To explore meanings attached to children in Mexican society, this article examines two changing aspects of child circulation, a widespread reproductive disruption to the families of Mexico City's working poor. In the late 1890s, a rapid rise in admissions to the public foundling home was matched by a striking increase in retrievals. At the other…

The "Research & Action Report," published twice a year, is a window on the activities and initiatives at the Wellesley Centers for Women. The report typically features news about the Centers, interviews with researchers, commentary on recent events or social trends affecting women and girls, announcements of new publications, and much more.…

A cohort of secondary English preservice teachers was engaged in a series of articles designed to bring about a shift in their initial autonomous views of literacy toward a more sociocultural "Discourses and literacies" perspective. Students wrote an essay in which they articulated their initial assumptions about what literacy was and what…

In recent years, increasing emphasis has come to be placed, both by researchers and by policy-makers, on the adequacy of primary teachers' subject knowledge of science. Within research, this emphasis has been linked to the rise of constructivist ideas about the significance of establishing children's prior conceptions of scientific concepts for…

Rationalistic, technical curriculum planning has been the dominant model underpinning student teachers' lesson-planning for a generation or more in England and Wales. In recent years, this process has become embedded in documents that direct initial training. The paper argues that this model leads to a limited view of teaching and learning as well…

The discourse and concepts associated with sociocultural theory have become increasingly important in discussion associated with early childhood education and curriculum at a theoretical level since the early 1990s. However, the extent to which such ideas have been adopted and understood by early childhood educators at the level of practice…

This article describes and analyzes an alternative supervision model at the Master of Education Programme at the University of Bergen aimed at improving research supervision. A three-pronged approach was introduced, combining supervision groups, student colloquia and individual supervision. The supervision groups consisted of two supervisors and…

This article investigates the ways in which alphabetic print concepts govern a sense of natural and appropriate early reading development, and juxtaposes the concepts found in early literacy curriculum and assessment with hypertextual elements found in new forms of texts written for children. Using a theoretical approach that combines…

This paper analyzes the "University Grammar of English" by Randolph Quirk and Sidney Greenbaum (1973) from the point of view of isolation of forms of language from meaning used to convey these forms, especially regarding gender differences and relations in the main characters, John and Mary Smith. It is suggested that females are underrepresented,…

This directory lists employees of the federal government who are involved in forecasting for policy formation and trend prediction purposes. Job title, agency, business address, phone or e-mail number, and specialty areas are listed for each employee. Employees are listed for the following agencies: (1) Bureau of the Census; (2) Bureau of Economic…

Over the past 25 years, much educational research in the United States has focused on effective schools. This paper presents findings of a study that examined the characteristics of Japanese education, which is often considered effective by American researchers. It compares features of the Japanese education system to characteristics of effective…

The book is Katherine Peter's own account, in her native Gwich'in Athabaskan language, of life in 1936-47 in Arctic Village, Alaska. An introductory section offers background information on the author's life and the origins of this work. The text that follows is in Gwich'in Athabaskan on the left page, and in English on the right page. It tells of…

This collection of essays addresses the role of culture in the functioning of families and the socialization of children. Following an introduction by Irving Sigel, the 15 essays are: (1) "Parent-Child Interactions in Urban Indian Families in New Delhi: Are They Changing?" (Jaipaul Roopnarine and Ziarat Hossain); (2) "Chinese…

This study identifies the factors that have contributed most to supporting growth of self-advocacy among people with developmental disabilities, by examining the history of self-advocacy and reporting on interviews with six self-advocates and six advisors of the self-advocacy movement. The study concludes that the growth of self-advocacy has been…

Mastery learning represents an increasingly prolific area of research in educational psychology that encompasses two principal characteristics: (1) an optimistic set of assumptions regarding the capability of students to learn if alterable variables comprising the conditions of learning are optimized; and (2) an array of adaptive instructional…