Enjoyment,Boredom, Anxiety in Elementary Schools in Two Domains: Relations With Achievement

This study investigated the enjoyment, boredom, and anxiety of elementary school students and the relations of these emotions with achievement in two domains. Seven-hundred-and-sixty-seven second- and fourth-graders completed an adaptation of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Elementary School (AEQ-ES: Lichtenfeld, Pekrun, Stupnisky, Reiss, & Murayama, 2012) assessing their emotions in their native language and mathematics. The hierarchical model of the instrument was invariant across countries (Italy, Germany, United States), grades, gender, and domains. Anxiety related negatively to achievement, while enjoyment related positively to achievement only in mathematics. Second-graders reported more enjoyment and less boredom and anxiety than fourth-graders. Overall, mathematics resulted in better emotions than native language. The results have implications for future research on achievement emotions in elementary school.     

Cognitive preferences and creativity: An exploratory study

Cognitive preference, a cognitive style acquired through life and learning experiences and representing a distinct orientation to the processing of information, is related to creativity in this study. Significant correlations were observed between cognitive preference and verbal creativity but not with figural creativity as measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.     

Capacité cognitive,sentiment d’auto-efficacité et autorégulation

Feelings of self-efficacy have been the object of several studies that have confirmed its ability to predict performance in different contexts. Yet few studies have been conducted using cognitive or academic tasks in which it is more difficult to clearly distinguish self-efficacy from competence. The present study aims to study the moderating role of cognitive capacity in determining the relationship between self-efficacy and on-line self-regulation observed while solving a verbal concept formation task. In order to distinguish self-efficacy from competence, 44 subjects were selected based on the results of their SSPI; these results of which are related to comprehension ability. Analyses of results allow us to observe that, when compared to subjects who consider themselves less efficacious, subjects who have strong feelings of self-efficacy have a higher success rate, are more certain of these successes and reject fewer correct hypotheses, no matter what their cognitive ability. These results once again bring to light the relative independance of cognitive ability and motivational determinants of a person’s actual accomplishments.     

转达未知世界的信息:科幻作品的交际模式

科幻作品叙事最初使用两种传统的叙事形式:旅行叙事和历史叙事。按其物质规则,科幻作品也意识到科学发现在向这些传统发起挑战,并最终证明传统的叙事手法是不足的。科幻叙事向读者转达过去或将来未知世界的信息时,情况更是如此。某些科幻叙事,即使在与血肉之躯的读者相关的叙事受众极度错位的情况下,继续违背事实地依赖传统形式,对问题视而不见。而另一些科幻叙事,比如本文中所讨论的这些,两者均意识到了由于时空错位所产生的问题,显然在寻求开辟新的叙事模式来应对这些问题。科幻作品中的“新颖性”,通常是指主题与内容。主题与形式是不可分割的,但是我们也希望结合由科学产生的新的时空情境,说明科幻作品如何证明原有层次的高度创造性。     

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.     

Cohesion,citizenship and coherence: schools’ responses to the British values policy

This paper explores how teachers respond to the requirement to promote ‘fundamental British values’ (FBV) to their pupils. It offers a preliminary analysis of data drawn from interviews with teachers and (mostly lesson) observations in schools. It argue that, first, the policy cannot be understood without a consideration of the multi-layered context in which it is being enacted in schools. Second, it locates the policy to promote FBV as a liberal nationalist one and considers some of the problematic issues that arise from this philosophy. Third, it turns to schools and teachers to consider their reactions and responses. It is concluded that teachers and schools in this research often did attempt to neutralize potentially exclusionary readings of the policy and were effective in absorbing the requirement to promote British values. However, doubt is cast on the policy’s ability to meet its aims and the paper also raise concerns about the limited amount of time given to pupils’ engagement with the values.     

Flipping the Coin: Towards a Double-Faced Approach to Teaching Black Literature in Secondary English Classrooms

Critiquing two approaches that English teachers use to teach Black, or African-American, literature in the secondary classroom – one that centralises races and the other that ignores it – this article proposes a hybrid approach that combines both. This double-faced approach recognises the culturally specific themes that give the text and the Black author their unique voice while also recognising commonalities that bridge the text to others – despite the race of the authors. To demonstrate the feasibility of the double-faced approach, the article concludes with an examination of three texts through the lens of this ‘race both matters and doesn’t matter’ perspective.