Social dynamics of the multicultural classroom

Instruction and learning are socially determined activities, where social forces such as classroom atmosphere, social feelings, cultural sentiments, prejudice and stereotyping, interpersonal relations and expectations, as well as the reflection of social reality in subject matter all have a significant influence on the effectiveness of teaching and learning. The effective "multicultural" teacher has to be concerned about each individual student, and also be sensitive to the group and cultural affiliations of each of his or her students. Intercultural relations in the classroom may be a source of knowledge and mutual enrichment between culturally diverse learners if managed proactively by teachers. Frustration, misapprehensions and intercultural conflict are a more likely outcome if teachers do not deal with diversity in a sensitive manner.     

Vom Experiment zur Praxis: Wie moralische Argumente wirtschaftliche Selbstinteressen beeinflussen

How do moral arguments influence economic self-interests? Behavioral economists try to answer this question using experiments, but their central results have not yet been tested in real economic life. A research project therefore reconstructed how moral arguments influenced economic self-interests in case studies of discussions about relocation. The results indicate that an orientation towards morality, as in the dictator- ultimatum- and collective goods game, also seems to influence how interests are defined and pursued in real economic life. Instead of maximizing economic self-interest, actors behave reciprocally. Results of behavioral experiments as well as the observation of case studies of economic behavior therefore hint towards economic actors that are influenced by reciprocity and social roles. This allows for a more precise understanding of economic behavior in many situations. Testing this in experiments of behavioral economics is in turn advocated based on the results of this article.     

Indigenous Religions in the United States

Delving into the life and legacy of Henry VIII is both complex and captivating. People seem compelled to learn more abut his critical contributions and controversial conduct that range from the significant to the scandalous. Reflecting on the history of the world would be incomplete without investigating the events and escapades associated with Henry VIII, whose impact of 500 years ago resonates through today's society and into the future through literature, music, politics, and religion. To view the many facets of Henry VIII, classroom teachers and their students are encouraged to use graphic organizers to provide easy-to-understand visualizations. Eight types of graphic organizers engage learners in student-centered activities that help students make meaning from and show relationships among the diverse attributes of Henry VIII. When combined, the eight graphic organizers equip learners with valuable tools to construct a holistic examination about the history of Henry VIII.     

Teaching economics across cultures: challenges and lessons learned in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan

Nine years of experience teaching economics in the Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan provides knowledge on the nuances and challenges of teaching economics across cultures. Particular categories and difficulties are presented with some examples of how to address them. Conclusions and findings are used to form general guiding principles for teaching economics in the increasingly diverse US classroom. The principles offered in the paper are valuable to English speakers providing economic teaching and training in post-Soviet nations and, more broadly, to anyone teaching economics across cultures. Finally, suggestions based these principles are offered to encourage all professors of economics to carefully consider language, illustrations, diversity of views regarding economics and the multi-cultural nature of university classrooms to better relate to students and be more effective teachers.     

语码转换与英语教学

语言习得的过程中学习者会遇到很多的困难，如何流畅地进行语言教学是语言学家和教育者关注的话题。在课堂环境中语言的习得是通过师生交际来实现的，在这个过程中，中英语码的使用是值得关注的。笔者提出在课堂上教师进行语码转换是积极的，同时有利于语言的习得。     

A Disabling Education: the case of disabled learners in Malaysia

Currently there is a move by the government towards improving the state of education for disabled learners in Malaysia. It is believed that current policy and practice do not meet the needs and requirements of these learners, partly because of the different definitions of disability adopted by various government agencies that are empowered to assist them. Employing a social constructivist framework, these definitions are examined specifically in the way they have been developed into different practices. It is argued that some of the common practices in educating disabled learners are discriminatory and haphazardly planned. The material effects of these practices on the actual provisions of education for these learners are then observed and evaluated. It is suggested that the education system be improved by including disabled learners in mainstream education, so as to help instigate positive changes in the lives of these learners through the wider process of social inclusion.     

Clause Segmentation by 6‐Month‐Old Infants: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants' attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language‐specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically well‐formed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning the grammatical structure of their language. Despite the potentially important role that the perception of large prosodic units may play in early language acquisition, there has been little work investigating the extraction of these units from fluent speech by infants learning languages other than English. We report 2 experiments investigating Dutch learners' clause segmentation abilities. In these studies, Dutch‐learning 6‐month‐olds readily extract clauses from speech. However, Dutch learners differ from English learners in that they seem to be more reliant on pauses to detect clause boundaries. Two closely related explanations for this finding are considered, both of which stem from the acoustic differences in clause boundary realizations in Dutch versus English.     

Teaching as a primary therapeutic intervention for learners from refugee backgrounds

Abstract

Refugees almost invariably have a history of traumatic experience and significant loss. However, for some, therapy is neither a practical nor a readily available solution and for others, it may present further challenges in terms of stigma or cultural inappropriateness. On the other hand, a classroom is generally considered unthreatening and, as teachers are with their learners on a regular basis, the opportunity exists for them to provide support and a form of healing. This article presents a range of therapeutic pedagogical strategies which can provide interventions for refugee backgrounds learners. It makes particular reference to the New Zealand on-arrival programme for refugees.     

THE IMPACT OF CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTS ON THE LEARNING OF ECONOMICS: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION

This paper provides limited evidence on the effectiveness of a simple classroom experiment. In different courses in environmental economics or public finance, a brief take-some game was performed. Students who took part in this classroom experiment, as well as those who just watched it, were more successful in answering a multiple-choice test on the "tragedy of the commons" than control groups from the same courses.     

CYBERNETICS AND MACROECONOMICS

A full estimate of the effects of cybernetics and control systems engineering on economics would be premature if not impossible at this time. The relevant literature is at most twenty-five years old and its ultimate impact remains uncertain; thus conclusions are at best tentative. However, one can identify sources of inspiration and main participants as well as apparent trends. Axel Leijonhufvud has referred to the introduction of control engineering into aggregate analysis by Tustin, Phillips, and others in the 1950s as “the Keynesian Revolution which did not come off.” One purpose of this paper is to explore Leijonhufvud's observation. What stopped monetary and macroeconomic theorists from picking up the Tustin-Phillips lead and making the control-theoretic approach an integral part of economic analysis? Historians of economics writing a few decades from now may be able to provide a proper answer. But a few speculations can be offered now.     

The contribution of behavioral economics to tax reform in the United Kingdom

This paper examines the contribution of behavioral economics to tax reform by examining two major reforms in the United Kingdom which may be seen as natural experiments – the reform of local taxation and the introduction of value added tax. The case for both was based strongly on mainstream economic analysis but one was a failure and the other a success. The introduction of the local community charge, or ‘poll tax’ as it became known, was such a failure that not only did it have to be repealed but it was also a factor in the downfall of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. The introduction of value added tax took more account of behavioral factors and was successful. The paper concludes that a wider approach based on behavioral as well as mainstream economics may have considerable advantages in developing tax policy.     

Experiment timing and preferences for fairness

Classroom experiments examining fairness preferences [Andreoni, J., Miller, J., 2002. Giving according to GARP: an experimental test of the consistency of preferences for Altruism. Econometrica 70 (2), 737–753] were conducted to examine two issues: first, are classroom points a salient reward medium (comparable to cash in research experiments)? Secondly, does experiment timing during the semester influence results. Subject choices are consistent with the existence of well-behaved utility functions, indicating that points experiments can be valid. Secondly, subjects are more likely to be “selfish” when the experiment is conducted early rather than late in the academic semester. This result has behavioral implications for environments where nonmonetary incentives prevail, as well as implications for the growing number of instructors using experiments and follow-up discussion in the classroom.     

Time-on-task, technology and mathematics achievement

Information and communication technologies hold much promise for use in education in developing countries. This study reports on an evaluation conducted on the introduction of computers in the delivery of the mathematics curriculum in one of the provinces of South Africa. Although the request was for an outcome evaluation very early in the implementation of the program, it was tailored in such a way as to fulfill a more formative role. Despite substantial variability in implementation, and in most cases with very weak exposure of the learners to the intervention, sufficient evidence emerged to indicate that this mode of curriculum delivery may be effective. Improvement in mathematics performance was related to a range of variables: some concerned classroom teaching practices, some referred to social differences between the learners, and some to the specific intervention. The strongest of these predictors in the sample was the strength of the intervention: the more time learners spent on using the software to study mathematics, the more improvement they showed from 1 year to the next in their performance in the subject.     

Critically engaging with cultural representations in foreign language textbooks

There is currently strong recognition within the field of intercultural language teaching of the need for language learners to develop the ability to actively interpret and critically reflect on cultural meanings and representations from a variety of perspectives. This article argues that cultural representations contained in language textbooks, though often problematic, can be used as a useful resource for helping learners develop their capacities for interpretation and critical reflection. The paper draws on data collected in an English language classroom in Japan to highlight some of the ways that language learners construct critical accounts of cultural content in a language textbook, highlighting not only the content of their accounts but also the discursive strategies they use to construct them. It therefore illustrates the potential for working with imperfect materials to develop intercultural competencies.     

Science,Invention and Society

Social studies teacher educators highlight the importance of oral stories and histories in the social studies classroom, leading social studies learners to seek multiple perspectives and encourage historical thinking in the classroom. However, preservice teachers are given few opportunities to internalize this idea. In this article, the author examines the collection of oral stories and creation of performances in a social studies methods course. The process involves preservice teachers conducting oral history interviews, choosing material to explore, creating and performing stories, and sharing their representations with peers. As preservice teachers become storytellers of someone's history, they are made aware of their own subjectivity.     

WILLFUL BLINDNESS: THE INEFFICIENT REWARD STRUCTURE IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH

This article examines how economics departments judge research articles and assign credit to authors. It begins with a demonstration that only strictly prorated author credit induces researchers to choose e?cient sized teams. Nevertheless, survey evidence reveals that most economics departments only partially prorate authorship credit, implying excessive coauthorship. Indeed, a half‐century increase in coauthorship may be better explained by incomplete proration than by any increased specialization among authors. A possible explanation for the reliance on incomplete proration is the self‐interest of economists who are more likely to engage coauthorship—full professors. The self‐interest of senior faculty may also explain the relatively small role given to citations in senior promotions. A rational response by economists to the under‐proration of author credit is to engage in false authorship. Although false authorship is of dubious ethical status, it may have the perverse impact of improving the e?ciency of team production. Grossly excessive coauthorship, where little attention is paid to most authors listed on a paper, as found in some other academic disciplines, may be the path down which economics is headed if the reward structure is not altered. (JEL A14, O30, I23)     

Re-Mediating Second Language Acquisition: A Sociocultural Perspective for Language Development

This article provides a cultural-historical (CHAT) analysis of the practices used by an effective teacher of Latino/a children previously classified as “underachieving” and “beginning/novice” English Language Learners. Although the teacher would not describe her practices in strict CHAT, or sociocultural theory (SCT) terms, our analysis shows that teaching practices in this classroom are better understood using a SCT model rather than more prevalent second language acquisition (SLA) models that dominate the field of bilingual/English as a Second Language education. We describe the fundamental limitations of SLA assumptions about learners vis-à-vis a SCT perspective and use classroom and case study data to illustrate how a CHAT perspective illuminates this teacher's practices. From a CHAT perspective, teaching and learning are socially reorganized around the mediation of dynamic learner identities and include shifts in expert–novice status, dialogic interactions, and the use of innovative mediational tools (e.g., keystrokes on a calculator) to promote academic writing and oral communication. The mediational reorganization described in the classroom opened up access to students who might have been dismissed by a SLA model as “incapable” of engaging in such tasks. We draw on classroom-level data (i.e., standardized scores in reading and math) as well as the work of selected focal students to illustrate our case.     

Moving youth participation into the classroom: students as allies

The experiences of urban public high school students, told in their own words, offer new and veteran teachers guidance on how to reach adolescent learners and illustrate what youth-adult partnerships in the classroom might look like.