Consecutive Successes: A Recursive Approach

This article illustrates the importance of one's initial thoughts in problem solving through an entertaining example.     

Eye movement patterns of captioned television viewers

Eye movement of six subjects was recorded as they watched video segments with and without captions. It was found that the addition of captions to a video resulted in major changes in eye movement patterns, with the viewing process becoming primarily a reading process. Further, although people viewing a specific video segment are likely to have similar eye movement patterns, there are also distinct individual differences present in these patterns. For example, someone accustomed to speechreading may spend more time looking at an actor's lips, while someone with poor English skills may spend more time reading the captions. Finally, there is some preliminary evidence to suggest that higher captioning speed results in more time spent reading captions on a video segment.     

Time spent viewing captions on television programs

The eye movements of 23 deaf subjects, ages 14 to 61 years, were recorded 30 times per second while the subjects watched four 2.5-minute captioned television programs. The eye movement data were analyzed to determine the percentage of time each subject actually looked at the captions on the screen. It was found that subjects gazed at the captions 84% of the time, at the video picture 14% of the time, and off the video 2% of the time. Age, sex, and educational level appeared to have little influence on time spent viewing captions. When caption speed increased from the slowest speed (100 words per minute, or wpm) to the fastest speed (180 wpm), mean percentage of time spent gazing at captions increased only from 82% to 86%. A distinctive characteristic of the data was the considerable variation from subject to subject and also within subjects (from video to video) in regard to percentage of time spent gazing at captions.     

Foreign Cinema

Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979 – $19.50/ $9.75)

Peter Cowie, Dutch Cinema: An Illustrated History (South Brunswick, New Jersey: A. S. Barnes, 1979–$12.00)

Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (244 pp.)

Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930s (256 pp.)

Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1978–$19.95/$7.95)     

CHRISTIAN PARTICULARITY DOES NOT DEPEND ON EXCLUSIVE TRUTH CLAIMS: TEACHING ENTHUSIASTIC WITNESS IN A PLURALISTIC WORLD

To educate for deep and responsible religious particularism, while at the same time laying a foundation for commitment to religious pluralism, means dealing with the nature of truth claims. Jesus Christ is an incomparable gift to the world, and the Truth revealed by him is of infinite value. It is a universal truth, and to educate for religious particularism means to proclaim that proudly, clearly, and convincingly. This fact should not, however, be reduced to an exclusive truth claim. To educate for pluralism is to be convinced that one has something of value that needs to be shared, but not to impose one system of truth on others because, without it, they are lost or damned.     

The Changing Nature of Private Engagement in Public Education: For-Profit and Nonprofit Organizations and Educational Reform

Recent years have seen a shifting landscape around private engagement in K-12 public education, one that involves a reorientation of education policy and practice around the principles of the marketplace. In this article, we examine the roles of both not-for-profit and for-profit agencies, as distinct from government agencies, in this movement. Past research has generally focused on subsets of these private actors (i.e., for-profit firms, charter management organizations, or alternative preparers of educators for public schools). We try to look more broadly in order to examine how private actors and the roles of those players in K-12 education are changing, both in terms of the scope of their engagement and the extent to which their role increasingly involves areas at the core of educational practice. In doing so, we consider some of the reasons for these changes, including the influence of federal policy, markets as drivers, and the broader political context. We conclude by raising questions for future research and examining how these developments intersect with values such as democratic voice, equitable distribution of resources, and the public purposes of schooling.     

Platonic & Freirean Interpretations of W. E. B. Du Bois's, “Of The Coming of John”

In the current Neoliberal climate of educational reform, the enlightenment project in education is more susceptible than ever to the machinations of historical amnesia. The notion that education can be transformative in a positive sense represents a moral ideal that teachers in the foundations of education find increasingly difficult to integrate into their pedagogies. As an antidote to this cultural forgetting, the article makes the case that W. E. B. Du Bois's lone fictionalized chapter in The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Coming of John,” can be used in classrooms to reinvigorate students’ thinking not only about the enlightenment project in education in a general sense, but more specifically, about the paradoxical and tragic dimensions that accompany this project and tradition. I argue that Du Bois's bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, can be most fruitfully interpreted when read alongside Plato's “turning around of the soul” (periagoge) and Paulo Freire's concept conscientization. When these 3 enlightenment-oriented narratives are studied in concert, they have an enormous potential to help cultivate the moral, political, and aesthetic sensibilities of our students as they construct their vocational identity as teachers in relation to the enlightenment project in education.     

Media and attitudes: A bibliography part 1 — Articles published in AV communication review (1953–1977)

The authors discuss briefly the purposes, trends, problems, and implications of media-attitude research published in AV Communication Review during its 25 years. The remainder of the article consists of abstracts of 68 such experimental studies and reference citations directing the reader to studies originally published elsewhere and abstracted in AVCR. This study was supported in part by a grant from the Research Institute for Studies in Education (RISE), College of Education, Iowa State University.     

Frog dissection via the world-wide web: Implications for widespread delivery of instruction

While valuable instructional products are available for development and distribution via a variety of media, the Internet provides one of the most effective delivery mediums to date. In this paper, we describe the design and development of a set of Internet-based instructional materials on frog dissection and anatomy, and report on the effectiveness of Internet delivery for encouraging high levels of use and user satisfaction.A previous version of this paper was presented at the 1995 annual meeting of the Internet Society, Honolulu, HI.     

The Bigger Picture: Institutional Perspectives on Interim Assessment Technologies

Drawing on a study of new forms of educational privatization, this article examines how ideas from institutional theory can be useful in analyzing the complex dynamics behind interim assessment technologies. The study was based on qualitative research methods and included interviews, a small-scale questionnaire, participant observation, and analysis of public and financial documents. As defined here, interim assessment technology is the software that is sold to schools and districts in order to gauge students’ progress toward high-stakes tests and to comply with the testing and reporting requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The design and implementation of these assessment technologies reflects the complex pressures on schools and districts—to be more efficient, to be more compliant, and to be more equitable. I argue that in understanding the consequences of these technologies, we need to pay close attention to interactions between private firms and public agencies. Examining these interactions is important—for drawing attention not only to what is changing in public education but also to what is not. Private vendors can design sophisticated technologies for generating, storing, and reporting test score data. These technologies can be adopted system-wide. However, from the perspective of school staff, privately designed services and products still can seem very disconnected from the actual challenges of improving instruction.