Parent Praise to 1‐ to 3‐Year‐Olds Predicts Children's Motivational Frameworks 5 Years Later

In laboratory studies, praising children's effort encourages them to adopt incremental motivational frameworks—they believe ability is malleable, attribute success to hard work, enjoy challenges, and generate strategies for improvement. In contrast, praising children's inherent abilities encourages them to adopt fixed‐ability frameworks. Does the praise parents spontaneously give children at home show the same effects? Although parents' early praise of inherent characteristics was not associated with children's later fixed‐ability frameworks, parents' praise of children's effort at 14–38 months (N = 53) did predict incremental frameworks at 7–8 years, suggesting that causal mechanisms identified in experimental work may be operating in home environments.     

Book review

Equality and Power in Schools: Redistribution, recognition and representation By Kathleen Lynch and Anne Lodge Routledge Falmer 2002, ISBN 0–415–26806–0 (pbk), pp. 243     

Attributions of deception as a function of reward value: A test of two explanations

Nonverbal expectancy violations theory and a cognitive heuristics approach were used to generate predictions regarding attributions of deception directed toward a message source. The appearance of a message source was manipulated to be either higher or lower in attractiveness while engaging in stereotypically deceptive or truthful behavior. A heuristic approach would suggest a main effect for attractiveness on deceptiveness attributions while a nonverbal expectancy violations approach would predict an interaction between the attraction and deception manipulations. An apparent main effect suggested that the more socially attractive message source was perceived to be less deceptive. However, the effect was driven by an interaction that showed the discrepancy in deception attributions between levels of attractiveness was highest in the deceptive behavior condition, as predicted by nonverbal expectancy violations.     

Child care and low-income children's development: direct and moderated effects

A large literature has documented the influence of child care on young children's development, but few studies have examined low-income children in community care arrangements. Using data from Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study (N = 204), this study examined the influence of child care quality and the extent of care on low-income children's (ages 2-4 years) cognitive and socioemotional development over time. Higher levels of child care quality were modestly associated with improvements in children's socioemotional development, and extensive hours in child care were linked to increases in children's quantitative skills and decreases in behavior problems. Analyses suggest that child care quality may be particularly salient for subgroups of children from low-income families.     

The Remaking of the American University

Five powerful forces have the capacity to reshape higher education today. They are the rise of an information economy, changing demographics, new technologies, privatization of higher education, and a convergence of knowledge producing organizations. Among the possible consequences of these forces are a greatly expanded and more diverse set of higher education providers; the development of brick, click and brick-and-click colleges; a reduction in the number of physical campuses and the rise of international institutions; an increasing independence of faculty from campuses; and a growing customization of higher education and a shift in focus from teaching to learning.     

Coke or Pepsi?

A binomial experiment dealing with a volunteer's ability to distinguish Coca-Cola from Pepsi-Cola is used to introduce the concepts of hypothesis testing and Type I and Type II errors.     

The importance of supporting technological knowledge in post-primary education: a cohort study

Background: Substantial research highlights the differences between scientific and technological knowledge. Considering that learning is heavily focused on the acquisition of knowledge, it is important to examine the individual and systematic implications of these types of knowledge.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the impact on overall educational performance as a result of engaging with technology subjects at post-primary level.

Sample: A five year cohort study was designed to gather longitudinal data from a total sample of 1761 pupils’ grades from the Irish Leaving Certificate examination. The sample was distributed across four schools.

Design and methods: Grades from the Irish Leaving Certificate were selected because the examination is considered high stakes as it serves as the country’s primary mechanism for matriculation into third-level education. Individual examinations are designed externally to schools by a government body ensuring the validity of each examination in capturing the holistic interpretation subject syllabi. Finally, a points system is used to score each examination facilitating comparisons between subjects.

Results: The results show that pupils who study the technology subjects are statistically significantly less likely to perform well overall in comparison to pupils who study science and mathematics subjects. They also show that for pupils who study the technology subjects, those subjects are statistically significantly likely to be their best performing subjects.

Conclusions: Due to the array of variables impacting subject selection, a definitive causal explanation cannot be deduced from the data for these results. However, it is possible to infer that the variance in knowledge types between the science and technology subjects has an impact on the results. A case is made that a compulsory technological component should be incorporated into educational curricula to provide a comprehensive and general education and to facilitate the holistic development of pupils.