Preschool children's attention to environmental messages about groups: social categorization and the origins of intergroup bias

This study was designed to examine the effects of adults' labeling and use of social groups on preschool children's intergroup attitudes. Children (N=87, aged 3-5) attending day care were given measures of classification skill and self-esteem and assigned to membership in a novel (red or blue) social group. In experimental classrooms, teachers used the color groups to label children and organize the classroom. In control classrooms, teachers ignored the color groups. After 3 weeks, children completed multiple measures of intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that children in both types of classrooms developed ingroup-biased attitudes. As expected, children in experimental classrooms showed greater ingroup bias on some measures than children in control classrooms.     

The marginal costs of instruction

This is a study of the costs of instruction in a large public research university. It departs from other work on instructional costs in its attempt to draw inferences about the economic costs of incremental or marginal enrollments. Focusing on graduate education, we examine how the costs directly facing faculty differ from those incurred by the institution's administration and legislature as reflected in the budgetary rewards for instruction. These cost differences provide the wherewithal for a university to carry out basic research and other important functions that lack a paying clientele. The study also explores the roles of economic costs in the institution's pricing of graduate education.     

Interactions of Economics of Science and Science Education: Investigating the Implications for Science Teaching and Learning

In recent years, there has been upsurge of interest in the applications of interdisciplinary perspectives on science in science education. Within this framework, the implications of the so-called “economics of science” is virtually an uncharted territory. In this paper, we trace a set of arguments that provide a dialectic engagement with two conflicting agendas: (a) the broadening of science education to include the contextual positioning of science including economical dimensions of science, and (b) the guarding of the proliferation and reinforcement of those aspects of economics of science such as commodification of scientific knowledge that embraces inequity and restricted access to the products of the scientific enterprise. Our aim is broadly to engage, as science education researchers, in the debates in economics of science so as to investigate the reciprocal interactions that might exist with science education. In so doing, we draw out some recommendations whereby the goals of science education might provide as much input into the intellectual debates within philosophy of science on issues related to the commercialisation and commodification of scientific knowledge. We explore some implications of commodification of science in the context of modelling and argumentation in science education.     

The Importance of Epistemic Cognition in Student-Centred Learning

To infer the sophistication ofepistemic thinking in a sample of undergraduatestudents, 25 participants completed afree-response task in which they were asked togive reasons for their agreement ordisagreement with a small number of beliefsabout the role of tutorials and of tutors ingaining knowledge. Responses were analysedaccording to King and Kitchener's (1994) stagesof reasoning, revealing that the justificationsoffered were either at the stages ofpre-reflective or quasi-reflective thinkingwith none exhibiting reflective thinking. Thefindings have two main pedagogicalimplications: first that good teaching beunderstood not as a set of performance skillswhich may only be opportunistically related tostudents' extant conceptualisations but as thelocus through which students confront their ownepistemic beliefs. A second implication isthat to extend students' reasoning, teachingpractices must focus explicitly on thedifficult issue of what counts as evidence.