Effects of Elaborations Included in Textbooks: Large Time Cost,Reduced Attention,and Lower Memory for Main Ideas

Educational Psychology Review - Textbooks currently include many elaborations that describe, illustrate, and explain main ideas, increasing the length of these textbook chapters. The current study...     

Linkages Among Preschoolers' Playground Behavior, Outcome Expectations, and Parental Disciplinary Strategies

To explore relationships among parent's self-reported disciplinary strategies, preschoolers' outcome expectations, and playground behavior, 136 mothers of preschool-age children (age range = 39-71 months) participated in home disciplinary style interviews. Measures of preschoolers' outcome expectations and observations of childrens' prosocial, antisocial/disruptive, and nonsocial/withdrawn playground behavior in preschool settings were also obtained. Results indicated that power-assertive mothers had preschoolers who engaged in more antisocial/disruptive behavior and who expected successful instrumental outcomes for hostile methods of resolving peer conflict. Preschoolers with such outcome expectations also participated in more antisocial playground behavior. Older preschoolers of inductive mothers engaged in more prosocial behavior and expected prosocial behavior to lead to both instrumental gains and enhanced relations with peers. Preschoolers who were more prosocial envisioned friendly-assertive strategies as leading to instrumental gains and, in the case of less nonsocial behavior, to enhanced relations with peers. Children's outcome expectations were also found to be different for older versus younger preschoolers. Evidence was also obtained suggesting that maternal discipline and outcome expectations make separate and independent contributions to children's social and aggressive play behavior.     

Instructional Activities and the Quality of Language in Chilean Preschool Classrooms

Research Findings: This study examines the association between preschool classroom activity and the quality of the language spoken by teachers and children. Eighteen classrooms serving low-income children between the ages of 3 and 4 in Santiago de Chile were audio-recorded during one morning shift. Recordings were transcribed and segmented into activities (greeting, learning experience, book sharing, book discussion, breakfast, lunch, free play and other noninstructional time). A total of 113 activity segments were identified. Characteristics of teacher and child language were measured in each segment. Differences between the eight activities were examined using analysis of variance. Activities were classified as instructional or noninstructional, and the association between this dimension and language characteristics was examined using multilevel path analysis. Results show that most of the variance in language outcomes occurs within classrooms. Analyses show that a significant portion of the variance in the way teachers and children talk is explained by the instructional/noninstructional dimension. Instructional activities are characterized by more language stimulation, more teaching, fewer directives, and more child talk than noninstructional activities. Practice or Policy Implications: We discuss implications for teacher professional development and early childhood education improvement in general and for Latin-America specifically.     

河岸

[abstract]提要Everything that shaped him happened near that river....Now its banks are filled with lies and greed, shame, and murder....     

Dynamic assessment: supporting educational psychologists’ practice through the use of video during supervision

ABSTRACT

Dynamic assessment (DA) is appealing to educational psychologists (EPs) due to: its flexibility, allowing EPs to adjust materials and processes to fit the assessment context; its usefulness, revealing ideas about how the next steps for learning might be achieved; and its focus on strengths. In Feuerstein’s words, “it is the instances of success of the individual that are the focal point for analysis for the reasons of success and failure”. Given the appeal of DA, it is frustrating that it has not been taken up more by practitioners. This paper will explore what DA is, and what it is not, summarise its advantages, consider why it is not more widely used, and introduce one way in which EPs can receive support for DA; using video of an EP “doing” DA within supervision in order to reflect on “good” DA.     

The interplay of scientific epistemological views,learning strategies,and attitudes of college students

This paper focuses on research that illustrates the important interplay between students' scientific epistemological views and their learning strategies. We address the problem of facilitating meaningful science learning as contrasted to rote memorization, which is practiced by many students and encouraged by instructional and evaluation practices. We show that when metacognitive tools are used to facilitate meaningful learning, positive consequences in learning of subject matter, attitudes toward science, and epistemological views can emerge. Positivistic epistemology continues to be the subtle enemy to encouraging meaningful learning and constructivist views of the nature of science and knowing. If you're a scientist, you can say that all knowledge is scientific and everything can be based on fact and experiment. I've taken so many science classes that I've started to believe that.     

Scientific explanations: Characterizing and evaluating the effects of teachers' instructional practices on student learning

Teacher practices are essential for supporting students in scientific inquiry practices, such as the construction of scientific explanations. In this study, we examine what instructional practices teachers engage in when they introduce scientific explanation and whether these practices influence students' ability to construct scientific explanations during a middle school chemistry unit. Thirteen teachers enacted a project‐based chemistry unit, How can I make new stuff from old stuff?, with 1197 seventh grade students. We videotaped each teacher's enactment of the focal lesson on scientific explanation and then coded the videotape for four different instructional practices: modeling scientific explanation, making the rationale of scientific explanation explicit, defining scientific explanation, and connecting scientific explanation to everyday explanation. Our results suggest that when teachers introduce scientific explanation, they vary in the practices they engage in as well as the quality of their use of these practices. We also found that teachers' use of instructional practices can influence student learning of scientific explanation and that the effect of these instructional practices depends on the context in terms of what other instructional practices the teacher uses. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 53–78, 2008     

‘If there's a dead rat,don't leave it’. Young children's understanding of their citizenship rights and responsibilities

Concerns about pupil disengagement from school and society have led to compulsory citizenship education in state schools in England. However, there is little evidence that the new citizenship education is meeting its goals. The research described here assesses a new approach to citizenship education that appears to overcome some of the identified obstacles in current practices. Hampshire's ‘Rights, respect and responsibility’ initiative is a rights‐based whole school reform of school policies and practices. Under this initiative the contemporaneous citizenship status of pupils is respected, pupils are taught about their rights under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and democratic participation is made meaningful in classroom and school functioning. Of particular interest is that the initiative starts in infant schools. This research indicates that young children can understand their rights and responsibilities in ways that are meaningful to their everyday behaviour and that rights‐based whole school reform has the capacity to improve pupil learning and citizenship behaviours.     

The use of phonological, orthographic, and contextual information during reading: a comparison of adults who are learning to read and skilled adult readers

The purpose of this study was to assess the role that phonological, orthographic, and contextual sources of information play in a group of adults who were learning to read compared to adult skilled readers. Participants read short paragraphs that contained a correct homophone, an incorrect homophone, or a spelling control. Target words were orthographically similar or dissimilar, and they appeared in context that predicted the target or was neutral with respect to the target. The pattern of data obtained for skilled readers was consistent with past work (Rayner et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 24(2), 476–497, 1998). Skilled readers showed no reading time differences between the correct homophone and the incorrect homophone, as long as the two were orthographically similar, but reading times on these words were faster than the spelling control condition. The pattern of data for the adults who were learning to read was different. These readers were actually better at noticing that an incorrect version of the homophone was present. Importantly, we did find consistent significant differences between the incorrect homophone condition and the spelling control condition. This suggests the adults who were learning to read use phonological codes during word recognition, but they do so less efficiently than skilled readers.