How Day School Teachers Perceive Their Working Conditions: A National Study

Induction and mentoring are widely considered in the United States and in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries as a basic universal and critical intervention for a successful launch of new teachers. Based on an expanded set of survey data, this article focuses on how Jewish day schools offer professional support and learning opportunities from the head of school, the administration, colleagues, parents, and the school community and how useful teachers perceive these resources to be. This study reveals that less than half of all teachers in the schools surveyed report participating in formal induction programs and believe their schools take the learning needs of new teachers seriously. Schools would do well to attend to this aspect of teacher support and consider the systems and structures that do (or do not) exist to help orient, support, and develop new teachers.     

Generality of US preexposure effects: Transfer from food to shock or shock to food with and without the same response requirements

A series of four experiments, employing mice, investigated the generality of the learned helplessness phenomenon. The first two experiments used preexposure to aversive stimuli (shock), while the other two used preexposure to appetitive stimuli (food). In all of the studies, subjects were preexposed to contingent, noncontingent, or no stimuli (except for Experiment 2) in a Skinner box. During the test, animals preexposed to shock were tested with food, and those preexposed to food were tested with shock. The test was conducted in a similar situation, a Skinner box (Experiments 1, 3), or a different situation—a runway (Experiments 2, 4). Performance decrements were evident when subjects that were preexposed to a noncontingent stimulus were compared with subjects preexposed to contingent stimuli. The differences between the contingent and the noncontingent groups were significant, as were the differences between the contingent and the nonpreexposed groups (except for Experiment 1). The effects cut across the different types of stimuli, situations, and response requirements of the preexposure and test phases.     

Increasing the effectiveness of learning how to teach in preservice education

Interchange - In the context of re-examining teaching practice as an integral part of teacher education, two hypotheses were tested by a year-long experiment in preservice education of elementary...