Children’s levels of contingent self-esteem and social and emotional outcomes

Contingent self-esteem (CSE) describes the degree to which self-esteem is dependent on meeting day-to-day appraisals from oneself and others. This will vary between individuals, ranging from lower to higher CSE. A lower CSE is related to a range of adaptive social and emotional outcomes in adolescents and young adults. This study explores children’s CSE and how this associates with behavioural outcomes. A total of 280 children between the ages of 9 and 11 years completed a composite questionnaire on aspects of their self-esteem and behaviour. Children’s class teachers completed behavioural outcome questionnaires for a random sample of 100 of these children. Based on teachers’ and children’s scores, high levels of global self-esteem were associated with lower CSE and fewer behavioural difficulties. CSE domains of social feedback and physical appearance retained significant associations with behavioural outcomes after controlling for global self-esteem. This may relate to the degree that children depend on the perceived evaluations of others. Implications for educational psychologists are highlighted.     

Policy and evidence: a critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check in England

“This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC), with special focus on the relationship between the UK Department for Education's policy‐making and the evidence considered in the process of developing and evaluating the PSC. The reports from the in‐house Standards and Testing Agency and from commissioned external organisations with limited remits have been analysed, with emphasis on how the screening check findings have been used in DfE decision‐making. My conclusion is that the department has overestimated both the validity and the reliability of the check: partly because important sources of measurement error have not been explored, and partly because the available evidence has not been analysed in sufficient depth — or perhaps simply been ignored by the department. The whole phonics screening check seems to be the product of policy‐based evidence, rather than evidence‐based policy‐making. This has, in my view, seriously undermined the value of the PSC as a screening instrument, and one must wonder whether it is ‘fit for purpose’.     

The Causal Effects of Grade Retention on Behavioral Outcomes

This study examines the impact of grade retention on behavioral outcomes under a comprehensive assessment-based student promotion policy in New York City. To isolate the causal effect of grade retention, we implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design that exploits the fact that grade retention is largely determined by whether a student scores below a cutoff on a standardized test score. We use data on students subject to the policy over a nine-year span to examine impacts on attendance and disciplinary event outcomes. We do not find evidence of systematic effects of retention on behavioral outcomes in either direction. We do find sporadic nonsustained significant effects of retention on behavioral outcomes. When present, these isolated nonpersistent effects tend to be beneficial when found for retained elementary school students and mixed for retained middle school students.     

Building social capital from sport event participation: An exploration of the social impacts of participatory sport events on the community

Participatory sport events have the potential to generate substantial social value in the local community. One important social benefit of such sport events is the development of social capital. However, little is known about the development and outcomes of social capital in the context of participatory sport events, such as running events. Taking a qualitative approach, the authors explored the social capital building among active participants in running events. The findings revealed that bonding capital is developed by all participants in the study while the bridging and linking capital varies by event type and involvement level. Moreover, four positive outcomes of social capital were identified: supportive attitude and behaviors, positive influence on others, prosocial behaviors, and increased everyday socializations. By generating these positive outcomes among the participants of this study, social capital has the potential to contribute to the community development and well-being. This study provides insights as to how social capital that stems from sport event participation can lead to the development of community in the long term. Suggestions are made for future research to test the relationships between social capital, its outcomes, and community development and well-being.     

基于XML技术的拓扑发现系统设计

结合当前网络管理软件开发的新技术,提出了基于XML与JAVA反射机制的拓扑发现系统体系结构,构建了一种易于重用,易于升级,易于维护的拓扑发现系统。     

教育技术学专业人才视觉素养的培养策略

针对教育技术学专业学生的现状,提出在课程设置、教学设计等方面应采取一些特殊性的策略和方法,并通过分析和案例解剖进行了阐述。另外,建议各高校教育技术学专业开设专门的《视觉素养》课程,作为其它专业课程的辅助性基础课程,并提出相应的课程内容及教材选择等可行性建议。     

Differential Effects of Three Teachers Over a Unit of Instruction

The purpose of this study was to describe the effects of three teachers on psychomotor, affective, and cognitive outcomes over a 15-lesson volleyball unit. Three intact middle school physical education classes were used. Pre- and posttests were administered for the overhead set, forearm pass, and serve psychomotor skills. A semantic differential test with four affective dimensions and a written test on the rules, strategies, and mechanics of volleyball were also administered pre- and posttest. Data on instructional characteristics were obtained using academic learning time (ALT-PE); observation system for content development (OSCD-PE), and a content analysis of lessons.

The following were key aspects of the results: (a) Teachers differed in their approaches to the content of the unit more than in the characteristics of their instruction as determined through observational data; (b) teachers differed in respect to the psychomotor skills for which they were able to produce statistically significant student gain; (c) the skill level of students played a major role in psychomotor outcomes; (d) affective measures started high and remained high from pre- to posttest with significant change occurring positively with the low-skilled in one measure; (d) cognitive learning was significant from pre- to posttest in rules and mechanics but not in strategies. Instructional characteristics, as described in this study, did not change from skill to skill, but student learning did. This led the authors to conclude that the instrumentation for instructional variables was not sensitive to differences in the way individual skills were handled by individual teachers.     

Development of a taxonomy of keywords for engineering education research

The diversity of engineering education research provides an opportunity for cross-fertilisation of ideas and creativity, but it also can result in fragmentation of the field and duplication of effort. One solution is to establish a standardised taxonomy of engineering education terms to map the field and communicate and connect research initiatives. This report describes the process for developing such a taxonomy, the EER Taxonomy. Although the taxonomy focuses on engineering education research in the United States, inclusive efforts have engaged 266 individuals from 149 cities in 30 countries during one multiday workshop, 7 conference sessions, and several other virtual and in-person activities. The resulting taxonomy comprises 455 terms arranged in 14 branches and 6 levels. This taxonomy was found to satisfy four criteria for validity and reliability: (1) keywords assigned to a set of abstracts were reproducible by multiple researchers, (2) the taxonomy comprised terms that could be selected as keywords to fully describe 243 articles in 3 journals, (3) the keywords for those 243 articles were evenly distributed across the branches of the taxonomy, and (4) the authors of 31 conference papers agreed with 90% of researcher-assigned keywords. This report also describes guidelines developed to help authors consistently assign keywords for their articles by encouraging them to choose terms from three categories: (1) context/focus/topic, (2) purpose/target/motivation, and (3) research approach.     

The happy-fish-little-pond effect on enjoyment: Generalizability across multiple domains and countries

Academic enjoyment is an important educational construct given that it benefits students' engagement, persistence, wellbeing, and mental health. In this study, we examine two factors that determine this crucial emotion, namely student- and class-level achievement. Past research has been restricted to single-country or single-domain examinations of secondary school students, limiting generalizability of findings. To bridge this gap, we utilize the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (TIMSS-PIRLS) combined 2011 data (N = 180,084 4th-grade students, 37 countries). Our results provide robust evidence that student-level achievement positively predicts enjoyment in math, science, and reading, while the effects of class-level achievement are negative—the Happy-Fish-Little-Pond Effect. These results showed relative universality across the domains and countries examined.     

First Things First: Developing Academic Competence in the First Year of College*

Perhaps two-thirds of the gains students make in knowledge and cognitive skill development occur in the first 2 years of college (Pascarella, E. T., and Terenzini, P. T. (2005). How college affects students Vol. 2. A third decade of research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass). A significant proportion of the students entering America’s colleges and universities, however, never make it to their second year at the institution where they began. This study, part of a national effort to transform how colleges and universities think about, package, and present their first year of college, is based on data from nearly 6,700 students and 5,000 faculty members on 30 campuses nationwide. The study identifies the individual, organizational, environmental, programmatic, and policy factors that individually and collectively shape students’ development of academic competence in their first year of college. *Paper presented at the meeting of the Association for Institutional Research, June 6, 2005 San Diego, CA. This study was supported by grants from the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Lumina Foundation for Education to the Policy Center for the First Year of College, Brevard, NC. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of those foundations or the Policy Center, and no official endorsement should be inferred.