The role of cognitive style in educational computer conferencing

This paper reports an investigation of the impact of students’ cognitive style on their effective use of educational text‐based computer‐mediated conferences. The research centres on an empirical study involving students from three courses run by the British Open University. Statistical analysis of the data does not suggest that cognitive style has a strong influence on student participation in the conference, but does suggest that, contrary to expectations, ‘imagers’ may send more messages to conferences than ‘verbalisers’. The data also suggest a possible link between certain cognitive styles and course completion, and that the interaction of different styles within a group, as described by Riding and Rayner's (1998 ) team roles, may have an indirect influence on task completion.     

Wellbeing in schools: what do students tell us?

Until recently, children and young people’s perspectives have been largely overlooked in considering optimal approaches to supporting their wellbeing at school. This article reports student views on the meaning of ‘wellbeing’ and how this is best facilitated, gathered as part of a large, national research project aimed at understanding and improving approaches to wellbeing in schools. The data reported here were gathered through 67 focus groups, involving 606 primary and secondary school students, across three Catholic school regions in different Australian states. Students provided rich accounts of how they view their wellbeing, conceptualised across three interconnected themes of ‘being’, ‘having’ and ‘doing’. They identified relationships with self, teachers, friends, peers and significant others, as central to their wellbeing. The findings point to immense potential in accessing and utilising children and young people’s views for change and reform in schools in the area of student wellbeing.     

Evaluating parent education programs: Problems and prospects

In this article it is argued that further development of the research knowledge base regarding the effectiveness of parent education programs depends on a major shift in conventional strategies of program evaluation. The prevalent evaluation method has been dominated by an interest in the outcomes of parent education programs; thus, a variety of evaluations has established that parent training programs have an immediate impact on such outcomes as child's IQ scores (see Clarke-Stewart, 1978). Little is known about why parent programs are effective, however. The typical evaluation approach is severely limited in its ability to identify factors which contribute to program effectiveness. Yet information about the processes of change in parent education programs is essential to the replication and improvement of program models.This article suggests that program evaluations should examine relations between parent characteristics and program attributes. An investigation of the goodness of fit between different program dimensions and a parent's needs and background is likely to extend our knowledge about the circumstances which lead to certain types of program outcomes. The article discusses the inadequate attention given to the complexity of the treatment variable in evaluation studies, and suggests that future evaluations consider variations in parents' experiences in a program, environmental characteristics, and child-rearing attitudes and practices.     

Psychological impact of childhood sexual abuse on male inmates: the importance of perception.

OBJECTIVE: The current study examined the association between childhood sexual victimization and adult psychiatric disorders among male inmates. It further assessed the association between the perception of an event (as sexual abuse or not) and psychiatric diagnoses. METHOD: A sample of 211 randomly-selected male inmates were interviewed. The Diagnostic Interview Schedule (Version III-R) was used to assess psychiatric diagnoses. An additional questionnaire assessing childhood sexual abuse and perception of childhood sexual abuse was also administered. RESULTS: Forty percent of the inmates met standard criteria for childhood sexual abuse, which far exceeded rates found in the general population. Significant differences were found between inmates who had a history of childhood sexual abuse and those who did not for a variety of psychiatric diagnoses. Forty-one percent of those who met criteria for childhood sexual abuse did not consider themselves to have been abused. Those who did not consider themselves to have been abused had higher rates of alcohol abuse/dependence, while those who considered themselves to have been abused had higher rates of posttraumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive disorder. CONCLUSIONS: This study emphasizes the importance of perception or "cognitive appraisal" of the sexual experience (as abusive or not) and the need for further study regarding the potential mediating role of cognitive appraisal. Other implications of these findings include the need for primary prevention programs designed to reduce childhood sexual abuse, and inmate rehabilitation programs with an emphasis on the connection between victimization and criminality.     

Remediating Computational Deficits at Third Grade: A Randomized Field Trial

The major purposes of this study were to assess the efficacy of tutoring to remediate 3rd-grade computational deficits and to explore whether remediation is differentially efficacious depending on whether students experience mathematics difficulty alone or concomitantly with reading difficulty. At 2 sites, 127 students were stratified on mathematics difficulty status and randomly assigned to 4 conditions: word recognition (control) tutoring or 1 of 3 computation tutoring conditions: fact retrieval, procedural computation and computational estimation, and combined (fact retrieval + procedural computation and computational estimation). Results revealed that fact retrieval tutoring enhanced fact retrieval skill, and procedural computation and computational estimation tutoring (whether in isolation or combined with fact retrieval tutoring) enhanced computational estimation skill. Remediation was not differentially efficacious as a function of students' mathematics difficulty status.     

The Axiomatic Trap: Stultifying Myths in Distance Education

Although university-level distance education often sets itself up in contradistinction to conventional educational provision, the thinking most distance educators is framed by a set of un-stated axioms that derive from the conventional system. This axiomatically framed approach to university education at a distance may well blunt the potential for distance education to achieve its true potential. This paper describes the axioms and attempts to explain their continuing power to constrain education thinking in the light abundant evidence that such thinking flies in the face of the facts. It uses Athabasca University, a free-standing distance education university located in Alberta Canada, as a case in point.     

Moving on: The challenges for foreign language learning on transition from primary to secondary school

Europe's commitment to language learning has resulted in higher percentages of pupils studying foreign languages during primary education. In England, recent policy decisions to expand foreign language learning at primary level by 2010 create major implications for transition to secondary. This paper presents findings on transition issues from case studies of a DfES-funded project evaluating 19 local authority Pathfinders piloting the introduction of foreign language learning at primary level. Research on transition in other countries sets these findings in context. Finally, it investigates the challenges England faces for transition in the light of this expansion and discusses future implications.     

An eco-behavioral analysis of children's engagement in urban public school preschool classrooms

The primary aim of this study was to identify particular group configurations and teacher behaviors that co-occurred with children's active engagement in public school early childhood classrooms for 4-year-olds. Children (N = 138, 52% boys) were observed using a time sampling method in 12 classrooms in 12 urban schools serving students from predominantly lower-income, minority families. Children were involved in whole group settings for 52% of observations. The most common teacher behavior in any setting was providing direction/instruction. Logistic regression analyses indicated that, during academic activities, children were more likely to be actively engaged when involved in a peer group and when teachers were providing affirmations or were monitoring, and least likely to be actively engaged in a whole group and when teachers were providing directions. During play activities, children were more likely to be actively engaged when they were alone and least likely to be engaged in a whole group and in a child–teacher setting.     

A study of students’ reasoning about probabilistic causality: Implications for understanding complex systems and for instructional design

Understanding complex systems requires reasoning about causal relationships that behave or appear to behave probabilistically. Features such as distributed agency, large spatial scales, and time delays obscure co-variation relationships and complex interactions can result in non-deterministic relationships between causes and effects that are best understood statistically. Causal Bayesian Research (e.g. Gopnik and Schulz in Causal learning: psychology, philosophy, and computation, Oxford University Press, New York, 2007) suggests that summing across probabilistic instances is inherent to human causal induction, yet other research (e.g. Schulz and Sommerville in Child Development 77(2):427–442, 2006) suggests a human tendency to assume deterministic relationships. Classroom science learning often stresses the replicability of outcomes, putting this learning in tension with understanding probabilistic patterns in complex systems. This investigation examined students’ reasoning patterns on tasks with probabilistic causal features. Microgenetic studies were conducted in multiple sessions over a school year with students in kindergarten, second, fourth and sixth grades (n = 16) to assess their assumptions when dealing with tasks from four domains: social; games; machines; and biology. Later sessions attempted to scaffold students’ understanding using connection making and analogical reasoning. This paper reports on the overall patterns and trends in the data. Most students held a deterministic stance at the outset; however, at least one student at each grade level reasoned probabilistically from the start. All students except one eventually revealed at least one topic for which they held a primarily probabilistic stance. The results have implications for how students reason about complex systems and for how patterns of co-variation and evidence in science are discussed.