The development of Canadian student's political conceptions

Two major considerations underlie a set of proposals, outlined in this paper, for a different technology of investigating the psychology of political development in Canadian children and adolescents. First, the paper deals with Hodgetts' (1968) findings, which point out a clear need for further study of the development of political orientations of Canadian students. Second, the paper surveys the typically normative, atheoretical, and methodologically constraining approaches of American investigations of political development in children. Recommendations are advanced to facilitate theory-building and methodological improvement in future investigations. Specific suggestions deal with the construction of an instrument that will elicit scorable information.

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Résumé Il y a deux considérations principales qui forment la base de propositions présentées dans cet article visant à une technologie différente d'étudier la psychologie du développement politique des enfants et des adolescents canadiens. Premièrement, cet article traite des conclusions de Hodgetts (1968) qui signalent la nécessité d'une étude plus poussée du développement des orientations politiques des étudiants canadiens. Deuxièmement, cet article examine les approches typiquement normatives et nonthéoriques des études américaines du développement politique chez les enfants; cette manière d'aborder le problème est restrictive du point de vue méthodologique. On fait des recommandations afin de faciliter la construction des théories et le progrès méthodologique dans les études à venir. Des suggestions spécifiques touchent à la construction d'un instrument qui obtiendra des renseignements qu'on peut noter.

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OISE     

The university of Pennsylvania dyslexia information center

Conclusion A systematic search is necessary to pull together a complete bibliography on dyslexia, because the literature is divided among several quite different disciplines. If the results of this search are shared, a general saving in time available and probably an enhancement of the general quality of research efforts will result. The Reading Clinic of the University of Pennsylvania has produced an annotated bibliography of some 500 articles through 1965 from the entire spectrum of professions dealing with dyslexia and severe reading disabilities. The bibliography will be published in two stages this year. The complexity of the subject matter led to creation of an index which permits manipulation of the information in ways not previously possible The urgency of the need for information gathering on dyslexia has been generally recognized. The Reading Clinic staff have long been aware of the need and have begun to meet it. As of July 1967 there were 331 programs in progress on dyslexia and related reading disabilities supported by $32,372,720 from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare: 172 ($8,346,957) in research; 75 ($14,425,824) in training; and 84 ($9,599,939) in diagnosis and/or treatment. Not one program suggested by its title that assembling and processing the literature would be one of its functions. It seems to me that collection of the existing literature and organization and analysis of the knowledge that has already been developed ought to be the first steps in mounting new programs. Paper presented at Thirteenth Annual Convention, International Reading Association, Boston, Massachusetts, April 26, 1968. Reprinted here, by permission of the author and of IRA, from theConference Proceedings, Vol. 13, Part 3, “Reading Disability and Perception,” pp. 46–51. U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.Catalog of Federally Assisted Programs for Dyslexia and Related Reading Disabilities. (Undated)     

A scaleable document clustering approach for large document corpora

In this paper, the scalability and quality of the contextual document clustering (CDC) approach is demonstrated for large data-sets using the whole Reuters Corpus Volume 1 (RCV1) collection. CDC is a form of distributional clustering, which automatically discovers contexts of narrow scope within a document corpus. These contexts act as attractors for clustering documents that are semantically related to each other. Once clustered, the documents are organized into a minimum spanning tree so that the topical similarity of adjacent documents within this structure can be assessed. The pre-defined categories from three different document category sets are used to assess the quality of CDC in terms of its ability to group and structure semantically related documents given the contexts. Quality is evaluated based on two factors, the category overlap between adjacent documents within a cluster, and how well a representative document categorizes all the other documents within a cluster. As the RCV1 collection was collated in a time ordered fashion, it was possible to assess the stability of clusters formed from documents within one time interval when presented with new unseen documents at subsequent time intervals. We demonstrate that CDC is a powerful and scaleable technique with the ability to create stable clusters of high quality. Additionally, to our knowledge this is the first time that a collection as large as RCV1 has been analyzed in its entirety using a static clustering approach.     

Immigrant families’ use of early childcare: Predictors of care type

Early care and education (ECE) settings are important developmental contexts for young children, with nearly half of all U.S. children experiencing non-parental care during infancy and toddlerhood. However, there is little research examining patterns and predictors of ECE selection among immigrant families even though children of immigrants represent the fastest growing population in the U.S. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (N ≈ 10,700), including a diverse group of children with immigrant parents (N ≈ 2950), this study aims to fill gaps in the literature by examining predictors of the type of ECE (parent, relative, home-based, or center-based) children experience during infancy and toddlerhood (children aged 7–38 months). It examines how immigrant, family, child, and contextual characteristics predict ECE selection within immigrant families and whether these correlates of ECE selection differ across native and immigrant families. Results show distinct patterns of infant and toddler ECE related to immigrant status, particularly when it came to socioeconomic advantage predicting increased relative care for children of immigrants but not native families. Furthermore, several immigrant-specific characteristics, including region of origin, English proficiency, and availability of non-English ECE options, were associated with immigrant families’ ECE choices for their infants and toddlers.     

A call to come together: why it matters and why it works

This letter to the editor is in response to Barbara Hotelling's column, "Tools for Teaching - The Power of Numbers: Transforming Birth Through Collaborations," published in the Volume 19, Number 2 (Spring 2010) issue of The Journal of Perinatal Education. Hotelling's brief overview of the history of birth activism in the United States and of current collaborations among diverse groups and individuals provides inspiration to continue efforts that improve maternity care and promote natural, safe, and healthy childbirth practices.     

Learning to redesign teacher education: a conceptual framework to support program change

University-based teacher education faces intensifying pressure to prove its effectiveness. This has prompted renewed interest in program redesign. In this article, we argue that enacting meaningful redesign requires university-based teacher educators to learn new ways of thinking and acting not only with teacher candidates but also with their university and K-12 colleagues. Drawing on Engeström’s expansive learning theory and our own efforts to redesign our teacher education program along a practice-based teacher education model, we delineate a conceptual framework and illustrate how it supports the organizational learning necessary to enact change in university-based teacher education. The expansive learning redesign framework specifies conceptual tools and social practices to guide, enact, and sustain university-based teacher education redesign. It acknowledges the multi-organizational nature of university-based teacher education and provides tools for engaging K-12 educators in the redesign of teacher education.