gap; and (7) the internal - external gap (tied to ignoring the complexity of moral agency and cultural identity).     

Self reference in interpretive performance

Self reference, the capacity of language to “talk about itself”, provides a useful paradigm for understanding, directing, and performing oral interpretation. An analysis of the various relationships and interactions within this art form reveals dimensions of self reference, that feature of language which transforms a system of discursive symbolism into a presentational literary art form. To the degree that oral interpretation capitalizes on this reflexive power of language, the transformation is most complete in this literary art form.