Like Father, Like Son: Young Children's Understanding of How and Why Offspring Resemble Their Parents

4 studies investigated the broad claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. In Study 1, 4–7-year-old children were told a story in which a boy was born to one man and adopted by another. The biological father was described as having one set of features (e.g., green eyes) and the adoptive father as having another (e.g., brown eyes). Subjects were asked which man the boy would resemble when he grew up. Preschoolers showed little understanding that selective chains of processes mediate resemblance to parents. It was not until age 7 that children substantially associated the boy with his biological father on physical features and his adoptive father on beliefs. That is, it was not until age 7 that children demonstrated that they understood birth as part of a process selectively mediating the acquisition of physical traits and learning or nurturance as mediating the acquisition of beliefs. In Study 2, subjects were asked whether, as a boy grew up, various of his features could change. Children generally shared our adult intuitions, indicating that their failure in Study 1 was not due to their having a different sense of what features can change. Studies 3 and 4 replicated Study 1, with stories involving mothers instead of fathers and with lessened task demands. Taken together, the results of the 4 studies refute the claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. The findings are discussed in terms of whether children understand biology as an autonomous cognitive domain.     

The Tensions of Urban School Renewal in an Era of Reform

The faculty and administration of a school of education in the mid-Atlantic region formally adopted a standards-based, conceptual framework that reflects the values articulated by the faculty and the outcomes for students as they prepare for and develop in their professions. Faculty and administrators agreed to use the framework as the basis for examining professional programs, academic courses, and professional experiences, as well as for governing interactions with one another as colleagues. This article describes the conceptual framework, its goals, research used to evaluate the framework, and the outcomes attained.     

The Honour of the Science Teacher: Pupils, Knowledge, and Society

This address covers several aspects of a teacher's "sense of honour." There is the professional honour we accord ourselves as members of a group who have shared working values. This is shown to be seriously at risk in today's world of distrust in all experts. Research evidence helps to show how, through practice and reconstructed autobiography, teachers develop an important functional sense of personal identity. Pupils form a large part of the content of this practitioner honour, although the teachers' relationship with them is carefully distinguished from that between parent and child. It is further argued that the teachers' pedagogic knowledge of science is, and indeed should be, closer to post-modern epistemology than to the abstract logical approach taken during the Enlightenment. The final section looks at society's changing demands on education and how this affects teaching, teachers, and their sense of honour in the tasks they undertake.     

Measuring ‘progress’: performativity as both driver and constraint in school innovation

Abstract

In this paper, we describe one secondary school’s radical attempt to rethink the shape and purpose of education for its pupils, and its subsequent return to more traditional methods in the face of pressures of performativity and accountability. Framing our analysis within activity theory and its emphasis on contradiction as a driver for change, we describe the school’s move towards a thematic curriculum and ‘personalised learning’ as a process of productive tensions which enabled the development of new approaches to education. While these innovations were considered to be of major benefit to both teachers and pupils, a fundamental contradiction between the focus on individual development underpinning the new approach and the demands of accountability in a persistent culture of performativity proved to be insurmountable. We argue that this particular contradiction highlights the dominance of measurability in judgements of school success and individual progress, with consequences for the pupils’ longer term education futures.     

Definitions of Integration Can Be Misleading

The discussion in this paper departs from a fundamental premise: that in the foreseeable future local central agencies for Jewish education will not be receiving from their parent Federations the degree of increase in allocations which will enable them to significantly expand — let alone sustain at the current levels — the array of services which they deliver. This situation can be traced to a number of factors. To begin with, in many communities the ability of the Federation to raise funds through its annual campaign has leveled off. As a result, the total amount of money available for distribution to all Federation constituencies, including local bureaus of education, is no longer increasing in step-function fashion. Secondly, other Federation beneficiaries are staking claim with ever greater determination to their perceived share of the community dollar. Over the years most central agencies for Jewish education have become inured to this sort of competition for Federation funds from such sister agencies as the Jewish community center, the local Jewish home, and the like. But in recent years, allocations to local Jewish Day Schools have climbed to record levels, often making these institutions prime “competitors” with bureaus of Jewish education for community funds, more particularly with that portion of the total pie which has been allotted to education. This places bureaus in a difficult dilemma: On the one hand, they must support — indeed, encourage — increased funding for Jewish day school education. At the same time, bureaus are confronted with the uncomfortable fact that each community dollar allocated to day school education is a dollar which, potentially, might have been assigned to the central agency.