The Intersection of Race and Gender Among Black American Adolescents

This study employed an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design to examine the intersection of race and gender among Black American adolescents, aged 11–19. The quantitative component (n = 344) used survey data to examine gender differences in peer-perpetrated and adult-perpetrated racial discrimination experiences, and no gender differences were evident. Qualitative data (n = 42) probed how males and females interpret discrimination experiences given the intersection of race and gender. Although the majority of participants believed that Black males and females have similar experiences, some believed that Black males face more racial discrimination. However, analyses revealed social disadvantages for Black females given that they report inappropriate comments and unwelcome hair touching and limited opportunities for interracial dating compared with Black males.     

Translating Laboratory Evidence into Classroom Practice with Teacher‐Led Randomized Controlled Trials—A Perspective and Meta‐Analysis

We initiated and structured a single program that supervised teachers, some with neuroscience or psychology degrees, to collaborate and explore the effects of science of learning‐translated pedagogy. This article reports on the 34 findings from teacher‐led randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and replications. Teachers designed trials, looking at areas such as attention, memory, and spaced learning. Overall, positive effects were found over short periods (1–6 weeks; r = 0.15, p < .0001 [d = 0.30], N = 2,157). However, retrieval practice (testing as a learning experience) had differential effects mediated by age, approach, and lesson content. Results suggest science of learning‐translated pedagogy needs extensive replication to establish how best to use laboratory evidence in classrooms. Multiple planned replication of teacher‐led RCTs has potential as an evaluation tool, combining high levels of mundane realism with strong internal validity and the potential to build cost effective large samples for meta‐analysis.     

Choosing schools,choosing selves: exploring the influence of parental identity and biography on the school choice process in Delhi,India

Drawing on qualitative interview data from a group of lower income parents in Delhi, India, this paper focuses on the dynamic relationship between parental choice of a particular school and parents’ own identity construction. The data indicate that choice of school is for some parents a symbolic expression of identity, influenced by family dynamics and parents’ educational biographies. The paper outlines the concept of ‘forging solidarities’ and proposes it as an alternative way of understanding school enrolment decisions that recognises the social significance of such choices for the wider family unit. More generally, as school choice mechanisms in various forms become an increasingly important part of the educational landscape in many countries, the findings draw attention to the sociocultural nature of choice in real-world market settings and the contribution of schooling choices to processes of social and educational segregation.     

In the Mailbox

Research has grown in the 21st century regarding the physical activity patterns of racial and ethnic minorities. Although more is now known about some groups, disparities in health have not diminished. The purpose of this paper is to further explore the research about physical activity for African American women and suggest ways that future research might be conducted to address social and environmental justice relative to healthy behaviors. More information about race and gender can facilitate the promotion of physical activity and healthy living for all individuals, and can address the environmental as well as policy issues influencing behavior. Research focusing on qualitative data, moving beyond explanations of only racial categorical differences, emphasizing the cultural competence of researchers, acknowledging the importance of intersectionality, and using more theorizing may promote better ways of knowing about groups such as African American women.     

Textbook treatments and students' understanding of acceleration

A single science textbook often provides the syllabus for courses at upper secondary and tertiary levels, and may be used as a principal source of information or explanation. The research reported in this article challenges such practices. The ways in which the concept, acceleration, is treated in physics textbooks is compared with understandings of the concept demonstrated by final-year secondary (Year 12) and first-year university students. Some students' understandings are shown to be incomplete in ways that parallel misleading or inaccurate textbook treatments of the concept. In addition to misleading or inaccurate statements, the limitations of some textbook treatments of acceleration were found to include: lack of attempts to make explicit relationships with other concepts, failure to point out when it is appropriate to use particular definitions or that an alternative definition might be more appropriate in specific situations, inclusion of operational definitions without conceptual explanations, and a focus on quantitative treatments while overlooking the development of qualitative understanding. Two principal aspects that distinguished the ways in which the students understood acceleration were identified: (a) the relation between acceleration and velocity; and (b) the relation between acceleration and force(s). The results of the study have implications for teaching and, in particular, for the use of textbooks in teaching. These implications are discussed in the article.     

Semantic Innovation: Arithmetical and Algebraic Metaphors Within Narratives of Learning

This paper examines a theoretical perspective on the ways in which children progress in learning mathematics. It suggests that there is a difficulty in associating teaching discourses with the mathematics they locate. This can result in an incommensurability between alternative perspectives being offered. The paper resists attempts to privilege any particular account but rather demands an analysis of these discourses and their presuppositions. In developing these themes the paper invokes Ricoeur's analysis of time and narrative as an analytical approach to treating notions such as transition, development and progression in mathematical learning. His notion of semantic innovation is introduced. This embraces both the introduction of a new metaphor into a sentence or the creation of a new narrative which reorganises events into a new plot. The notion is utilised in arguing that the shift in the student's mathematical development from arithmetic to first order linear equations with unknowns reconfigures the contextual parameters governing the understanding of these mathematical forms. It is also utilised in showing how alternative approaches to accounting for such transitions suit different and perhaps conflicting outcomes. For example, demonstrating awareness of generality or performing well in a diagnostic test featuring the solution of linear equations.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Caste and UK education: a historical overview

ABSTRACT

Caste, and awareness of it, have been a persistent, though changing, feature of South Asian communities’ experience in the UK. In twenty-first century Britain the issue of caste has come to the fore and has been hotly contested, in relation to equality legislation. In this wider context, the present article maps some of caste’s historical intersections with education in the UK. The focus is, variously, on: caste as it has intersected with post-18 education; caste as a factor in families’ attitudes to education; school children’s awareness of caste as an aspect of their own identity and as a way of differentiating their peers; the incidence of caste-based bullying in schools; and the inclusion of caste as a topic in religious education and a matter for ongoing consideration by religious educationists.