Ino Rossi

Grouping Students for Instruction: Effects of Learning Style on Achievement and Attitudes

The present study examined the effects of matching and mismatching American middle-school students with a preference for learning alone or learning with peers with selected instructional treatments in order to determine the impact upon their attitudes and achievement in social studies. Analysis revealed that the learning-alone preference performed significantly better in the learning-alone condition and that the learning-with-peers preference performed significantly better in the learning-with-peers condition. However, no-preference students also performed significantly better in the learning-alone condition than with peers. In addition, data revealed that the learning-alone and the learning-with-peers students had significantly more positive attitudes when matched with their preferred learning style; the nopreference students had more positive attitudes in the learning-alone condition.

Toward a Framework for Global Communication: Durkheim, Phenomenology, Postmodernism, and the “Construction” of Place and Space

ion is not by definition diminishing; it is rather enriching; this is one of the main lessons of semiotics. Information technologies are defined by their abilities to perform different types of abstraction. Rather than looking upon them as fundamentally distortive and disruptive, which seems to be infected with a kind of longing for immediacy, we should resolutely hold fast to the ineluctable universality of mediation, fateful as it is (Op. Cit.: 5–6). “ . . . To be sure, inasmuch as all technologies, and technological artifacts, are perceived, they have an expressive or physiognomic dimension or qualitative ‘feel’; the expressive function is the one experientially and affectively linking sign and object . . .” (Op. Cit.: 6). Information Technologies Produce New Forms of Intelligibility and Partially Form the Information User Information technology also . . . inscribes, a pattern of intelligibility upon the world, giving rise to “stamped forms” of every sort: from chipped stone to the “automatic” processes of modern computing systems (p. 2). This is what Levinson calls “process extending” informational technologies. . . . This is one of the main lessons of semiotics. Information technologies are defined by their abilities to perform different types of abstraction. . . . Modern “digital” technologies, which may be used primarily for ‘aesthetic’ purposes, are themselves made possible by notation systems that belong to the stratum of 340 Frontiers of Globalization Research

Globalization as an Historical and a Dialectical Process

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the various facets of globalization. Globalization is explained as a multicivilizational and technologically sustained process that is driven by conflicts among different cultural traditions and by competing interests among nations and among social strata within nations. Globalization is approached from a macro, micro, and historical perspective. Because all these perspectives are represented in the contributions to this volume, this essay may help the reader to see the relation-ship among the contributions and, therefore, attain an integrated understanding of the volume. The ambition of this chapter goes a bit further. A comprehensive view of globali-zation is achieved by focusing on the conflictual interaction between the vertical and horizontal parameters, so to speak, of intrasocietal and intersocietal processes: the vertical parameter refers to the interaction among the local, national, and international levels of societal functioning; the horizontal parameter refers to the interaction among the cultural, political, and economic principles of social organization within each level of societal functioning. In the first part of the chapter I construct a typology of societies to identify three major kinds of globalization. In the second part I use the typology to discuss the dialectical interaction among intrasocietal, intersocietal, and intercivilizational

JEAN PIAGET. Structuralism. Translated and edited by Chaninah Maschler. Pp. vi, 153. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

goes beyond the mere setting and &dquo;Occasion for American Pragmatism&dquo; in chapter 1 to expound pragmatism as a valuable way of thinking, a direction to follow in understanding and resolving problems. There were different emphases in this direction as the major practitioners colored their view of pragmatism with their own interests and insights. Peirce stressed scientific method and took the community of scientists as his context. James gave more weight to empiricism and took the individual as context. Mead worked from evolutionary biology to examine the individual in his social context. Dewey emphasized values within the moral conception of democracy. Thus, it appears there were four pragmatisms, if not the thirteen Arthur Lovejoy once catalogued. But Morris binds together these vigor-