Understanding Scale: Powers of Ten

The classic film “Powers of Ten” is often employed to catalyze the building of more accurate conceptions of scale, yet its effectiveness is largely unknown. This study examines the impact of the film on students’ concepts of size and scale. Twenty-two middle school students and six science teachers participated. Students completed pre- and post-intervention interviews and a Scale Card Sorting (SCS) task; all students observed the film “Powers of Ten.” Experienced teachers’ views on the efficacy of the film were assessed through a short written survey. Results showed that viewing the film had a positive influence on students’ understandings of powers of ten and scale. Students reported that they had more difficulty with sizes outside of the human scale and found small scales more difficult to conceptualize than large scales. Students’ concepts of relative size as well as their ability to accurately match metric sizes in scientific notation to metric scale increased from pre- to post-viewing of the film. Experienced teachers reported that the film was a highly effective tool. Teachers reported that the design of the film that allowed students to move slowly from the human scale to the large and small scales and then quickly back again was effective in laying the foundation for understanding the different scales. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0411656 and 0507151.     

Planning responses to demographic change

The United Kingdom faces a decline in the 18-year-old cohort from 900,000 + in the mid-1980s to 600,000 + in the mid-1990s. Will a third of the universities close? More important, will industry and commerce cope with the potential reduction in skilled manpower production? A method is described for forecasting graduate numbers and their quality by discipline, and suggestions are made about ways in which society could react so as to influence unacceptable trends.     

Teaching for Open‐Mindedness: A Justice‐Oriented Approach

This article explores the pedagogical virtue of open‐mindedness in practice and its relationship to epistemic justice through analysis of a fictional, narrative case. The case focuses on a young white woman who attempts to implement a pedagogy of open‐mindedness as she teaches a unit on the civil rights movement. After presenting the case scenario, Tadashi Dozono and Rebecca Taylor examine three tensions that arise for teachers as they seek to enact a pedagogy of open‐mindedness. First, what form of open‐mindedness should guide them? Second, how should they respond to limits in their own knowledge and understanding? And finally, how should teachers exercise authority within a pedagogy of open‐mindedness? Their analysis confronts the tension between the teacher's own open‐mindedness, on the one hand, and the teacher's subject position, on the other. Through this exploration of open‐mindedness, Dozono and Taylor argue that, in practice, teachers must counteract legacies of epistemic injustice as a necessary part of cultivating their own and their students' access to open‐mindedness.     

A dynamic model of memory for research on human information processing

This article outlines a broad theoretical framework for understanding the human information processing system as a whole. It represents one attempt to integrate the relatively static models of memory structures with the more dynamic conceptions underlying research on control and processing mechanisms. The framework embodies the synthesis of a number of conceptual orientations, including contemporary emphases on working memory, item-specific and relational information, metacognition and schema abstraction. This synthesis rests on the basic assumption that the nature of knowledge structures in human long-term memory depends on the type of information processing whereby these cognitive structures were generated.     

Permanency planning for children and youth: out-of-home placement decisions

This article advocates the extension of "permanency planning" in out-of-home placements to include those children and youth with developmental disabilities. It discusses permanency planning and notes its promise in improving the opportunities of all children and youth to grow up in a stable family environment. There is a need for major initiatives in this area: 78% of children and youth with developmental disabilities who are placed in long-term care have no such protections. Though some states currently operate programs according to the principles of permanency planning, significant changes in existing federal policy are recommended to require permanency planning in federally supported out-of-home care for all children, including those with severe disabilities.     

A “Grand Challenge”: Measuring Information Societies

Even though there has been a proliferation of e-society measures in recent years, analyses of the metrics of the “information society” are still far from responsive to the needs of many stakeholders and continue to suffer from a number of serious limitations. Issues in eight critical areas are briefly presented. They include: definition of the universe to be measured; definition of the objects and phenomena to include in the universe; need to establish measurements based upon solid theories; units of measurements; data sources and collection; methods of analysis and construction of indicators; target audiences; and purpose and utilization of measurements. An organized collective effort, which could provide the impetus for the development of a coherent academic field of study, is called for to address this “grand challenge.”     

The wigner distribution in speech processing applications

Recently the Wigner distribution has been shown to be a potentially useful tool for analysing the time varying frequency domain phenomenon. In this paper, some of the salient features of the Wigner distribution are presented; properties of this important discrete distribution are derived, and an efficient digital implementation is presented. Effective Wigner throughput rates, in excess of those obtainable with an equivalent length FFT, are shown to be feasible. In particular, the Wigner distribution is studied in the context of enhancing speech analysis and recognition systems. It is suggested that this class of distribution is consistent with the mechanics of human speech and, using experimentation, produces a very robust spectral signature. This enriched data space can be used to uncover some frequency domain attributes of human speech which may be lost using a discrete Fourier transform.     

The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: a meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions

This article presents findings from a meta-analysis of 213 school-based, universal social and emotional learning (SEL) programs involving 270,034 kindergarten through high school students. Compared to controls, SEL participants demonstrated significantly improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behavior, and academic performance that reflected an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement. School teaching staff successfully conducted SEL programs. The use of 4 recommended practices for developing skills and the presence of implementation problems moderated program outcomes. The findings add to the growing empirical evidence regarding the positive impact of SEL programs. Policy makers, educators, and the public can contribute to healthy development of children by supporting the incorporation of evidence-based SEL programming into standard educational practice.