(2014). Maze of Mistrust: How District Politics and Cross Talk Are Stalling Efforts to Improve Public Education. Kettering Foundation In 1993, the Kettering Foundation and Public Agenda released a report titled "Divided Within, Besieged Without: The Politics of Education in Four American School Districts." The study's attention to communities was distinct from the conventional focus on the technical issues of school administration and funding, and it reported on what people in communities said they were concerned with: the qualities of human relationships. And the relationships people described were troubled. Parents, teachers, and administrators spoke of mutual suspicion and distrust, which stifled the ability to make even simple improvements to administrative practices in schools. The past 20 years have seen some powerful trends that one might expect to have improved things. Public engagement strategies should have helped bridge the distance between citizens and school districts-and among stakeholders. The digital revolution should have made communication between districts and parents, teachers, and… [PDF]
(1991). The Rights of the Child: Progress toward Human Dignity. American Psychologist, v46 n1 p49 Jan. Introduces a series of articles concerning children's rights, as newly defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in effect since September 2, 1990. The authors here focus on the rights of children from psychological and legal perspectives in an international context. (DM)…
(2008). A Lateralization of Function Approach to Sex Differences in Spatial Ability: A Reexamination. Brain and Cognition, v67 n2 p168-182 Jul. The current study assessed the lateralization of function hypothesis (Rilea, S. L., Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., & Boles, D. (2004). \Sex differences in spatial ability: A lateralization of function approach.\ \Brain and Cognition,\ 56, 332-343) which suggested that it was the interaction of brain organization and the type of spatial task that led to sex differences in spatial ability. A second purpose was to evaluate explanations for their unexpected findings on the mental rotation task. In Experiment 1, participants completed the Water Level, Paper Folding, and mental rotation tasks (using an object-based or self-based perspective), presented bilaterally. Sex differences were only observed on the Water Level Task; a right hemisphere advantage was observed on Water Level and mental rotation tasks. In Experiment 2, a human stick figure or a polygon was mentally rotated. Men outperformed women when rotating polygons, but not when rotating stick figures. Men demonstrated a right hemisphere… [Direct]
(2008). Hopes Riding on Leader for Troubled St. Louis District. Education Week, v28 n10 p1, 10 Oct. Kelvin Adams, who takes over next week as the St. Louis schools' seventh superintendent since 2003, will arrive already familiar with the dynamics of a district under state supervision. Still, the leadership and management challenges he faces are daunting. The St. Louis schools have been run since June 2007 by an appointed, three-person Special Administrative Board (SAB) set up by the state of Missouri after it stripped the district of its accreditation for poor academic performance. SAB president Rick Sullivan said in an interview that Adams is the right leader for steering the schools back into good academic standing and for working with an appointed board that plays a large role in the day-to-day administration of the district. To that end, Sullivan said, the new superintendent will be charged with dealing aggressively with human capital issues. He will have to hire a chief academic officer, a chief accountability officer, and a chief operating officer right away. Sullivan also… [Direct]
(2011). Vascular Thalamic Amnesia: A Reappraisal. Neuropsychologia, v49 n5 p777-789 Apr. In humans lacunar infarcts in the mesial and anterior regions of the thalami are frequently associated with amnesic syndromes. In this review paper, we scrutinized 41 papers published between 1983 and 2009 that provided data on a total of 83 patients with the critical ischemic lesions (i.e. 17 patients with right-sided lesions, 25 with left-sided lesions and 41 with bilateral lesions). We aimed to find answers to the following questions concerning the vascular thalamic amnesia syndrome: (i) Which qualitative pattern of memory impairment (and associated cognitive and behavioral deficits) do these patients present? (ii) Which lesioned intrathalamic structures are primarily responsible for the amnesic syndrome? (iii) Are the recollection and familiarity components of declarative memory underlain by the same or by different thalamic structures? Results of the review indicate that, similar to patients with amnesic syndromes due to mesio-temporal lobe damage, patients with vascular… [Direct]
(2010). New Developments in the Education and Professional Activity of Young People. Russian Education and Society, v52 n7 p3-15 Jul. The younger generation of Russians is entering adult life at a time in which the information society is being formed, where education, knowledge, and the possession of information are coming to be key resources to ensure success. As previous studies have shown, most young people place a high value on getting a good education. Young Russians also say that they are fully satisfied about their chances of acquiring a good education. At the same time, they differ considerably when it comes to "realistically" getting involved in raising the level of their intellectual development, accumulating and bringing up to date needed knowledge and skills. In the past fifteen to twenty years a "new model" of young people's educational behavior and work activity has taken shape at the time they are starting out in independent life. Under current conditions, there is an ongoing "expansion of investment in human capital and education." This article illustrates the trend in… [Direct]
(2009). A Right to Be Different. Adults Learning, v20 n5 p22-23 Jan. Ireland and the European Union have to accommodate difference not just in theory but in lived reality. For many people that means making themselves think and act differently, for they no longer have the complacency that comes from living in a homogeneous environment but the challenge of living in a heterogeneous environment where their rights are equal to the rights of all others. There is a process of both learning and unlearning to be undergone for everybody. Cardinal Newman once remarked that "to be human is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often". It is a good description of lifelong learning and could be the motto of all lifelong learners. If people saw education as something that ended with official school days then many would be in deep trouble by now in this fast-paced and rapidly changing world where the shelf-life of information and knowledge is short, where the skills needed for the workplace, the home, and even for leisure have dramatically changed… [Direct]
(2009). Memory Effects of Speech and Gesture Binding: Cortical and Hippocampal Activation in Relation to Subsequent Memory Performance. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, v21 n4 p821-836 Apr. In human face-to-face communication, the content of speech is often illustrated by coverbal gestures. Behavioral evidence suggests that gestures provide advantages in the comprehension and memory of speech. Yet, how the human brain integrates abstract auditory and visual information into a common representation is not known. Our study investigates the neural basis of memory for bimodal speech and gesture representations. In this fMRI study, 12 participants were presented with video clips showing an actor performing meaningful metaphoric gestures (MG), unrelated, free gestures (FG), and no arm and hand movements (NG) accompanying sentences with an abstract content. After the fMRI session, the participants performed a recognition task. Behaviorally, the participants showed the highest hit rate for sentences accompanied by meaningful metaphoric gestures. Despite comparable old/new discrimination performances (d') for the three conditions, we obtained distinct memory-related… [Direct]
(2011). Teacher and School Leader Effectiveness: Lessons Learned from High-Performing Systems. Issue Brief. Alliance for Excellent Education In an effort to find best practices in enhancing teacher effectiveness, the Alliance for Excellent Education (Alliance) and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) looked abroad at education systems that appear to have well-developed and effective systems for recruiting, preparing, developing, and retaining teachers and school leaders. The goal was not to find policies that could be imported wholesale to the United States; rather, the idea was to learn from international examples and see if lessons could be applied in the U.S. context. For its examination of teacher effectiveness policies, the Alliance and SCOPE looked to Finland, Ontario, and Singapore. These jurisdictions have attracted a great deal of attention in United States education policy circles recently, and with good reason. Most significantly, they get good results: they are among the highest-performing jurisdictions in international tests of student achievement, and their results are among the… [PDF]
(2007). The Tensions between Academic Freedom and Institutional Review Boards. Qualitative Inquiry, v13 n3 p388-398 Apr. Academic freedom and the protection of human research subjects are central tenets of American universities. Academic freedom protects the rights of tenured professors to conduct autonomous research; human subject protection ensures that research causes as minimal a risk as possible to study participants. Although the two principles are mutually exclusive, recent trends in Institutional Review Board jurisdiction have placed the two principles in increasing conflict with one another. This article outlines three ways in which Institutional Review Boards potentially infringe on academic freedom: (a) by regulating who is required to consent to research, (b) by stipulating the type of questions allowed and location of research interactions, and (c) by limiting research design…. [Direct]
(2010). Education in the Context of the Priorities of the Long-Range Social and Economic Development of the Russian Federation. Russian Education and Society, v52 n11 p27-40 Nov. The strategic goal of the long-range social and economic development of the Russian Federation is that of rising to an economic and social level in keeping with Russia's status as a leading world power in the 21st century, a country that occupies an advanced position in the global economic competition and reliably provides for the nation's security and the exercise of the constitutional rights of its citizens. One of the key conditions that are necessary for the long-range and mid-range social and economic development of the country has to be the modernization of education. In addition to developing human capital, education is also called on to play a crucial role in the social consolidation of Russian society. In this paper, the authors examine the current state of the Russian system of education. Their analysis leads to the conclusion that there is no continuity between preschool education and general education, and any effective connections between them are either absent or not… [Direct]
(2023). Data Science: A Gateway to Belonging in STEM and Other Quantitative Fields. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University. The divide between those who do and those who do not excel in mathematics is patterned in problematic ways. Women and people of color are typically underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) and other quantitative fields (ex. Finance) where mathematics plays gatekeeper. However, mathematics is not a subject these groups of people are somehow less capable of learning (Chesnut et al., 2018). Instead, this imbalance points to issues within the education system where only a narrow group of students' needs are being met, constituting a history of institutionalized sexism, racism and classism. The current U.S. math education system seems to value a narrow and antiquated set of skills which necessarily result in only a small group of students succeeding at the highest levels. Students spend their time learning to reproduce a list of methods and procedures that have been in place since the 1800's even though this type of work can be done more quickly and accurately… [Direct]
(2009). A Usage-Based Approach to Recursion in Sentence Processing. Language Learning, v59 ns1 p126-161 Dec. Most current approaches to linguistic structure suggest that language is recursive, that recursion is a fundamental property of grammar, and that independent performance constraints limit recursive abilities that would otherwise be infinite. This article presents a usage-based perspective on recursive sentence processing, in which recursion is construed as an acquired skill and in which limitations on the processing of recursive constructions stem from interactions between linguistic experience and intrinsic constraints on learning and processing. A connectionist model embodying this alternative theory is outlined, along with simulation results showing that the model is capable of constituent-like generalizations and that it can fit human data regarding the differential processing difficulty associated with center-embeddings in German and cross-dependencies in Dutch. Novel predictions are furthermore derived from the model and corroborated by the results of four behavioral… [Direct]
(2008). A National Perspective: Utilizing the Postmodern Theoretical Paradigm to Close the Achievement Gap and Increase Student Success in Public Education America. Online Submission, National Forum of Educational Administration and Supervision Journal v26 n4. The belief that there is one right way or method of inquiry to pursue truth as it is constructed has been rejected by postmodernism. Postmodernism challenges and opens up the central idea that only one set of limits are possible in supporting professional practice. Postmodernism designs a way to look at concepts through the context of meaning. The postmodern paradigm considers human endeavors to be connected with the natural world rather separate from nature. The postmodern theoretical paradigm is about investigating and accepting new practices in solving old problems. In order for change to occur there must be a shift in our thinking. Accepting and applying new views will lead the way for educators to close the academic gap and promote student success…. [PDF]
(2008). Top University–Downhill for Humanities? Policing the Future of Higher Education in the Finnish Mainstream Media. European Educational Research Journal, v7 n3 p289-307. The ongoing structural changes of the university are under heated debate worldwide, including the Nordic countries. In scholarly discussion, however, there has been surprisingly little analysis and critical assessments of the ways the mainstream media especially represent the state and future of university for the general public. By focusing on the ways Finland's largest daily newspaper covered a specific plan to reform the Finnish university system during Spring 2007, this article explores who were given the right to define the university's contemporary state of affairs, name its problems and suggest solutions to them in the national print media's public arena. More specifically, the article is concerned with the kind of actor positions afforded to human sciences and humanist scholars in the media coverage. (Contains 36 notes.)… [Direct]