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 ...

If you ask a manager what he does, he will most likely tell you that he plans, organizes, co-ordinates, and controls. The fact is that these four words, which have dominated management vocabulary since the French industrialist Henri Fayol first introduced them in 1916, tell us little about what managers ...

One of the distinctive marks of reading programmes in New Zealand schools is the extent to which story-reading is used in the classroom. Recent surveys show that most primary school children expect, and usually get, 15 to 30 minutes a day sharing a story with their teacher, as a recreational ...

As soon as we consider teaching about Race Relations we strike a dilemma: how to promote desirable values and still let the children learn for themselves. Trying to persuade children to believe what we believe interferes with the possibility of them constructing their own answers; in providing ready made answers ...

Three volunteer teachers arranged home interviews for each pupil in their class, offering parents the choice of an interview at home or at school. As more than half the parents opted for a home visit, it was possible to make some comparison between the relative effectiveness of the two methods ...

In New Zealand it is estimated that non-Maori girls now reach puberty, on average, at 12 years 6 months and Maori girls at 12.0. In Australia the age is between 12.4 and 13.0. That means that most girls could bear children in their first year at high school, and many ...