Balfour’s Mission to Palestine: Science,Strategy, and the Inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem

In 1925, A.J. Balfour, first Earl Balfour and author of the famous ‘Balfour Declaration’, attended the inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His education and experience of foreign policy equipped him to take a prominent role. However, the conditions of strife-torn Palestine weighed heavily upon him, and raised wider interests of imperial concern. This essay recounts the circumstances leading to his visit, and suggests that, whatever the region’s political destiny, Balfour’s vision of science-based economic development would play an essential role in crafting its future.

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Schools and communities: An experience in rural India

When India became independent, primary education in the state of Rajasthan was made the responsibility of the Panchayats (Village Councils), and a number of village schools were opened. However they only drew around 40 per cent of the 6–11 age group, and the curricula, text books, and even the teachers themselves, recruited from the cities, were out of touch with the needs of the rural communities. A study conducted in 1974 showed that, to improve the situation, it would be necessary to make the school more relevant to village life, to involve the parents in planning, and to run it at times when the children could be spared from domestic or farm work; to select the teachers from village residents; and to adapt the curricula and teaching methods to the environment. An appropriate programme was worked out and introduced in three villages in 1975. It provided for morning classes for the regular pupils and evening school for children who worked during the day. The emphasis in the curricula was to be on agriculture and animal husbandry, and teaching methods were to be closely in keeping with the life of the village. Suitable local people were found and trained as teachers. The author describes the implementation of this programme in detail. It proved a success and has now been extended to ten villages with a total attendance at the schools of more than five hundred children.

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Zusammenfassung Als Indien unabhängig wurde, übertrug man im Staat Rajasthan die Grundschulbildung der Verantwortung den Panchayats (Dorf-Räten) und eine Reihe von Dorfschulen wurde eröffnet. Aber diese erfaßten nur etwa 40% der Altersgruppe von 6–11 Jahren, und die Lehrpläne, die Textbücher, ja sogar die aus den Städten rekrutierten Lehrer selbst hatten keinerlei Berührung mit den Bedürfnissen der ländlichen Gemeinwesen. Aus einer 1974 durchgeführten Untersuchung ergab sich, daß es zur Verbesserung der Lage notwendig sein würde, der Schule mehr Bedeutung für das dörfliche Leben zu verleihen; die Eltern in die Planung einzubeziehen; zu den Zeiten Schule zu halten, da die Kinder bei der häuslichen und bäuerlichen Arbeit entbehrt werden konnten; die Lehrer unter den Dorfbewohnern auszuwählen, sowie Lehrpläne und Unterrichtsmethoden der Umwelt anzupassen. Nach Ausarbeitung eines geeigneten Programms wurde dieses 1975 in drei Dörfern eingeführt. Den regulären Schülern bot es Vormittagsunterricht und den tagsüber arbeitenden Kindern eine Abendschule. In den Curricula sollte das Hauptgewicht auf Landwirtschaft und Viehzucht liegen, und die Unterrichtsmethoden sollten genau auf das Leben des Dorfes abgestimmt werden. Geeignete Einheimische wurden gefunden und zu Lehrern ausgebildet. Der Verfasser beschreibt im einzelnen die Einführung dieses Programms. Es erwies sich als wirksam und wurde nun auf zehn Dörfer übertragen, so daß jetzt ingesamt mehr als fünfhundert Kinder die Schulen besuchen.

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Résumé Lorsque l'Inde est devenue indépendante, l'enseignement primaire, dans l'état de Rajasthan, a été placé sous la responsabilité des Panchayats (Conseils de village), et un grand nombre d'écoles ont été ouvertes dans les villages. Toutefois, elles ne furent fréquentées que par 40% environ des enfants appartenant au groupe d'âge de 6 à 11 ans, car les curricula, les manuels scolaires et même les enseignants qui étaient recrutés dans les villes, ne tenaient pas compte des besoins des communautés rurales. Une enquête menée en 1974 a montré que pour améliorer la situation il faudrait que l'école ait davantage de rapports avec la vie du village, qu'elle fasse participer les parents à la planification et que les classes fonctionnent quand les parents peuvent se passer de l'aide des enfants pour les travaux domestiques ou ceux de la ferme. L'enquête a révélé également qu'il fallait choisir les enseignants parmi les habitants du village; enfin que les curricula et les méthodes d'enseignement soient adaptés à l'environnement. Un programme approprié a alors été élaboré et appliqué expérimentalement dans trois villages en 1975. Ce programme assurait des classes matinales pour les élèves réguliers et des classes vespérales pour les enfants travaillant dans la journée. L'accent des curricula était mis sur l'agriculture et l'élevage, et les méthodes d'enseignement étaient en harmonie avec la vie du village. Des gens du cru, répondant à certains critères, étaient formés pour devenir des enseignants. L'auteur décrit en détail la mise en application de ce programme qui s'est révélé un succès. Il est maintenant étendu à dix villages et plus de cinq cents enfants fréquentent l'école.

     

ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THE SAME CHILD? PARENT–TEACHER RATINGS OF PRESCHOOLERS’ SOCIAL–EMOTIONAL BEHAVIORS

The parent‐teacher agreement has become an important issue of children's psychological assessment. However, the amount of research available for preschool children is small and mainly based on one index of agreement with samples of modest size/representativeness. This study examined parent‐teacher agreement (correlations) and discrepancies (t tests) on preschoolers' social skills and problem behaviors for the normative Portuguese sample (N = 1,000) of the Preschool and Kindergarten Behavior Scales – 2^nd Edition (PKBS‐2). Analyses were replicated according to the child's gender and mothers' educational level. Correlational analyses suggest weak to moderate informant agreement (mean correlation = .32). Parents' and teachers' ratings are significantly different for all PKBS‐2 scores, with parents assigning higher scores both on social skills and problem behaviors. Results highlight the importance of both parents' and teachers' perspectives to achieve a more comprehensive picture of preschoolers' social‐emotional behaviors, and reinforce the evidence of reliability of the PKBS‐2 Portuguese version.     

Stability of biases in self-evaluation and relations to well-being among elementary school children

This paper aims to investigate to what extent a bias in self-evaluation is an enduring characteristic among children, and whether there is a relationship between the trajectory of children's self-evaluation bias over a five-year period and their psychosocial adjustment. 462 children (200 boys) in Grade 3 (mean age = 8.6 years old) or Grade 4 (mean age = 9.7 years old) at the outset of the study participated following their parents’ written consent. The group-based approach using a multinomial modeling strategy allowed identifying five groups based on changes in the children's self-evaluation bias over the five-year period. Children in the stable and highly positive bias group stood out as having markedly more positive scores on all indices of psychosocial adjustment, and also outperformed the other children in achievement in language arts and math.     

Distributed by Design: On the Promises and Pitfalls of Collaborative Learning with Multiple Representations

This article presents a designed learning environment intended to engage students in learning about the relationships among multiple representations as they work together on a shared task. Over the course of several extended problem-solving sessions, groups developed several successive alignments of participants and representations as they learned to solve increasingly difficult tasks. Our findings highlight the emergent and often unexpected meanings that learners established for representational tools as their groups reorganized into increasingly effective problem-solving ensembles. Our findings echo those of prior research regarding learners' considerable competence and creativity in interpreting and applying distributed representational tools, as well as the careful coordination among learners involved in establishing and acting on those interpretations. Challenges in this design space include instances in our data where students capitalized on connections among representations without really trying to understand those connections, temporarily undermined the distributed character of the representations, and worked more efficiently by reducing the number of participants actively involved in breaking codes. Our findings indicate that managing these challenges requires presenting groups with regular opportunities to reconsider and reorganize their roles, and to experiment with different meanings and uses of flexible tools in the context of tasks with carefully sequenced levels of difficulty.     

Developing University Teachers: an account of a scheme designed for postgraduate researchers on a lecturing career path

Abstract

There is a growing recognition within higher education institutions of the importance of teaching as a core activity for trainee academics. This paper outlines and reports on a scheme which has been established to address the needs of postgraduate researchers who wish to build a career as university teachers. The scheme, now under review at the close of its first year of operation, is one which provides a potential model for other institutions. The paper includes extracts from a frank discussion involving participants in the scheme and highlights some of the practical difficulties which have occurred, in addition to the many benefits which are both expected in the future as well as some which are currently accruing