Young children’s reading for pleasure with digital books: six key facets of engagement

This paper offers a new characterisation of young children’s (2–8 years) reading for pleasure (RfP) with digital books. This characterisation is rooted in a re-contextualisation of Anna Craft’s conceptualisation of twenty-first century childhoods in Creativity and education futures (Stoke on Trent, Trentham, 2011) and a review of the literature concerning young children’s RfP with digital books. The paper develops Craft’s (2011) work by considering the ways in which digital books can resource the ‘4Ps of digital childhood’ in reading for pleasure. Six facets of reader engagement, nested within Craft’s (2011) 4Ps, are presented: affective, creative, interactive, shared, sustained and personalised reading engagements. It is argued that this characterisation of young children’s reading engagements can enrich our understanding of the affordances of digital books in relation to RfP in the twenty-first century. The paper thus offers an important new contribution, going beyond established work in the field, which typically explores digital books in relation to children’s learning, product design or developmental outcomes.     

How New Caledonian crows solve novel foraging problems and what it means for cumulative culture

New Caledonian crows make and use tools, and tool types vary over geographic landscapes. Social learning may explain the variation in tool design, but it is unknown to what degree social learning accounts for the maintenance of these designs. Indeed, little is known about the mechanisms these crows use to obtain information from others, despite the question’s importance in understanding whether tool behavior is transmitted via social, genetic, or environmental means. For social transmission to account for tool-type variation, copying must utilize a mechanism that is action specific (e.g., pushing left vs. right) as well as context specific (e.g., pushing a particular object vs. any object). To determine whether crows can copy a demonstrator’s actions as well as the contexts in which they occur, we conducted a diffusion experiment using a novel foraging task. We used a nontool task to eliminate any confounds introduced by individual differences in their prior tool experience. Two groups had demonstrators (trained in isolation on different options of a four-option task, including a two-action option) and one group did not. We found that crows socially learn about context: After observers see a demonstrator interact with the task, they are more likely to interact with the same parts of the task. In contrast, observers did not copy the demonstrator’s specific actions. Our results suggest it is unlikely that observing tool-making behavior transmits tool types. We suggest it is possible that tool types are transmitted when crows copy the physical form of the tools they encounter.     

The Effects of Autonomy on Motivation and Performancein the College Classroom

The goals of this study were to extend the literature about classroom autonomy in several ways. First, since previous research on autonomy has tended to focus on younger learners, we examined whether the positive effects of autonomy on motivation and performance would be replicated in a college sample. Second, we tested to see whether the well-established links between intrinsic motivation and autonomy would also be found using motivational constructs that play key roles in learning (specifically, task value, self-efficacy, and test anxiety). Third, we sought to trace the effect of autonomy on changes in student motivation over the course of a semester. Finally, we examined the role of autonomy on course performance. We found that experiences of classroom autonomy in the college classroom were more closely related to motivational factors than to performance. While the immediate experience of autonomy may not be directly facilitative of high course grades, autonomy does seem to foster intrinsic goal orientation, task value, and self-efficacy, all of which are critical components of “continuing motivation.” The data presented here lend further support for the benefits of fostering autonomy within academic settings.