Vygotsky Meets Technology: A Reinvention of Collaboration in the Early Childhood Mathematics Classroom

With the advent of Web 2.0, Vygotsky’s traditional role of the more knowledgeable other (MKO) has been transformed. This transformation shifts the power of a facilitator of learning from an elite group of MKOs to all students. Such a transformation possesses significant value in the early childhood mathematics classroom where collaboration is essential for student learning. This article reveals three distinct MKOs that have emerged from the WEB 2.0 expansion, and discusses three tools that usher collaboration and empower students in an early childhood mathematics classroom: Voki, VoiceThread, and Vodcasts.     

Envisioning Equitable Classrooms That Enhance All Students’ Wonderful Ideas: A Duckworth Perspective

This synopsis centers on Eleanor Duckworth’s ideas about the relationship between education and intellectual development. Specifically, Duckworth described the essence of intellectual development as the “having of wonderful ideas” and the essence of pedagogy as the creation of occasions to “have wonderful ideas.” As opposed to accepting the persistent, pernicious educational belief that there is a single, best way to understand and a single, best way of explaining this understanding, Duckworth determined that all children can come to comparable, equally satisfactory, wonderful understandings when provided occasions to do so.     

Student trust in teachers and student perceptions of safety: positive predictors of student identification with school

This study examined the effects of student trust in teacher and student perceptions of safety on identification with school. Data were collected from one large urban district in an eastern state. Participants included 5441 students in 3rd through 12th grades from 49 schools. Students responded to surveys that assessed student trust in teachers, safety and identification with school. Free and Reduced Lunch (a proxy for SES), school level and ethnicity were included as control variables. Two hypotheses guided the study. Hypothesis 1 stated that student trust, safety and identification with school would positively covary. Hypothesis 2 predicted that student trust in teachers and perceptions of safety were school properties that would individually and collectively explain differences among schools in student identification with school. Both hypotheses were confirmed. The results of the hierarchical linear model indicated that student trust in teachers and school safety accounted for 98% of the 22% of variance that exists among schools in student identification. SES, school level and ethnicity were not significant predictors of identification with school. Findings suggest that student trust in teachers and perceptions of safety may significantly contribute to student identification above the effects of SES, ethnicity and school level.     

The Effect of Mobile Support Devices on the Anxiety and Self‐Efficacy of Hospital Float Staff

Floating is the act of staff moving from one unit to another based on the needs of the patients in a hospital. Many staff who float to different units express negative feelings, including anxiety and lack of self‐efficacy. However, floating is an economical and efficient method to use staff across the hospital, especially with current staffing shortages in the United States. This study investigated how the use of mobile performance support devices may help reduce anxiety and increase self‐efficacy for staff who float to different units. With access to multiple resources available on mobile devices, Bandura's social learning theory and self‐efficacy concept set the framework through modeling, observing, and imitating others in order to reproduce certain behaviors and tasks and believe in one's capability to perform. A quantitative study incorporating the retrospective pretest‐posttest design was conducted using the population of float staff, both nurses and respiratory therapists, from Children's Medical Center of Dallas. Both the State‐Trait Anxiety Inventory and General Self‐Efficacy Scale, along with a basic demographic tool, were used to explore anxiety and self‐efficacy in relation to the use of mobile performance support devices. Findings can be used to alleviate the negative feelings of staff toward the idea of floating.     

Supervision experiences of trans/gender expansive counselors-in-training: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

Clinical supervisors should be culturally competent working with transgender or gender expansive (TGE) counselors-in-training; however, minimal research exists regarding TGE counselors’ experiences in supervision. This interpretative phenomenological analysis study explored the supervision experiences of five TGE counselors-in-training. Findings revealed four super-ordinate themes and two sub-themes, and implications are discussed.     

The Effects of Concreteness on Mathematical Manipulative Choice

There is mixed evidence as to whether concrete manipulatives (e.g., toy animals) are better than abstract manipulatives (e.g., counters) for teaching mathematical concepts to children. Concreteness is defined as the amount of extraneous information a manipulative provides, and in this study we aimed to unpick which dimensions of concreteness influence manipulative choice. Researchers, teachers, and parents completed a comparative judgment task comparing images of manipulatives varying in different dimensions of concreteness, selecting which they would choose to teach arithmetic to children. The findings indicated homogeneous, 3-dimensional manipulatives were the most preferred across all groups to teach arithmetic to children, regardless of more extraneous features. This contradicts research recommendations to minimize the use of concrete manipulatives due to their distractive qualities. Instead, it suggests that some concrete features may be preferred in more naturalistic contexts. More research is required to investigate how different dimensions of concreteness influence learning outcomes for children both in artificial research contexts and in practice.