Maternal employment and parent-infant interaction at one year

The purpose of this study was to ask if parent-infant interaction differs in middle-class families with employed and homemaker mothers. Home observations of mother, father, and infant were carried out on weekday evenings, and observations of mother and infant as a dyad were performed during the daytime. Findings indicated group differences in the mother-father-infant context only, in which infants in the homemaker-mother group smiled and laughed more and were engaged more often in mutual looking and object play. Furthermore, daughters in the employed-mother group, but sons in the homemaker-mother group, received more parental stimulation encouraging their attention of objects.     

Enhancing pre-service teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK): a mixed-method study

Educational technology research and development - The main aim of this two-step mixed-method study was to explore the effectiveness of the strategies used to prepare pre-service teachers for...     

Lessons learned from a decade implementing Comprehensive Sexuality Education in resource poor settings: The World Starts With Me

Today, more than half of the world population is under the age of 25 years and one in four is under age 18. The urgency of expanding access to Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) notably for children and young people in Africa and Asia is greater than ever before. However, many challenges to the implementation and delivery of CSE in resource poor settings have been identified in the literature. CSE’s effectiveness could be strongly improved if these challenges were better met. This paper aims to contribute to those much-needed improvements by sharing lessons learned from a decade of implementation of one particular CSE programme, The World Starts With Me, among various populations in 11 low income countries in Africa and Asia. The aims, content, reach and effectiveness of the programme are described. Next, the challenges for implementation and delivery at student, teacher, school and context level are discussed with reference to the wider knowledge base in this area. Finally, suggestions are provided for ways forward including the increased sensitivity of programmes for normative and practical barriers to sexual health, further advancement towards gender transformativity, a far-reaching expansion of comprehensive forms of teacher training and coaching, and a serious stepping-up of multilevel ‘whole school’ approaches.     

Public schools,private schools,and the common school ideal

According to the ethos of the nineteenth century common school, all students are assigned the same tasks, and in all the same powers developed. Twentieth century innovations such as ability grouping are foreign to the common school's egalitarian ideal. Such innovations may reinforce connections between students' ascribed background characteristics and school achievement. Proponents of the common school sought to sever these connections. Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore, inHigh School Achievement (1982), argue that private schools are more in keeping with the common school tradition than public schools. In their view, private schools offer greater meritocratic justice than public schools; this is due to the fact that private schools minimize the impact of students' background characteristics, such as race and family income, on achievement. Our findings, however, are inconsistent with those of Coleman et al. We use a data set provided by the Educational Testing Service in which public and private subgroups are approximately equal with respect to measured background factors, and we employ a more adequate complement of independent variables, along with outcome measures which appear to be more curriculum sensitive than those employed by Coleman et al. Our regression results indicate that private secondary schools are no more effective than public schools at severing the connections between background characteristics and measured achievement in English, math, and American history.     

Enhancing Part-time Teaching in Higher Education: a Challenge for Institutional Policy and Practice

Higher education in the UK has seen a steady increase in the numbers of part‐time teachers, yet the way in which they are inducted into teaching and the utilisation of their expertise are under‐researched. This qualitative study of 33 part‐time teachers from several universities suggests that their involvement in higher education should be considered from a fresh perspective, which differs from approaches to the enhancement of university teaching that rely upon simply educating individual teachers to do better by requiring their attendance at formally provided courses and events. While these approaches have their place, modern research on professional learning is increasingly pointing to the view that professional formation is an ecological process that is insufficiently served by the formal provision of learning opportunities. The ecological perspective, which emphasises the part played by the everyday workplace in professional formation, provides a challenge to leaders and managers regarding the development and implementation of institutional policy and practice.     

The relationship between reading achievement and morphological word analysis in deaf and hearing students matched for reading level

This study extends the findings of Gaustad, Kelly, Payne, and Lylak (2002), which showed that deaf college students and hearing middle school students appeared to have approximately the same morphological knowledge and word segmentation skills. Because the average grade level reading abilities for the two groups of students were also similar, those research findings suggested that deaf students' morphological development was progressing as might be expected relative to reading level. This study further examined the specific relationship between morphologically based word identification skills and reading achievement levels, as well as differences in the error patterns of deaf and hearing readers. Comparison of performance between pairs of deaf college students and hearing middle school students matched for reading achievement level shows significant superiority of younger hearing participants for skills relating especially to the meaning of derivational morphemes and roots, and the segmentation of words containing multiple types of morphemes. Group subtest comparisons and item analysis comparisons of specific morpheme knowledge and word segmentation show clear differences in the morphographic skills of hearing middle school readers over deaf college students, even though they were matched and appear to read at the same grade levels, as measured by standardized tests.     

Observations of Children's Task Activities and Social Interactions in Relation to Teacher Perceptions in a Child-Centered Preschool: Are We Leaving Too Much to Chance?

The goal of the present study was to describe one center's interpretation of childcentered instruction and what this looked like in terms of the children's daily activities, social affiliation, and behavior in the classrooms. Staff at a self-identified child-centered constructivist preschool program were interviewed about their pedagogical philosophy and asked to give their estimates of the proportion of time that children in their classrooms spent both interacting with different people (alone, with peer, with teacher) and engaged in various behaviors. Data were collected pertaining to children's goal-directed, sustained activities, social affiliation, affect expression, and inappropriate/aggressive behavior via 2,752 naturalistic classroom observations over the course of a semester. Results indicate children a) spent significantly less time engaging in focused, goal-directed, learning activities, b) sustained their attention on one activity for significantly smaller lengths of time, c) expressed overt positive affect considerably less often, and d) had significantly less one-on-one teacher-child interaction, than was believed and desired by the staff. Results were consistent with both a fear expressed by the center director and recent calls from researchers in early childhood education, that teachers in many child-centered constructivist early childhood programs may be committing the "early childhood error" by stepping back and refraining from getting directly involved in children's activities.     

Can middle‐school science textbooks help students learn important ideas? Findings from project 2061's curriculum evaluation study: Life science

The transfer of matter and energy from one organism to another and between organisms and their physical setting is a fundamental concept in life science. Not surprisingly, this concept is common to the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993 ), the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council, 1996 ), and most state frameworks and likely to appear in any middle‐school science curriculum material. Nonetheless, while topics such as photosynthesis and cellular respiration have been taught for many years, research on student learning indicates that students have difficulties learning these ideas. In this study, nine middle‐school curriculum materials—both widely used and newly developed—were examined in detail for their support of student learning ideas concerning matter and energy transformations in ecosystems specified in the national standards documents. The analysis procedure used in this study was previously developed and field tested by Project 2061 of the AAAS on a variety of curriculum materials. According to our findings, currently available curriculum materials provide little support for the attainment of the key ideas chosen for this study. In general, these materials do not take into account students' prior knowledge, lack representations to clarify abstract ideas, and are deficient in phenomena that can be explained by the key ideas and hence can make them plausible. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study to curriculum development, teaching, and science education research based on shortcomings in today's curricula. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 41: 538–568, 2004