This research study examines the instructional practices of 10 middle grades teachers related to their use of manipulatives in teaching mathematics and their control of mathematics tools during instruction. Through 40 observations of teaching, 30 interviews, and an examination of 67 written documents (including teachers' plans and records),…

Background: Traditionally, autism and specific language impairment (SLI) have been regarded as distinct disorders but, more recently, evidence has been put forward for a closer link between them: a common set of language problems, in particular receptive language difficulties and the existence of intermediate cases including pragmatic language…

Mirror neurons, first described in the rostral part of monkey ventral premotor cortex (area F5), discharge both when the animal performs a goal-directed hand action and when it observes another individual performing the same or a similar action. More recently, in the same area mirror neurons responding to the observation of mouth actions have been…

Assessment of graduate student competencies is important, and benefits are realized at the student, department, institution, and community levels. The institution has a method of assessing the achievement of identified skills; the gerontology department or division has prepared workers to promote to potential employers and to potential recruits to…

Ethnographic research, including interviews, focus groups, and observations were conducted to explore gendered dimensions of smoking among low level smokers, including the acceptability of smoking in different contexts; reasons for smoking; the monitoring of self and friends' smoking; and shared smoking as a means of communicating concern and…

Point-light displays of human gait provide information sufficient to recognize the gender of a walker and are taken as evidence of the exquisite tuning of the visual system to biological motion. The authors revisit this topic with the goals of quantifying human efficiency at gender recognition. To achieve this, the authors first derive an ideal…

This study focuses on a multicultural ESL classroom with the purpose of exploring the creation of new individual and cultural identities and the formation of interculture. Through on-site observations and interviews with second-language learners and their teacher, the study presents findings about the dynamics, quandaries, complexity, and…

An American, invited to speak on aesthetics and creativity, came away from the academic conference in the city of Perm fascinated by the character of the Russians he met, but depressed at the shabbiness and the creativity-dispelling gracelessness of the proceedings. Lecturers had apparently become accustomed to going through the motions in mumbled…

The research was motivated by an interest in improving the teaching of deaf children. It is important to identify what has been written about short-term memory and the deaf, and this was achieved through a literature search and review. An extensive survey was conducted to ascertain what knowledge existing teachers of the deaf have about short-term…

This study examines how newcomers use colleagues as role models in organizational socialization, taking a multiple level approach to organizational socialization as individual, social and cultural learning processes. The newcomers most important personal characteristics are expectations, experience, self-confidence and competitive instinct. These…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on observation of teaching in a Higher Education (HE) context with a view to proposing some guidelines for the design and practice of institutional systems to observe teaching. Design/methodology/approach: A literature review and a proposed model for a system of observation of teaching…

Do 9-month-old infants motorically simulate actions they perceive others perform? Two experiments tested whether action observation, like overt reaching, is sufficient to elicit the Piagetian A-not-B error. Infants recovered a toy hidden at location A or observed an experimenter recover the toy. After the toy was hidden at location B, infants in…

Objective: New residency training directors are often faced with multiple competing tasks such as meeting Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Psychiatry Program Requirements and achieving successful completion of residency review committee (RRC) site visits. For many years, the authors have presented workshops on this…

Fifty-two clinic-referred (20) and volunteer (32) mother-child dyads were observed in their home settings for 1 hour per dyad. Observers monitored the mothers' responsiveness during interactions with their children, and mothers' use of ''do'' and ''don't'' instructions were recorded; the children's compliance with instructions was also recorded,…

Alternate forms reliability of the Behavioral Relaxation Scale (BRS; Poppen,1998), a direct observation measure of relaxed behavior, was examined. A single BRS score, based on long duration observation (5-minute), has been found to be a valid measure of relaxation and is correlated with self-report and some physiological measures. Recently,…