Helping children become less prejudiced. That is one of our airns as teachers. In Social Studies prejudice often shows up as, 'My
The story I have to tell is not a particularly cheerful one. Discrimination on grounds of ethnic origin - racial discrimination - is widespread. The evidence for it is well established by research, by the investigations of Commissions and by what we see in front of our eyes in our cities. Teachers, principals, inspectors and politicians all declare themselves concerned about the levels of discrimination in society at large and are committed to doing something about this within the schools and colleges through which all young people pass.
It is profoundly disturbing to learn that 70% of Australian 15-year-olds' expect the future to be ended by nuclear war. The research which revealed this was not elaborate. It was called 'Images of the Future'; Australian secondary students at Years 9 and 10 (approximately 15-16 years old) were asked what their futures would be like. The researchers used interviews, questionnaires and asked for written imaginings of what the world would be like in 20 years time. It came as a shock to me to learn that as well as expecting nuclear war only 16% felt they had any influence on the future.
Just kids, aged nine to twelve, so you wouldn't expect any great insights from them about the world, would you? I asked them how they thought houses would be different when they grew up. Most thought they'd be bigger and better. One thought they would be smaller because people would have fewer children, and one predicted a few big houses for the rich and many small ones for the poor. Nothing surprising in all that. Just stuff they pick up from their older brothers and sisters or their parents. Or the media. If you ask trite questions you get trite answers.
Decoding has always been controversial. Rather than an ally, it has often been seen as the enemy of comprehension. The problem is that poor comprehenders are usually poor decoders as welt which implies that decoding is the culprit. This leads to the strange argument that we should give less attention to decoding, and more attention to comprehension. Which brings me to Gough's multiplicative hypothesis. The hypothesis is not new, but is it straightforward. It says that . problems in reading come about because of difficulties in either decoding, listening comprehension, or both.
When we look at recent research on reading acquisition, there has only been one exciting show to watch, and that has been the debate between Ken Goodman and Phil Gough. Ken Goodman's (1967) paper, 'Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game', made him the person most clearly associated with the view that reading is a 'top down' process. But Goodman became the target of debate in Phil Gough's (1972) paper, 'One Second of Reading', which took the opposite view, that reading is a 'bottom up', serial process. What, in plain words, has the debate been about?
Is classroom interaction research worth the effort involved? Up till recently the main result of decades of work seemed to be that 'time on task' was the only thing you could be sure about: the more time a subject got the more learning took place. But time is a precious and finite commodity in a classroom, and new ways are needed of exploring its use. Is time itself of the essence, or are other (less easily quantifiable) factors also involved?
Tertiary education should give students (1) the general ability to think critically and independently and, (2) competencies in at least one specialised discipline. Unfortunately, if tertiary education does have a beneficial impact on intellectual growth there is not much convincing evidence of it. A fundamental problem for teachers and researchers alike is what criteria should be used to judge such
It is generally the case that teachers, instructing young children to read single words, present these sight-words in the company of pictures representing the same objects. For example, when teaching a child to recognise and later read the word I dog', the teacher presents the word accompanied by a picture of a dog. It is assumed that the child will make use of the information presented in the
Just when can children take charge of their own health? New research shows that, even at age 5, children are quite clued up on ways to keep well. In our study we talked to 53 Wellington children about what it means to stay healthy and what they know about certain illnesses.
