阅读障碍者的视空间能力:补偿还是缺陷?

阅读障碍者的视空间能力近些年来广受研究者的关注和争论,其争论的焦点在于阅读障碍者的视空间能力存在补偿还是缺陷,不管在英语阅读还是汉语阅读领域都发现了不同的研究结论.迥异甚至相互矛盾的研究结果存在多方面的原因,在未来的研究中,需要更明确的界定阅读障碍的操作性定义、选取更具代表性的被试样本、设计更科学的实验材料、采用更先进的技术手段对阅读障碍者的视空间能力做更精细化、综合性的研究,同时未来也需要更加重视汉语阅读障碍的研究.     

The uses and abuses of power: teaching school leadership through children's literature

There are relatively few studies of how representations of teachers, schools and educational administrators in popular films and television might be, and are, used in leadership preparation. This paper seeks to add to this small body of work; it reports on an exploratory study of the representation of headteachers in contemporary children's fiction. Thirty-one texts are analysed to ascertain key themes and the major characterisations. The paper draws on children's literature scholars to argue that both the historical school story and its contemporary counterpart focus heavily on the power of the head to control the micro-world of the school. Because these fictional accounts deal with issues of power and justice more openly than many mainstream educational administration texts, this makes them particularly useful in the preparation of potential school leaders.     

Static Versus Dynamic Disposition: The Role of GeoGebra in Representing Polynomial-Rational Inequalities and Exponential-Logarithmic Functions

This study investigates prospective secondary mathematics teachers’ visual representations of polynomial and rational inequalities, and graphs of exponential and logarithmic functions with GeoGebra Dynamic Software. Five prospective teachers in a university in the United States participated in this research study, which was situated within a framework of productive disposition and visual representations in pre-calculus. The main result was that the role of GeoGebra as a cognitive tool fostered the research participants’ productive disposition, despite recurrent mismatches between the algebraic and visualized formalisms. Moreover, participants exhibiting dynamic productive disposition seemed to understand and make better sense of the conceptual underpinnings of the mathematical content they explored in contrast to those embracing static productive disposition.     

School as ‘survival game’: representations of school in transition from preschool to primary school

In children's lives the start of school is a turning point: compulsory education is their first encounter with civil duties. This important step in the process of becoming individual citizens is permeated with strong emotions and ambivalent expectations. However, the representations of school are created, established and negotiated in educational experiences preceding the start of school. In this article I explore the ways in which school is constructed in a Finnish preschool context. I build on ethnographic data generated in two preschool classes. First, I focus on how school is constructed in the social practices of teaching and in the physical space of preschool. Second, I analyse how children construct themselves as future school children and citizens by taking up available discourses and cultural practices. I argue that in official preschool, an ethos of individual survival characterises representations of school. Psychological, social and physical challenges are emphasised. Although preschool teachers in interviews and informal discussions sometimes problematise the ways in which school operates, in their teaching school practices are represented as natural. However, children actively exhibit their agency by collectively reworking of discourses and cultural practices and by renegotiating their informal relationships.     

Regulating Swish: Early Television Censorship

This article investigates the mechanisms of early television censorship from 1947 to 1952, looking at the restrictions placed on content, and the process that shows and advertisements went through before being broadcast. This article focuses on the inner workings of the National Broadcasting Company's (NBC) censoring arm, the Continuity Acceptance Department, and takes into consideration the medium-specific qualities of television and the challenges presented to those who had the task of regulating broadcast content. In addition to a general discussion of regulations, this article examines the censorship of homosexual characterizations in early television, looking specifically at the use of ‘swish’ routines (which make use of stereotyped gay mannerisms) in comedy shows. While networks and the National Association for Radio and Television Broadcasters established codes to govern their censorship apparatuses, the process of censorship was less an enforcement of hard and fast rules than a constant negotiation over content and allowable material.     

Teaching and Research: Identity Representations Among Teacher-Education Faculty Members,Decades After an Institutional Change

Recent emphasis on research productivity in teacher-education institutions has intensified the inherent tension in faculty members’ roles as both educators and researchers. We adopt the framework of social representations theory to explore identity perceptions among teacher-educators whose organization required them to take on the identity of “researcher.” The study relies on qualitative content analysis of data from eight focus groups (n?=?100) comprising faculty members at an Israeli teachers’ training college that transitioned into an academic research institution. We observe that, in the wake of the organizational change, participants abandoned the traditional hegemonic representation of the centrality of pedagogy and accepted new representations combining teaching and research. Yet few participants identified with the new representation on a personal level, and pedagogy continued to constitute the essence of their work.     

On the misinterpretation of histograms and box plots

Recent studies have shown that the interpretation of graphs is not always easy for students. In order to reason properly about distributions of data, however, one needs to be able to interpret graphical representations of these distributions correctly. In this study, we used Tversky’s principles for the design of graphs to explain how 125 first-year university students interpreted histograms and box plots. We systematically varied the representation that accompanied the tasks between students to identify how the design principles affected students’ reasoning. Many students displayed misinterpretations of histograms and box plots, despite the fact that they had the required knowledge and time to interpret the representations correctly. We argue that the combination of dual process theories and Tversky’s design principles provides a promising theoretical framework, which leads to various possibilities for future research.     

Graphic abilities in relation to mathematical and scientific ability in adolescents

Background:?The study investigated a small range of cognitive abilities, related to visual-spatial intelligence, in adolescents. This specific range of cognitive abilities was termed ‘graphic abilities’ and defined as a range of abilities to visualise and think in three dimensions, originating in the domain of visual-spatial intelligence, and related to visual perception and the ability to represent space. The educational importance of graphic abilities has received minimal attention from the educational community and, consequently, plays a limited role in educational practice.

Purpose:?In order to understand the particular educational importance of this range of cognitive abilities, we investigated how graphic abilities are connected with the performance and the subject preference of adolescents in several academic areas. Our hypotheses were, first, that there is a high degree of correlation between developed graphic abilities and high performance in mathematics and science, and second, that there is a high degree of correlation between developed graphic abilities and personal subject preference in these two areas.

Sample:?The sample consisted of 60 14-year-old students (30 girls and 30 boys) attending a public secondary school in a small town in northern Greece. The entire sample had followed the same mathematics courses, which did not involve any geometry or spatial representation tasks.

Design and methods:?We identified and defined a specific range of three graphic abilities, related to visual-spatial intelligence, and we investigated these abilities in the sample through several visual-spatial tasks designed for the study and measured the sample's performance in these tasks. The degree of adolescents' graphic performance (that is, the performance in these visual-spatial tasks) was correlated with their performance in mathematics and science and with their subject preference (mathematics, science and language).

Results:?Our findings confirmed both hypotheses. A high degree of correlation was found between developed graphic abilities and high performance in mathematics, and a lower but still significant degree of correlation was found between developed graphic abilities and high performance in science. The findings support the second hypothesis as well, suggesting that children with developed graphic abilities reported that their favourite subject was mathematics and second favourite subject was science.

Conclusions:?The research suggested that there is a particular relation between the level of graphic abilities performance and children's performance and in preference for mathematics and science. That is, children with developed visual perception, visual thought and representational skills are actually better with numbers and physical concepts. This particular relation might be relevant to the overall cognitive development of children, especially with respect to the increasingly developing communication technologies, and it would seem to deserve more attention and extended research from the educational community. The authorial position is that education would gain from a better understanding of: the nature of graphic abilities, how we can develop this range of abilities and how the development of visual thought and graphic expression contributes to several curriculum subjects.     

What underlies successful word problem solving? A path analysis in sixth grade students

Two component skills are thought to be necessary for successful word problem solving: (1) the production of visual-schematic representations and (2) the derivation of the correct relations between the solution-relevant elements from the text base. The first component skill is grounded in the visual–spatial domain, and presumed to be influenced by spatial ability, whereas the latter is seated in the linguistic–semantic domain, and presumed to be influenced by reading comprehension. These component skills as well as their underlying basic abilities are examined in 128 sixth grade students through path analysis. The results of the path analysis showed that both component skills and their underlying basic abilities explained 49% of students’ word problem solving performance. Furthermore, spatial ability and reading comprehension both had a direct and an indirect relation (via the component skills) with word problem solving performance. These results contribute to the development of instruction methods that help students using these components while solving word problems.     

Mobile consumers and the retail industry: the resistible advent of a new marketing scene

ABSTRACT

Over the last ten years, marketing professionals have invested in various devices aimed at digitalizing the point of sale. Mobile phones, and the connection they open between the digital and physical worlds, are likely to profoundly renew the way organizations build the representations of consumers upon which they operate. This article aims to describe the new, mobile-based market infrastructure that is currently being implemented; the figures of the consumer it builds on and renews for marketing purposes; and the opportunities it offers to create a new marketing scene. We address this question by focusing on the world of physical retail. We show that online commerce websites and http cookies have enabled a connection between three traditionally separate figures of the consumer and associated marketing scenes: the consumer as an audience, as a shopping cart, or as a (loyalty) card. The smartphone carries the promise of pursuing this movement into store aisles. We show, however, that the domestication of physical geography to cultivate mobile consumers is particularly difficult, and so far based on a series of disparate attempts and experiments.