GSE Scholarly Articles

Explaining that no definitive pedagogy flows from the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, the author explores ways that classroom teachers can nevertheless make powerful use of that theory. For her, the essence of the child's intellectual development lies not in the progressive accomplishment of Piagetian tasks, but in the child's testing out the ideas that she or he finds significant. This process of testing out ideas, she argues, is critical for the child's cognitive growth. Teachers can assist this growth primarily by accepting the child's perpective as the legitimate framework for generating ideas—allowing the child to work out her or his own questions and answers. This approach—and the importance of providing varied settings and materials which suggest ideas to children—is discussed with particular reference to the author's classroom experience and her evaluation of an elementary science program.

This essay is a response to the history of American reactions to Piaget's work—skepticism about his findings, followed by a desire to accelerate development. Influenced by the mass of psychological research devoted to these issues, educators have adopted them as their concerns as well. Eleanor Duckworth sketches this history, reviews recent Genevan learning research, and in so doing, suggests that the dilemma is both false and beside the point. She turns to a consideration of issues of greater educational concern,bringing Piaget's work to bear on them.

Discussion of reports: A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform prepared by the National Commission on Excellence in Education; Action for Excellence prepared by the National Task Force on Education for Economic Growth; Making the Grade: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Federal Elementary and Secondary Education Policy; and America's Competitive Challenge: The Need for a National Response by the Business-Higher Education Forum.

After an extended account of two features which she considers to be the essence of teaching,Eleanor Duckworth describes how such teaching can, at the same time, be seen as a form of research. In conclusion, she proposes a vision of teachers as significant participants in theoretical and pedagogical discussions on the nature and development of human learning.

In this article, Eleanor Duckworth focuses on the nature of understanding by leading the reader through the process of extended clinical interviewing. Duckworth describes some of her own explorations of science and how those experiences showed her what learning could be like. Those experiences included working with "a highly imaginative bunch of scientists and teachers of science" while developing the Elementary Science Study, a curriculum development program. As she describes it, Duckworth "got hooked" on the excitement of learning and has been an educator ever since, working to develop engaging learning experiences for both teachers and students. This article continues her effort to do just that, with lengthy descriptions of her own and her students' struggles — and enjoyment — as they attempt to understand and define various phenomena. And with that, she opens the discussion of "keeping it complex.

Although much attention has been devoted to lexical, grammatical, and semantic aspects of child-directed speech, less is known about its pragmatics. This paper describes a longitudinal study of the communicative intents used by parents in interaction with their 14-, 20-, and 32-month-olds (n = 52). With 14-month-olds, parents used a small core set of communicative intents. This set grew in size and sophistication with increasing child age. Comparison with children's intents showed that some commonly used parental communicative intents were rare in children's language at all three ages. As children grew older, parental use of directive intents declined and child-centered acts increased. These findings suggest that child-directed parental speech is simplified pragmatically as well as grammatically and semantically.

This article examines the conflict in political liberalism between the demands placed on education by liberalism and those placed on education by democracy. In so far as the principles of political liberalism entail both that the state not interfere with individuals' private commitments and that it ensure the maintenance of liberal democratic institutions, I suggest that it is rent by an internal tension that poses particular dilemmas for education. This tension is explored through three competing models of the school as a politically liberal institution, expressed in terms of a schematic analysis of three countries' approach to education: England, the United States and France. I argue that while all three countries capture important aspects of the politically liberal educational project, and while the American approach especially successfully and self-consciously addresses the balance between liberalism and democracy in constructing the school as a public square, no model in theory or in practice is able to meet the diverse and competing demands of political liberalism. In so far as any political system is viable only if it is able to maintain itself across generations, however, I conclude that political liberalism fails as a theory in at least one important respect, and that the problem of education thus deserves much deeper attention from liberal political theorists than it has yet enjoyed.

The study explores the notion that some Chinese characters contain pictorial indications of meanings that can be used to help retrieve the referent. Thirty adults with no prior knowledge of Chinese guessed the meanings of twenty Chinese characters by choosing between one of two photographs. Half of the characters were considered to be iconic and the other half was considered to be arbitrary. The proportion of correct guesses for iconic characters was high, but the proportion for arbitrary characters was at chance. These results show a distinction between characters based on the extent to which they have retained aspects of iconicity in reference to their concepts that can direct the reader to their meaning. The results have implications for using pictures to promote the understanding of the orthographic–semantic process in simple Chinese characters.

En este artículo se investigan algunas cuestiones metodológicas relativas al estudio del lenguaje infantil y se presenta la instrumentación y el software desarrollados en el proyecto CHILDES (Sistema de Intercambio de Datos del Lenguaje Infantil). El sistema proporciona potentes herramientas para investigar en el marco de la metodología de Registro, Transcripción y Análisis de Muestras de Habla Espontánea (RETAMHE). Se proporciona información del sistema de codificación (CHAT) que permite introducir finas distinciones en el proceso de transcripción, al tiempo que se exponen los requerimientos básicos (minCHAT) para crear archivos CHAT. El paquete de programas (CLAN) específicamente diseñados para analizar esos archivos que contienen transcripciones de muestras de habla, incluye recuentos de frecuencias, búsqueda de palabras, análisis de la interacción, etc. El núcleo de comandos y opciones de CLAN constituye el sistema minCLAN, del que se ofrecen algunas pautas. Se trata con todo ello de facilitar los primeros pasos para aprender a usar los instrumentos metodológicos de CHILDES.

This study examines maternal talk and uses of the pointing gesture during interaction with young children in order to uncover the relationship between maternal and child pointing and talk. Forty- five low-income mother-child dyads were videotaped in their homes at child age 14 months. Results indicate that: (a) mothers and children who talk more point more during interaction, (b) the majority of pointing gestures are used to direct the hearer's attention, (c) mothers who communicate more with their children view their children as understanding more, (d) more educated mothers point more in the context of discussing a joint focus of attention and for conversation-directing purposes. Findings are discussed in terms of the relationship between maternal communi cative characteristics and child pointing and talk.

Cognitive progress often involves reconfiguring a domain, bringing previously unrecognized likenesses, differences, patterns and discrepancies to light. I argue that the arts effect such reconfigurations, enabling us to discern and appreciate the importance of aspects of the domain that we had previously overlooked or underemphasized. I argue that so-called ‘aesthetic devices’ like metaphor, fiction, and exemplification figure in our understanding of science as well as art. We cannot do justice to our scientific understanding while denying that art and its devices function cognitively.

Civic education is a primary aim of public schooling in liberal democratic states, which rely on a well-educated, civic-minded citizenry for their perpetuation. Because liberal democracies can differ, it is important to decide for what kind of democracy schools should be educating. Recently, deliberative democracy has come into vogue as a political – and hence civic educational – goal. Because of differences in perspectives as a result of life experiences, however, racial, ethnic, economic, and/or religious minorities are disadvantaged in deliberative settings. Even if they fully participate, and even if all citizens welcome their participation, minority group members are unlikely to be able to influence debate appropriately. Furthermore, the steps that teachers or schools might take to overcome this problem in the future themselves impose serious costs on children, especially those who grow up in segregated minority communities. These costs may outweigh deliberative democracy’s putative benefits over adversarial democracy.

This article addresses the question of whether literacy could be mediating the relationships of schooling to maternal health behavior in populations undergoing demographic transition. Recent studies in which literacy was directly assessed suggest a literacy pathway to demographic change. The literacy skills of 167 urban and rural mothers of school-aged children in Lalitpur District of the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal were assessed by tests of reading comprehension, academic language proficiency, health media skills and health narrative skill, as part of studies in the urban and rural communitiesthat included a maternal interview and ethnographic fieldwork on the contexts of family life, health care and female schooling. Regression analysis of the data indicates the retention of literacy skills in adulthood and their influence on health behavior; ethnographic evidence shows that selective bias in school attainment does not account for the results. Further direct assessment studies are recommended.