Civic Meanings Reconsidered: A Response to “Civic Meanings: Understanding the Constellations of Democratic and Civic Beliefs of Educators”

In this response, we argue for the importance of understanding teachers\u27 and administrators\u27 beliefs about civic education, as well as how those beliefs may influence teachers\u27 practices. We commend the authors for examining the beliefs of principals and school board members—groups rarely surveyed—but question how their beliefs may affect the teaching and learning of citizenship in schools

Brainstages THE ROLES OF BRAIN IN HUMAN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

ABSTRACT Brain development in humans occurs stagewise in correlation with the onsets of the main Piagetian stages of reasoning development. This allows a description of cognitive development as resulting partially from and dependent upon biological events occurring in the brain. Evidence shows that some eventual brain structures depend on a combination of biological events and instructional or experiential inputs. Such a description thereby permits some novel working hypotheses about normal cognitive development and how to foster it, as well as suggesting alternative ways of creating intervention programs for children from deprived environments. Piagetian and Neo-Piagetian theories of human cognitive abilities attempt to describe what happens developmentally leading up to the mature state. They describe this almost entirely in terms of the psycho-social factors involved. But, cognitive functions and changes are more readily and more accurately understood and described if attention is also, if not first, paid to the facts of brain growth. That understanding also permits parents and teachers to see ways to enhance children's cognitive development

A Video of Myself Helps Me Learn : A Scoping Review of the Evidence of Video-Making for Situated Learning

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an “able” body to enact complex tasks in situated and/or simulation-based contexts (for example, “safe nursing practice”). Our interdisciplinary research seeks to intervene within the culture of professional learning by investigating what we know about the use of smartphone video recording for situated, practice-based learning, and for supporting interactive video-based assessment as a means of accommodation and extending access for students, including students with performance anxiety, mature students, ESL learners, students with disabilities, and students in remote communities. In this paper we employ a scoping review methodology to present our findings related to students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the use of smartphone video to demonstrate and document practical knowledge and practice-oriented competencies across fields in the arts and sciences. We also examine broader research, as well as the ethical and design implications for the development of our technology-based toolbox project – an online resource created to advance pedagogies deploying smartphones as tools for practical skills acquisition - and for accommodation - within multidisciplinary practical learning environments

Polarization of coalitions in an agent-based model of political discourse

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a specific statement to the discourse by following ideological criteria, preferential attachment, agenda-setting strategies, governmental coherence, or other mechanisms. The evolving macro-level discourse is represented as a dynamic network and evaluated against arguments from the literature on the policy process. A simple combination of four theoretical mechanisms is already able to produce artificial policy debates with theoretically plausible properties. Any sufficiently realistic configuration must entail innovative and path-dependent elements as well as a blend of exogenous preferences and endogenous opinion formation mechanisms