Revved up or turned off? How domain knowledge changes the relationship between perceived task complexity and task interest

This correlational study examined the relationship between perceived task complexity and task interest for individuals with varying levels of domain knowledge and/or individual interest. Forty-five college student participants (46% women) reported their knowledge and individual interest in biology before learning about the biology of fungus. Following the task, participants rated the complexity and their understanding of the material. Participants took a quiz on the material and reported their interest in fungus and willingness to return for another session. A significant Biology Knowledge × Perceived Complexity interaction emerged on task interest and willingness to return for another session, ps < .05. Perceived complexity predicted positive task outcomes for high-domain-knowledge individuals but negative task outcomes for low-domain-knowledge individuals, suggesting that domain knowledge and individual interest can help explain individuals' diverse responses to learning activities.     

Key considerations in assessing young children’s emotional competence

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a surge in evidence on preschoolers’ emotional development as crucial for both concurrent and later well-being and mental health, and for learning and academic success. Given the importance of building such strengths, assessing emotional competence skills is important to aid early childhood educators in focusing programming for individuals and classrooms. Based on these assertions, this article is structured as follows: (1) outline important issues regarding developmentally appropriate early childhood assessment, particularly of emotional competence; (2) discuss use of culturally relevant standards of attainment of such skills in assessing student progress; (3) define the skills of emotional competence; (4) describe a model leading from developmentally appropriate emotional competence skills to assessment and programming; (5) suggest some possible tools for schools to use in assessing emotional competence of young children; (6) give guidance for new measurement development, and (7) suggest needed policy and practice in this area.     

The vocational–academic divide in neoliberal upper secondary curricula: the Swedish case

A historical tension between a more general and a more specific focus in post-compulsory education is made visible in some educational systems by the division into more academic and more vocational programmes. Embedded in this tension are questions of social justice and the purposes of education. In addition, division into academic and vocational programmes has class dimensions since youth with working class backgrounds are often over-represented in vocational programmes. This study investigates how this tension is handled in the Swedish upper secondary curriculum, which reflects an international neoliberal policy trend in promoting competition, employability and employer influence over the curriculum. By analysing how the educational content of vocational educational and training (VET) programmes and higher educational preparatory (HEP) programmes is contextualised, we found that the two programme types were based on very different logics. In VET programmes, knowledge is strongly context-bound and often related to regulating behaviours. This contrasts sharply with the way knowledge is contextualised in HEP programmes in which less context-bound knowledge and skills such as using concepts, models and critical thinking are dominant. Students in VET programmes are trained to ‘do’ and to ‘adapt’, while the students in HEP programmes are trained to ‘think’ and to ‘imagine possibilities’. Thus, students from different social classes are prepared for very different roles in society.     

Shifting the Zone of Mediation in a Suburban New Immigrant Destination: Community Boundary Spanners and School District Policymaking

This paper explores the context of reception for immigrant students and English learners in one medium-sized suburban school district in the northeastern United States. Using qualitative methods, the authors describe how, despite a troubling context of reception emerging from a normative and political community context that harbored resentment toward the new immigrant population, a community-based organization whose members served as boundary spanners between the school district and the community helped prompt district leaders toward more equity-minded policies. Given increasing culturally and linguistically diverse student populations in suburban school districts across the United States, findings from this paper have important implications for community engagement and school district policymaking.     

STEM Bridges: Evolution of an Academic Library STEM Outreach Program

Big Orange STEM Saturday (BOSS) is a sustainable model of outreach that fosters the STEM cycle of discovery and learning experiences. Through this program, the library creates and reinforces a bridge between secondary educational experiences and higher education that facilitates the transfer of knowledge from the classroom to the world. Local high school students are able to engage with experts in several different ways to explore what STEM has to offer and to look beyond their current experiences. This approach creates a venue for STEM teaching spaces outside the school classroom for enrichment and innovation. Over the past 5 years, the variety of experiences offered at BOSS have expanded and the reputation of the program has grown. This article explores the challenges, lessons, and impact that this program has had on its constituents, with a particular focus on the impact the library can have when exploring nontraditional areas of support and outreach.     

Children like it more but don’t learn more: Effects of esthetic visual design in educational games

Little is known about what design elements in digital learning games enhance learning; especially in the case of child audiences. This study examines the effects of a learning game’s visual design on perceived attractiveness and learning outcomes. We developed two visual designs for the game: one with supposedly high esthetic value and another with a low esthetic value. Participants (children between 9 and 11 years of age, N = 53) were randomly divided into two groups. Each group interacted with their assigned version for about 20 minutes and then evaluated its visual attractiveness without knowing about the other version. Then, they evaluated the attractiveness of the complementary version. As the next step, they evaluated both versions side-by-side. During the free-choice period, children could continue playing one of the game versions or a different game. They clearly preferred the high esthetic version in evaluations (d > 0.86) and in the free-choice period (62% preferred the high esthetic version of the target game), but this did not improve their learning outcomes (comprehension: d = –0.59; transfer: d = –0.16). Possible explanations of this effect are discussed in terms of cognitive load theory and cognitive-affective theory of learning from media.     

Performative Technology Intensity and Teacher Subjectivities

Critical educational literature suggests that an increased reliance upon neoliberally inspired management technologies transforms the very foundations from which images of the ideal teacher are constructed. The purpose of this paper is to add to this literature by (i) identifying and analysing a number of theoretical qualities associated with performative technologies, and (ii) discussing how such qualities contribute to the emergence of performative teacher subjectivities. Drawing upon the findings from a qualitative interview study into the extensive use of performative technologies in a Swedish upper-secondary school, we discuss four key roles of performative technologies—referred to as territorializing, mediating, adjudicating, and subjectivizing—and the intensity by which they play out such roles. A key conclusion is that the intensity by which performative technologies territorialize, mediate, and adjudicate educational practices affects self-reflection and internalization among teachers and, hence, is important for understanding the subjectivizing role of performative technologies.     

Same Same,but Different: Word and Sentence Reading in German and English

The current study compared eye fixation patterns during word and sentence processing in a consistent and an inconsistent alphabetic orthography. German and English children as well as adults matched on word reading ability read matched sentences while their eye fixation behavior was recorded. Results indicated that German children read in a more small-unit plodder-like style with more diligent first-pass reading and less rereading. In contrast, English children read in a more large-unit explorer-like style with a greater tendency to skip words, and more regressions. It is important that these cross-linguistic processing differences largely persisted in the adult readers. Orthographic consistency thus influences both local word recognition and global sentence processing in developing and skilled readers.