The Effects of Verbal Mediation Training on the Problem‐Solving Skills of Children with Partial Sight and Children without Visual Impairments

Thirty children with partial sight and 30 children with unimpaired sight aged between 8 and 12 years were randomly assigned to either verbal mediation or visual mediation training regimes. Participants were asked to complete four variations of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and success on the task was judged on the basis of the number of moves and time taken to complete the puzzles. Children with visual impairments had some difficulty in adjusting to the requirements of the problem‐solving tasks. However, on the final and most difficult of the tasks (a four‐disc problem), the children with impaired sight performed very much like participants without visual impairments. The effect of verbal mediation training was superior to that of visual mediation training in the final trials of the four‐disc problem‐solving period for both children with partial sight and children without visual impairments.     

默顿对科学社会学的贡献

这篇文章是关于默顿及其科学社会学工作的回忆与评论.作者自1960年起先后作过默顿的学生、助手和同事,前后达15年之久,可以说对默顿非常熟悉.文中主要讨论了默顿关于清教与科学的博士论文、关于科学规范的论述、以及关于"马太效应"的文章.作者评论道,默顿一方面未能赋予其清教论题以更一般化的陈述,另一方面又未能对经验资料给予足够的关注,从而导致人们怀疑其马太效应理论的正确性.     

The social field(s) of arts education today: living vulnerability in neo-liberal times

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the ‘real business’ of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a ‘perfect storm’ for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of ‘vulnerability’ as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education – a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment.     

Attachment Styles,Social Skills,and Depression in College Women

Attachment styles, social skills, and depression were studied in 93 college women using the Relationship Questionnaire (K. Bartholomew & L. M. Horowitz, 1991), the Beck Depression Inventory‐II (A.T. Beck, R.A. Steer, & G. K. Brown, 1996), and the Interpersonal Competence Questionnaire (D. Buhrmester, W. Furman, M.T. Wittenberg, & H.T. Reis, 1988). The self and other attachment models and the social skills of negative assertion, self‐disclosure, and conflict management all correlated with depression. Conflict management partially mediated the relationship between attachment self‐model and depression. Implications for counseling are discussed.     

Positioning Whitehead as a Means to Enhance Social Justice in Education

This paper attends to a theoretical overview in process philosophy and empirical data, with the intent of providing a way forward for social justice in education. The introduction of Whitehead into the role of an educationalist questions what social justice means and how to enact it through pedagogy. The focus of thought about social justice in education is removed from a human-only activity and repositioned as a global concern that builds upon the work of the new materialisms and post humanism. In times of environmental crisis, the use of Whitehead is a means to enhance the personal, social and global aspects of educational provision, whilst retaining a focus and call to action with respect to nature and everything non-human. Whitehead was resolute that he could avoid human-nature bifurcation, and his construction of ‘process metaphysics’ was to resolve the issues created by knowledge potentially becoming abstracted and devoid of nature, process and/or context. This piece puts Whitehead to work for social justice issues, such as those caused by the injustices of and in contemporary capitalism, whilst recognizing this work must simultaneously attend to environmental and planetary concerns.     

The Development of the Manchester Motor Skills Assessment (MMSA): An initial evaluation

This article is an initial evaluation of a motor skills assessment for primary aged children. The Manchester Motor Skills Assessment (MMSA) is designed to be quick and easy for teaching assistants to complete, with the dual purposes of informing group programme planning and demonstrating an individual child’s progress following a period of intervention. Inter‐rater reliability checks were conducted during initial assessments of 37 children in 11 schools. Focus groups discussed practical relevance of the tool. The evidence from this small‐scale study suggests that a range of assessors can reliably complete the MMSA. The tool also taps into functionally relevant motor skills for primary age children and informs programme planning. The MMSA appears to be a promising tool for supporting primary schools in identifying children with motor skills difficulties. The contribution of EPs to the MMSA’s development and implementation is discussed.     

A mixed methods comparison of teachers' lunar modeling lesson implementation and student learning outcomes

The authors compare three teachers' adaptations and implementation of a lunar modeling lesson to explain marked differences in student learning outcomes on a spatial-scientific lunar assessment. They used a modified version of the Practices of Science Observation Protocol (P-SOP; Forbes, Biggers, &; Zangori, 2013 Forbes C., Biggers, M., &; Zangori, L. (2013). Investigating essential characteristics of scientific practices in elementary science learning environments: The practices of science observation protocol (P-SOP). School Science and Mathematics, 113, 180–190.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) to identify ways in which features of inquiry were emphasized in each classroom. Additionally, classroom communities of practice were categorized as task-based or practice-based (Riel &; Polin, 2004 Riel, M. &; Polin, L. (2004). Learning communities: Common ground and critical differences in designing technical support. In S. Barab, R. Kling, &; J. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 16–52). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The authors found that student learning outcomes were related to the fidelity with which the teachers implemented the lesson. Teachers with higher P-SOP scores fostered more of a practice-based learning community than task-based one, which also paralleled greater student learning gains. Although the students' scores did not differ by teacher on the preassessment, they did differ significantly on the postassessment, indicating that the curricular choices and learning communities developed by the teachers impacted what students were able to learn.