Journal article

In 1975 and again in 1977, Anne Bray and Bruce McMillan carried out a family survey as a class exercise in Stage I Education at Otago University. Students were asked to provide descriptive data about their family of origin and to say a little about their 'ideal family'. The data from this exercise were used to look at some traditional issues. For example, at University we often find more students are the first born in the family than you would expect by chance. But the data on ideal families also raised some rather different and very interesting issues.

Each set is a collection of leaflets, articles, and small books. Each item has one or more articles on recent educational research findings, specially written or selected for relevance to teachers. Teachers have limited time: but they wish to be informed. set items are designed and written to bring research information in manageable, readable form to busy teachers.

Despite the excellent research of Janet Emig, Donald Graves and others, the writing process itself is still largely a mystery.

Technological improvements are still being made. Choose new performance and convenience, not new gimmickry or styling that is just new casing around old brains. On the whole, the more you pay the more you get, but young children do not need much. Till a perfect school calculator is built there will have to be 'trade-offs ', for example, a well placed negative sign may not be available on the same machine as rounding off recurring decimals. When in doubt ask the child 's teacher what he or she prefers.

In 1972, after four years of using mechanical calculators in my teaching now and again, I tried electronic calculators. It

Children are not failures in the normative sense when they arrive at school but the process of labelling a child as a failure begins early in his school career. The early school years a:re particularly significant for the growth of the child's ability to cope with failure. It is then he acquires the basic skills which are crucial for subsequent school learning, but further to this, it is in the early school years that children develop perceptions of themselves as learners.