set 1984: no. 1

Most teachers use television incidentally in their lessons, if only to reinforce or illustrate some point. Many will have noticed a reluctance, almost an hostility, by the children towards discussing their favourite shows. Children learn quickly that too much discussion and analysis destroys the pleasure they get from television-while teachers learn that by the middle of secondary school, children regard television and school as radically different activities. This is a report of the… Read more

Alison is shy and finds it difficult to meet new people. She habitually stands back a little when approached, seldom looks people in the eye for long, and masks many of her emotional expressions. Her new classmates misread her nonverbal cues as lack of interest in their friendly overtures. Margaret also finds meeting new people difficuIt. When approached by strangers, she tends to talk louder and more often, stands too close, and she frowns or giggles at inappropriate times. She is often '… Read more

The young people who are the subject of the National Child Development Study are now aged 25. For most of their lives they have been monitored by the National Children's Bureau and described in 19 books and 200 chapters and journal articles. Many of the books have dealt with very specific issues or examined the circumstances and development of particular subgroups of young people. Among these publications which have made the greatest impact are: Born to Fail? (Wedge and Prosser,… Read more

Several years ago I compiled a 'starter' list of books that I had read to children and we had enjoyed together. This year, conscious that many exciting childrens' books have been published recently, I surveyed teachers in ten schools to see which books they chose to read aloud to their classes and which books children read for themselves. The list was compiled in New Zealand but I am sure it will be a 'starter' list for Australian teachers too.

Essays written in a 'good hand' get better marks than those written in a 'poor' hand. That was discovered over 50 years ago. Perhaps the computer will eradicate the influence of handwriting on the marks awarded to written work, once we can all type and all have the hardware. Then the frantic scribblings of the examinee will be replaced by the pristine uniformity of machine type, or perhaps by 'vocalised' expressionless 'darlek' speech. In the meantime, however, each child produces his or her… Read more

Handwriting is a skill very similar to playing tennis or Space Invaders. It is complex and strategies need to be learnt if you want to do it well. But for fun, learning handwriting the conventional way, with sitting-up-straight and copying-tasks, comes nowhere near a game of tennis or a dollar's worth of zapping electronic aliens. These games need the same skills of prediction, hand-eye co-ordination, and the working up of automatic responses
that a fluent handwriter needs: letter… Read more

A flowchart can describe what happens when we set out to copy a sentence; the factors and skills which operate during this task. The model is not about 'meaning' or 'word choice' or 'self-expression'. These things are part of the larger and more complex, less mechanical task of 'expressing one's self in writing'. Nor does this process include' spelling', though such copying can be related to it. 'Spelling' is writing down on paper the right letters, in the right order, of a mental image of a… Read more

Most children are right-handed and as a result most teachers have developed teaching methods that are aimed specifically at right-handers rather than lefthanders. Most teachers feel uncomfortable teaching left-handers to write because they are not left-handers themselves and are not aware of the needs of left-handers. This report is a summary of current educational research into the needs of lefthanded writers and is presented as a list of
teaching notes.

During the 1960s there was a dramatic increase in the amount of both experimental and theoretical work devoted to the topic of short-term memory. The field had become enormously complicated, so in an attempt to clarify this increasingly complex picture, Graham Hitch and I decided to ask the simple question 'What is short term memory for?' A wide range of cognitive tasks require the manipulation of information, and this in itself demands temporary storage, so short-term memory was assumed to… Read more

Children know a great deal of mathematics before they come to school. They have a variety of ways of interpreting and solving problems about quantities, but of course there are wide differences in how effective they are. Counting appears to play a central role in the child's mathematics learning during the early years, it generally develops before school but greatly improves during the first two years at school. Children make up mathematics-they construct mathematical knowledge.… Read more