Children of around six have rather different perceptions of people's roles than do older children and adults. They tend to focus on one aspect or characteristic of a situation instead of scanning all the information available. They have a strong tendency to see other people through their own reactions and ...

Despite the fact that resources to help slow achievers in classrooms are usually less than adequate, we tend to overlook
one of the most powerful sources of children's learning at school - other children. Children pick up considerable knowledge from interaction with other children, including complex social skills and rituals ...

Discussing nuclear war informally with a group of 16-year-olds I discovered that they had a great many different opinions about it, and many misconceptions. Stimulated by Hugh Lauder and Alan Scott and their 'Politics of Education' course at Canterbury University I set out to find out exactly what the situation ...

When Kirsty was brought to the attention of the Kelburn Visual Resource Centre in September 1979 she was a rather egocentric, tense, frustrated, unhappy and mixed up individual. She wanted to attend University but saw herself being dead from drug addiction by 20. Kirsty was classified as dyslexic. At a ...

Secondary schools can be organized in a variety of ways. A whanau organization subdivides a large school into largely self-contained units or whanaus to gain the social advantages of a small school while retaining the curriculum flexibility of the large school. The social objectives of promoting caring relationships and a ...

The comment that predicting the future is hazardous (as any gambler knows) has been made so often that it is trite. Yet there is a need to look at the possible social outcomes of particular policies, especially when we have limited resources to invest. The problem is that, unlike the ...

At Dunedin Teachers College, all students who graduate with a B.Ed. degree are required to carry out an independent
research study as part of their programme. This study (known as Teaching Practice B) is a small-scale piece of research conducted in a classroom setting and dealing with a topic which ...

Most of what we know about children comes from watching carefully what they do. Proud parents entertain their friends - or bore them out of their minds - with the latest tales of their offspring's achievements. Just as frequently we discuss some 'problem', often asking a simple question such as ...

There are two main traditions in the psychology of reading. The most familiar tradition is educational, based on the study of children learning to read: its theoretical base is in the theories of learning that were so dominant a feature of academic psychology in the 1940s and 50s. The second ...

How is the teacher to convert these private worries into informed and constructive thinking? It seems to be assumed that the two crucial components of education on nuclear issues are to increase knowledge about nuclear weapons and strategies, and to arouse an appropriate level of concern about the dangers inherent ...