set 1982 : no. 1

The focus of our research was on what supervising adults do. We were interested in behavioural processes. Two play centres and two free kindergartens running V2 day sessions, and two day-care centres agreed to participate in the study. All centres (reflecting the dominant approach in New Zealand) run child-centred free play programmes. The staff create the environment by putting out equipment (curriculum materials) and the children are free to choose how and what they will play with. Both… Read more

In the best of all possible worlds, so goes the myth, students go to university because of their ability and interest, and the subjects they choose they choose for the same two reasons. Because of our egalitarianism and because New Zealand offers equal educational opportunity to ale it is tempting to think that New Zealand university students are drawn from a cross section of society. Particularly we might hope that the school you went to would have a negligible effect on your getting to… Read more

In both Australia and New Zealand there has been a history of tension and prejudice as the English speaking majority has reacted to the presence of minorities. The basic tension revolved around the question (never resolved) of how far minorities should be excluded. What is the role of language in settlement and assimilation? In particular, what is the situation of non-English speaking new immigrants and what tensions are there between their need for support from those who speak their own… Read more

These Initial Vocabularies for Reading have been developed by Brian Thompson of the Education Department of Victoria University of Wellington to help teachers in primary schools.

Children are not failures in the normative sense when they arrive at school but the process of labelling a child as a failure begins early in his school career. The early school years a:re particularly significant for the growth of the child's ability to cope with failure. It is then he acquires the basic skills which are crucial for subsequent school learning, but further to this, it is in the early school years that children develop perceptions of themselves as learners.

Maybe your pupils are doing well in science tests and in examinations. But do they really understand the concepts and principles you teach them? New methods of probing reveal that apparent success often masks gross misunderstanding, on a scale not previously imagined. In two set items, researchers, one at Monash University in Australia and the other at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, describe how the misunderstandings can be revealed, how they come about, and something of what can… Read more

This lesson was one of a series of lessons considering the nature of matter. In the immediately preceding lesson the pupils had investigated crystallisation. At the end of that lesson pupils had been encouraged by the teacher to try and grow salt (NaCl) crystals at home. The task of the lesson was identified - "today's work is on the board" (see above) but not explained by the teacher who then referred to the homework task in an attempt to develop a class discussion on… Read more

In a London classroom the teacher and the children share a warm, supportive, and productive relationship. Mr A would be an asset to the staff on any school. The interaction we see here is primarily between the teacher and the class as a whole, but revealed amongst the interactions is the relationship between the teacher and one child, Jennifer. In attempting an analysis of these interactions I want to do two things . First, I would like to demonstrate how any teacher can do some self-… Read more

In 1972, after four years of using mechanical calculators in my teaching now and again, I tried electronic calculators. It
was incontestable that they were a help in the classroom. They had a highly motivating effect on the pupils, and we could get through more problems than usual. All the energy could be used on solving the problems; the machines did the manual table-work. It was now appropriate to find out what one wanted from the machines, and at which stage to use them. If we… Read more

Technological improvements are still being made. Choose new performance and convenience, not new gimmickry or styling that is just new casing around old brains. On the whole, the more you pay the more you get, but young children do not need much. Till a perfect school calculator is built there will have to be 'trade-offs ', for example, a well placed negative sign may not be available on the same machine as rounding off recurring decimals. When in doubt ask the child 's teacher… Read more