Journal article

In The Confusing World of High School Reading (Part 1): What the Teacher Doesn't See I reported the results of a recent study which showed that teaching a class of high school pupils can be deceptive. Sometimes the surface structure of the classroom indicates effective teaching, while in the minds of the pupils there is a maze of confusion that the teacher does not see. I also argued that to see these confusions, teachers need to become researchers in their own classrooms.

PAT: Study Skills measures some of the most important skills we teach; skills that give children the capacity to learn on their own. However, as study skills are imbedded in every subject in the curriculum they can be difficult to plan for and even more difficult to keep track of. This article describes a number of specific ways in which the results from PAT: Study Skills may be used in schools.

It is a commonplace that a child's success at school is influenced by home experiences. The attitude of parents towards school and schooling affects a child's progress. There is a developing interest in the part parents can and do play in the learning of their own children. Even amongst those who regard teaching as the preserve of the trained professional, few would question the value of sympathetic, well informed parent teacher relationships.
What then do the teachers colleges do to help students consider their relationships with parents and work cooperatively with them?

Of those students entering with University Entrance as their highest school-leaving qualification, 47% are in the 17- 18 age bracket. This is a similar percentage to those holding an 'A' Bursary and considerably higher than those with a 'B' Bursary or HSC. Full-time students entering with UE achieve as well as those entering with a 'B' Bursary and significantly better than those with HSC. The analysis produced no evidence to support the position that the majority of students proceeding from school to university should do so from the Seventh Form.

I wanted to know what beginning readers thought about the full stop , and so, with Gay Way Red Book 5 open at the ready, and at the risk of sounding like a less than popular quiz show, I asked 15 five year-olds to 'tell me about these little dots. Why do you think we have them?' I was rewarded with a fascinating glimpse into the world of print as seen through the unjaded eyes of infant pupils-turned-teachers.

Discipline is only one aspect of classroom management. It tends to loom large in the eyes of young teachers because the potential for trouble is large, many problems can arise and some are difficult to deal with. However,
there are many ways to prevent discipline problems from even beginning and there are useful procedures for dealing with them if they do occur.

Children know a great deal of mathematics before they come to school. They have a variety of ways of interpreting and solving problems about quantities, but of course there are wide differences in how effective they are. Counting appears to play a central role in the child's mathematics learning during the early years, it generally develops before school but greatly improves during the first two years at school. Children make up mathematics-they construct mathematical knowledge.

During the 1960s there was a dramatic increase in the amount of both experimental and theoretical work devoted to the topic of short-term memory. The field had become enormously complicated, so in an attempt to clarify this increasingly complex picture, Graham Hitch and I decided to ask the simple question 'What is short term memory for?' A wide range of cognitive tasks require the manipulation of information, and this in itself demands temporary storage, so short-term memory was assumed to provide the storage.

Most children are right-handed and as a result most teachers have developed teaching methods that are aimed specifically at right-handers rather than lefthanders. Most teachers feel uncomfortable teaching left-handers to write because they are not left-handers themselves and are not aware of the needs of left-handers. This report is a summary of current educational research into the needs of lefthanded writers and is presented as a list of
teaching notes.

A flowchart can describe what happens when we set out to copy a sentence; the factors and skills which operate during this task. The model is not about 'meaning' or 'word choice' or 'self-expression'. These things are part of the larger and more complex, less mechanical task of 'expressing one's self in writing'. Nor does this process include' spelling', though such copying can be related to it. 'Spelling' is writing down on paper the right letters, in the right order, of a mental image of a word.