You've Been Warned: Does Information About Pitfalls of Technological Toys Affect Caregiver Behavior?

Although the presence of toys in childhood has remained steady for decades, the types of toys that fill children's toy boxes have changed, especially over the last 10–15 years. Many of today's toys are marked by technological enhancements, from a shape sorter driven by a singing bear to robotic plastic animals designed to match a toddler's favorite television show. Although examining the effects of these changes is still an unexplored area, research to date suggests that there may be costs to the quality of caregiver–child interaction when using these toys together. This leads to two possibilities: (1) the design of the enhancements themselves hurt interactions; or (2) these toys can still be beneficial to interactions, but caregivers simply need to be aware of the potential pitfalls. In this study, we explore whether providing caregivers with a subtle cue about the potential negative impacts of technological toys on caregiver–child interaction affects their behavior.     

Human capital theory,the diversity of societies and the problem of quality in education

Taking off from the “human capital theory” vs. “screening theory” debate, the paper seeks to distinguish at least ten different causal strands which potentially enter the explanation of the commonly observed correlation between earnings and educational qualification. Debates on this issue are commonly vitiated by two factors: (i) the failure to distinguish between mechanisms which operate in fluid market situations and those which operate in bureaucratized economies with administered careers, (ii) the assumption that there can be a universally valid answer to the question “Why do earnings and certificates correlate?” Various institutional and historical factors cause considerable differences in the relative importance of the ten linking mechanisms in different countries. Of the greatest importance is one general difference between early and late developers. Schools in developing countries are generally less effective in fostering the sort of mental attitudes and abilities which conduce to economic development chiefly because, for a variety of reasons, schooling is more examination-oriented than in richer countries. These crucial aspects of the quality of education are too often overlooked, presumably for reasons which have to do with the nature of the economics and educational professions.     

Film Biographies

Dore Schary, Heyday (Boston: Little Brown, 1979 -- $14.95)

Rosiland Delmar, Joris Ivens: 50 Years of Film-Making (London: British Film Institute, 1979---£2.45)

Allen Estrin, The Hollywood Professionals, Volume 6: Capra, Cukor, Brown (South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1980 -- $12.00 hardcover)

Stan Brakhage, Film Biographies (Berkeley, California: Netzahualcoyotl Historical Society, 1979 -- $7.95 in paper -- write c/o 2845 Buena Vista Way, Berkeley 94708)

Stuart Kaminsky, Coop: The Life and Legend of Gary Cooper (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980 -- $10.95)     

Gramscian Thought and Brazilian Education

In the history of Brazilian education, it is only since the 1980s, during the redemocratization of Brazil, that proposals for public education in a socialist perspective have been presented. The past two decades have been marked by a growing interest in Gramscian thought, mainly in the educational field, making possible the elaboration of proposals for public school organization in Brazil. However, intellectuals and pedagogues in Brazil have confused the Gramscian 'unitary school' with what is known in Brazil as the 'polytechnical school', a vague idea of education which is attributed to Marx and taken up by Lenin in the course of the Soviet Revolution. The two conceptions of education differ because of the varying historical contexts in which Marx, Lenin and Gramsci lived and developed their thinking on the roles of State and school. These fundamental differences have been overlooked during the diffusion of Gramscian thought in Brazil, causing confusion in the understanding of the 'unitary school' and the 'polytechnical school'.     

Credentials in a More Expressive Future

Abstract

Women working in higher education find themselves in a minority when compared to their male colleagues. In addition, they display different characteristics, as a group, to comparable men. Women, for example, tend to be younger, concentrated within specific subject areas, and clustered in the lower ranks of the academic hierarchy. In this paper, attention focuses upon the analysis and explanation of the variation between the ranks reached by men and women. A number of possible explanations exist as to the basis of this discrepancy. One such explanation concentrates upon the tendency for women to be found in groups unlikely to be considered for promotion to senior rank. In this paper a preliminary exploration and assessment is made of the utility of such arguments when applied to men and women working in higher education in the late 1980s.

The survey of academic staff to which this article refers was carried out bySocial and Community Planning Research (SCPR) during October 1988 in collaboration with its initiator, Professor A. H. Halsey (then director of the Department of Social and Administrative Studies at the University of Oxford). For further information about the technical details of the survey, and for a detailed discussion of its general findings, see Halsey, A. H. (1992)Decline of Donnish Dominion. Parts of the data derived from the survey also formed the core of an M. Phil, thesis on women working in higher education. It is upon this thesis that this article is based.     

‘It's all scientific to me’: focus group insights into why young people do not apply safe-sex knowledge

Despite rising levels of safe-sex knowledge in Australia, sexually transmitted infection notifications continue to increase. A culture-centred approach suggests it is useful in attempting to reach a target population first to understand their perspective on the issues. Twenty focus groups were conducted with 89 young people between the ages of 14 and 16 years. Key findings suggest that scientific information does not articulate closely with everyday practice, that young people get the message that sex is bad and they should not be preparing for it and that it is not appropriate to talk about sex. Understanding how young people think about these issues is particularly important because the focus groups also found that young people disengage from sources of information that do not match their own experiences.