Young Children's Ability to Adapt their Drawings of the Human Figure

5‐year‐olds, 7‐year‐olds and 9‐year‐olds were asked to draw three figures, one standing still and facing them, one standing still in profile and one running in profile. Half drew from imagination and half drew from models. The 5‐year‐olds made fewest distinctions in the way they drew the figures, the most notable being the greater spread of the legs of the running figure. With increasing age, more features were used to differentiate the three figures. There was little evidence of 5‐year‐olds adapting their figures in the presence of a model. Only among the older children was there a significant effect of the presence of a model when the 7‐year‐olds and, to a greater extent, the 9‐year‐olds drew their running figure with bent arms and legs and also with more transparencies and partial occlusions.     

The Moral Limits of Open‐Mindedness

Epistemologists have long worried that the willingness of open‐minded people to reconsider their beliefs in light of new evidence is both a condition of improving their beliefs and a risk factor for losing their grip on what they already know. In this article, Matt Ferkany introduces and attempts to resolve a moral variation of this puzzle: a willingness to engage people whose moral ideas are strange or repugnant (to us) looks like both a condition of broadening our moral horizons, and a risk factor for doing the wrong thing or becoming bad. Ferkany pursues a contractualist line of argument according to which such hazardous engagement is a virtue only when it matters to our interlocutors whether they can justify themselves to us on terms we can accept — for our sake or for the sake of their own virtue, not instrumentally or to get something out of us. When it does not so matter, openness can be unintelligent or gullible — in other words, not virtuous.     

The Relation between Individual Differences in Fantasy and Theory of Mind

The relation between early fantasy/pretense and children's knowledge about mental life was examined in a study of 152 3- and 4-year-old boys and girls. Children were interviewed about their fantasy lives (e.g., imaginary companions, impersonation of imagined characters) and were given tasks assessing their level of pretend play and verbal intelligence. In a second session 1 week later, children were given a series of theory of mind tasks, including measures of appearance-reality, false belief, representational change, and perspective taking. The theory of mind tasks were significantly intercorrelated with the effects of verbal intelligence and age statistically controlled. Individual differences in fantasy/pretense were assessed by (1) identifying children who created imaginary characters, and (2) extracting factor scores from a combination of interview and behavioral measures. Each of these fantasy assessments was significantly related to the theory of mind performance of the 4-year-old children, independent of verbal intelligence.     

The design of tasks in support of teachers’ development of coherent mathematical meanings

We examine the role of tasks that have the intended effect of teachers re-conceiving the mathematics they teach as comprising a coherent body of meaningful ideas. We ground our discussion in ideas of trigonometry and modular functions and draw from a professional development research project to illustrate our approach. In this project, many teachers experienced dissonance that was rooted in their commitments to their curricular knowledge of trigonometry. Teachers who built new meanings into a coherent whole were those who coordinated them at a micro level. Teachers who saw implications of their own reasoning for student learning were also successful at expressing that reasoning in natural language. We saw a similar pattern in the case of teachers' creation of meanings for action and process conceptions of mod(f(x),g(x)). Teachers who gained insight into implications of their own activities for student learning were the teachers who reasoned at a micro level in regard to the meaning of mod, who coordinated that meaning with a covariational perspective on the behavior of functions, and who expressed that coordination in natural language. We conclude that a primary feature of tasks that promote teachers' construction of coherent mathematical meanings is that they support an overall effort to have teachers engage in the coordination of meanings in the context of explaining significant ideas and relationships.     

Charter school authorizers and student achievement

In this paper we analyze the relationship between charter school authorizers and student achievement. We perform this analysis using a 10-year panel dataset from Minnesota, a state that permits four distinct types of authorizers—local school boards, postsecondary institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the Minnesota Department of Education. The results of the analysis indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between charter school authorizing type and mean levels of student achievement. However, the analysis also reveals that schools authorized by nonprofit organizations exhibit substantially more variability in achievement than schools authorized by local school boards.     

Assessment matters: Considering the scholarship of teaching and learning in student affairs

Tony Ribera, Sarah Fernandez, and Matt Gray apply a scholarly approach to assessing student learning in the cocurriculum.     

“Sharing My Bias”: We're From the Government,and We're Here to Help

This article describes reference skills as a sharable resource, particularly in light of the development of e-government and the demands it places on public services staff in libraries.     

Scenario planning in public libraries: a discussion

The authors explore the use of scenario planning in public libraries via a Q&A discussion. They discuss the impact of unexpected events and unwelcome trends on libraries’ future, explain the distinction between scenario work and forecasting, and outline a practical approach to devising and delivering scenario planning activities at a local library level. This discussion, which took place at Oxford University’s Said Business School on 23 August 2018, explores the use of scenario planning in public libraries.     

The Three R's: Rapport,Relationship, and Reference

In the eyes of our patrons, the success of a library transaction depends on both the accuracy of the information conveyed and the quality of the patron/staff interaction. We each experience rapport naturally many times during the day. Skills borrowed from the field of neuro-linguistic programming allow us to learn to quickly create a state of rapport with anyone we encounter. By learning to create rapport intentionally with our patrons, we can improve the quality of their library experience.