Educating to Use Evidence in Thinking About Education     

Nora S. Newcombe 《Mind, Brain, and Education》2013,7(2):147-150

There is an increasing emphasis on evidence‐based education, and the sciences of learning are progressing rapidly. But are reports, guidelines, and outreach enough to disseminate this knowledge and affect educational practice? In fact, policy makers and the public often resist evidence‐based recommendations about education. This article suggests that some of the problems lie in well‐known difficulties in everyday reasoning and decision making, especially in situations that involve probability and uncertainty. We should communicate and educate so as to address these difficulties.  相似文献   

English language teaching in public primary schools in Mexico: the practices and challenges of implementing a national language education program     

José Luis Ramírez Romero  Peter Sayer  Elva Nora Pamplón Irigoyen 《International journal of qualitative studies in education》2014,27(8):1020-1043

Over the past 15?years, many state governments in Mexico have initiated local programs to introduce English at the primary school level. In 2009, the Mexican Ministry of Education formalized the Programa Nacional de Inglés en Educación Básica (PNIEB) as part of the national curriculum, based on the argument that increasing the number of English speakers in Mexico is necessary for the country to be globally competitive and to follow the trend in other developing economies of augmenting English instruction in public education. This paper focuses on the implementation of PNIEB and the state programs that preceded it. The authors document the practices and challenges associated with the program based on data collected from interviews with the main stakeholders involved (students and parents, teachers, school principals, and program coordinators) and from classroom observations. The total data-set consisted of over 200 interviews and classroom observations spread over several years from 2008 to 2012. Several challenges are described, including the development of materials, the role of English in relation to other subject areas, and the training of teachers who often speak English but have uneven formal preparation. The status of the teachers, both as second-class citizens within the schools and the instability and irregularities with their contracts, was identified as the most significant challenge to the successful implementation of the programs.  相似文献   

Mazes and Maps: Can Young Children Find Their Way?     

Jamie J. Jirout  Nora S. Newcombe 《Mind, Brain, and Education》2014,8(2):89-96

Games provide important informal learning activities for young children, and spatial game play (e.g., puzzles and blocks) has been found to relate to the development of spatial skills. This study investigates 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's use of scaled and unscaled maps when solving mazes, asking whether an important aspect of spatial learning—the ability to use scaled representations—is related to children's play with scaled maps. Results show that almost all children used the maps to solve the mazes at least occasionally, and use them consistently across maze difficulty and different types of maps. Map use and more accurate spatial scaling were associated with better maze performance. We suggest that maze activities including scaled maps might provide an opportunity for developing children's spatial scaling through play, and discuss future research directions.  相似文献