Supervisor Flexibility

The author makes some very specific and rather bold suggestions to supervisors of instruction. His suggestions should also be helpful to other people with supervisory responsibilities, such as administrators, department heads, and supervising teachers.     

The Project on Innovative Teaching Methods — An Overview

Over the past several years, the education system in Singapore has undergone very significant and far-reaching changes, especially in terms of the programmes and resources available to teachers and pupils. New textbooks and teaching materials have been introduced into the schools by the Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore (CDIS). Within the Institute of Education (IE), teacher education programmes for pre-service trainees and in-service teachers have also undergone review and change to meet new needs and expectations.     

What predicts injury from physical punishment? A test of the typologies of violence hypothesis

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the power of child, perpetrator, and socio-economic characteristics to predict injury in cases of reported child physical abuse. The study was designed to assess the validity of the assumption that physically injurious incidents of child physical abuse are qualitatively different from those that do not result in injury, that their generative factors are distinctive, and that the quality of caregiving in these two types of incidents is different. METHOD: A weighted, nationally representative sample of 8,164 substantiated punishment abuse cases in Canada was used. Various models were constructed and evaluated through logistic regression. RESULTS: Of six potential predictors - child age, perpetrator sex, child functioning, parent functioning, economic stress, and social stress - none predicted injury to the child. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that injurious and non-injurious physical abuse cannot be distinguished on the basis of the personal characteristics or circumstances of the child or perpetrator. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: A common criterion for child welfare intervention into cases of suspected physical abuse is injury or risk of injury. This criterion assumes that injurious and non-injurious assaults are qualitatively different phenomena, predicted by different risk factors. In the present study an attempt was made to differentiate between injurious and non-injurious cases of punitive physical abuse on the basis of characteristics of the child, perpetrator, family, and social context. None of these factors explained the likelihood of injury, suggesting that the prediction of injury as an intervention criterion may be questionable.     

The development of relational thinking: a study of Measure Up first-grade students’ thinking and their symbolic understandings

Educational Studies in Mathematics - This study is focused on the relational thinking of first-grade students following their first 3 months of instruction from the Measure Up (MU)...     

Processing Cultural Differences: Structuration as Framework for Sensemaking Efforts

Drawing on key aspects of structuration theory, this case study examines student sensemaking efforts based on an international service learning (ISL) program conducted annually over a period of three years, wherein 11 U.S. students and 2 faculty members worked in a remote village in Moldova, teaching local students and community representatives to operate an online news outlet and interviewing young adults and professionals. Team members also interviewed Moldovan citizens, journalists, and politicians as part of a media research project. We adopted a meta-analytic approach to written student reflections to examine the processes through which students worked to understand cultural differences in a situation characterized by low community capabilities to either problem solve or to be self-sustaining, which further challenged their pre-existing assumptions.     

An Institutional Repository Experience at a Large Health Care System

Institutional repositories (IRs) collect, preserve, and disseminate the scholarly output of an organization. Though common in academic settings, they are less so in hospitals or health care systems. The librarians for Aurora Health Care decided to create a primarily citation-level IR to organize and promote the scholarly output of Aurora faculty, residents, and fellows using the proprietary software Digital Commons, a product of the company bepress. The repository also hosts a newly published peer-reviewed journal and includes digitized historical images and institutional memorabilia. Suggested alternatives are given for hospitals or health care systems that may not currently be able to pursue a full-fledged IR.     

Development of vocabulary sophistication across genres in English children’s writing

This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children’s use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory education in England. We find that the received model needs elaborating in a number of important ways. Specifically: (1) the average frequency of words in the repertoire used by older children is no lower than that of younger children. However, younger children’s writing is characterized by extensive repetition of high frequency verbs and adjectives and of low frequency nouns (the latter being a product of a focus on entities which are rarely discussed in adult writing). The role of repetition in this finding implies that lexical sophistication is inseparable from lexical diversity, a construct which is usually treated as distinct. (2) Younger children’s writing shows a preference for fiction-like vocabulary over academic-like vocabulary. As they mature, children come to make greater use of academic vocabulary in both their literary and non-literary writing, though this increase is greatest in their non-literary writing. Use of fiction vocabulary remains constant across year groups but decreases sharply in non-literary writing, showing an enhanced sense of register appropriateness. This development of register appropriate word use can be captured by relatively simple frequency-based measures that could readily be employed by teachers and researchers to track writers’ development in this aspect of word use.

     

Sources of Stress for Primary School Head Teachers in New Zealand

A stratified sample of 40 primary school head teachers in the North Island of New Zealand completed a 63 item check-list on sources of stress. The most highly rated items referred to stress arising from management of time, administrative tasks and interpersonal relationships. A principal components analysis identified four factors, labelled: staff, work-load/administration, role conflict, and meetings. Comparison between groups suggested that experiences of stress were related to the school's catchment area, to the adequacy of its buildings and to the head's teacher's responsibilities.     

Teacher Education Objectives: A Survey of Student Views

This article is a summary of the Survey of Teacher Education Objectives: The Views of Diploma in Education Students published as a monograph in 1982. A report of the previous study was published in 1981 and a summary of the report appeared in Vol. 4 No. 1 of this Journal.