Carol A. Christensen

The Impact of Learning Journals on Metacognitive and Cognitive Processes and Learning Performance.

Forty university students in a first-year biology course were randomly assigned to either a learning journal (experimental) or scientific report (control) group. Students in the learning journal group were provided with opportunities to develop a written record of their learning processes during the course. Students in the scientific report group were provided with similar opportunities to write a report on the material they were learning. Both groups gave comparable ratings on a questionnaire asking them to indicate the importance of a range of metacognitive and cognitive strategies. Results showed that the experimental group used more metacognitive strategies and more sophisticated cognitive strategies during a learning task. The journal group also showed more sophisticated conceptions of learning, greater awareness of cognitive strategies and demonstrated the construction of more complex, related and integrated knowledge structures when learning from text. Finally, the journal group performed significantly better on the final exam for the course.

Learning in inclusive education research: Re-mediating theory and methods with a transformative agenda

This is the authors accepted manuscript. The original publication is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0091732X030001065.

COMPETING NOTIONS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CONTRADICTIONS IN SPECIAL EDUCATION REFORM

In the past three decades, special education has been subjected to extensive critique and reform of practices. These critiques have been based on notions of social justice and equity. However, the field has suffered from inadequate attention to assumptions about social justice. Social justice is essentially a contested concept. Rather than representing a unitary and universally shared concept, social justice has variable meanings. Differing views of social justice can be seen to underlie apparent contradictions in continuing practice in response to pressures for reform. Reforms predicated on individual rights have been undermined by deep commitments to meritocratic practices in U.S. schools. Reforms based on more communitarian principles, however, ignore the need for structure and the tendency for communal values to marginalize people with disabilities. Special education reform today requires a different basis in a relational definition of the self, structures to support the qualities of relationships, and a belief in the mutability of social justice.

The Efficacy of Orthographic Rime, Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondence, and Implicit Phonics Approaches to Teaching Decoding Skills

This study compared the efficacy of two decoding skill-based programs, one based on explicit orthographic rime and one on grapheme–phoneme correspondences, to a control group exposed to an implicit phonics program. Children in both explicit decoding programs performed consistently better than the control group in the accuracy with which they read and spelled words covered in the program. Only children in the grapheme–phoneme correspondence program consistently spelled transfer words better than children in the control group. In addition, children in the grapheme–phoneme correspondence group consistently read words more quickly than children in the control group. Children in both explicit decoding programs scored higher than the children in the control group on measures of reading comprehension and oral reading at posttest.

Perpetuating Gender Inequity: Attitudes of Teacher Education Students.

The role of schools in perpetuating social inequalities has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. However, less attention has been paid to the impact of teacher education programs in influencing teacher attitudes which can contribute to discriminatory practices. To begin to address this question in relation to gender equity, attitudes of 751 teacher education students to traditional sex-role stereotypes were measured on a 32-item questionnaire. One three-way ANOVA was conducted on the total score (all items summed) and another on each item. The independent variables were age, gender and length of enrolment of the student. A consistent main effect for gender was obtained; women were more egalitarian in their attitudes than men. There was, however, no effect for length of enrolment. This was interpreted to indicate that the current teacher education program in which the students were enrolled had a limited impact on traditional gender-related stereotypes.

The Role of Cognitive Strategies in the Transition from Counting to Retrieval of Basic Addition Facts

This study examined the hypothesis that children who use cognitive strategies in solving simple addition questions develop greater proficiency in addition than children who fail to employ such strategies. Forty non-strategy users were provided with instructional experiences to facilitate the development of cognitive strategies. At post-test 20 children demonstrated cognitive strategy use, while 20 did not utilise these strategies. Strategy users demonstrated greater retrieval at post-test. However, no other indicators of greater proficiency in addition were detected.