Forging futures? Engineering in the primary school curriculum

Starting with the research question, "How can the Primary School Curriculum be developed so as to spark Children's Engineering Imaginations from an early age?" this paper sets out to critically analyse the issues around embedding Engineering in the Primary School Curriculum from the age of 5 years. Findings from an exploratory research project suggest that in order to promote the concept of Engineering Education to potential university students (and in doing so begin to address issues around recruitment / retention within Engineering) there is a real need to excite and engage children with the subject from a young age. Indeed, it may be argued that within today's digital society, the need to encourage children to engage with Engineering is vital to the future sustainable development of our society. Whilst UK Government policy documents highlight the value of embedding Engineering into the school curriculum there is little or no evidence to suggest that Engineering has been successfully embedded into the elementary level school curriculum. Building on the emergent findings of the first stage of a longitudinal study, this paper concludes by arguing that Engineering could be embedded into the curriculum through innovative pedagogical approaches which contextualise project-based learning experiences within more traditional subjects including science, history, geography, literacy and numeracy.

The role of analogy in spelling in English primary school children - a partial intervention study

The English writing system is notoriously irregular in its orthography at the phonemic level. It was therefore proposed that focusing beginner-spellers’ attention on sound-letter relations at the sub-syllabic level might improve spelling performance. This hypothesis was tested in Experiments 1 and 2 using a ‘clue word’ paradigm to investigate the effect of analogy teaching intervention / non-intervention on the spelling performance of an experimental group and controls. The results overall showed the intervention to be effective in improving spelling, and this effect to be enduring. Experiment 3 demonstrated a greater application of analogy in spelling, when clue words, which participants used in analogy to spell test words, remained in view during testing. A series of regression analyses, with spelling entered as the criterion variable and age, analogy and phonological plausibility (PP) as predictors, showed both analogy and PP to be highly predictive of spelling. Experiment 4 showed that children could use analogy to improve their spelling, even without intervention, by comparing their performance in spelling words presented in analogous categories or in random lists. Consideration of children’s patterns of analogy use at different points of development showed three age groups to use similar patterns of analogy, but contrasting analogy patterns for spelling different words. This challenges stage theories of analogy use in literacy. Overall the most salient units used in analogy were the rime and, to a slightly lesser degree, the onset-vowel and vowel. Finally, Experiment 5 showed analogy and phonology to be fairly equally influential in spelling, but analogy to be more influential than phonology in reading. Five separate experiments therefore found analogy to be highly influential in spelling. Experiment 5 also considered the role of memory and attention in literacy attainment. The important implications of this research are that analogy, rather than purely phonics-based strategy, is instrumental in correct spelling in English.

Planning for success : an investigation into the management, organisation and feasibility of teaching modern foreign languages in the primary school.

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The perceptual basis of the understanding of some spatial adjectives in primary school children

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The future of engineering - Do primary school engineering education interventions leave a lasting impression?

This positional paper proposes a conceptual framework and methodological approach for use in a PhD study investigating the longer term educational and social impact of 'active' engineering focused interventions for children age 8-10 in the UK. The study will critically analyse how a child's participation in an engineering education activity contributes to the Engineering Capital that the child possesses; focusing on how the child's awareness and perceptions about engineering are affected. To achieve this aim it is proposed that Grounded Theory methodology be used to enable an in-depth analysis of participation from the perspective of the child participant. The study proposed will be longitudinal, taking place over three formative years for the education and career aspirations of the child, from age 8-10 to 11-13. Although the research is in its infancy, this paper will provide the opportunity to develop theory in an underdeveloped area of engineering education research.

School vision screening, ages 5-16 years:The evidence-base for content, provision and efficacy

The optometric profession in the UK has a major role in the detection, assessment and management of ocular anomalies in children between 5 and 16 years of age. The role complements a variety of associated screening services provided across several health care sectors. The review examines the evidence-base for the content, provision and efficacy of these screening services in terms of the prevalence of anomalies such as refractive error, amblyopia, binocular vision and colour vision and considers the consequences of their curtailment. Vision screening must focus on pre-school children if the aim of the screening is to detect and treat conditions that may lead to amblyopia, whereas if the aim is to detect and correct significant refractive errors (not likely to lead to amblyopia) then it would be expedient for the optometric profession to act as the major provider of refractive (and colour vision) screening at 5-6 years of age. Myopia is the refractive error most likely to develop during primary school presenting typically between 8 and 12 years of age, thus screening at entry to secondary school is warranted. Given the inevitable restriction on resources for health care, establishing screening at 5 and 11 years of age, with exclusion of any subsequent screening, is the preferred option. © 2004 The College of Optometrists.

Maintenance of communication in primary classrooms : some evidence for the role of elicitation and code-switching in English medium schools in Kenya, with implications for teaching

This is a study of specific aspects of classroom interaction primary school level in Kenya. The study entailed the identification of the sources of particular communication problems during the change-over period from Kiswahili to English medium teaching in two primary schools. There was subsequently an examination of the language resources which were employed by teachers to maintain pupil participation in communication in the light of the occurrence of possibility of occurrence of specific communication problems. The language resources which were found to be significant in this regard concerned firstly the use of different elicitation types by teachers to stimulate pupils into giving responses and secondly teachers' recourse to code-switching from English to Kiswahili and vice-versa. It was also found in this study that although the use of English as the medium of instruction in the classrooms which were observed resulted in certain communication problems, some of these problems need not have arisen if teachers had been more careful in their use of language. The consideration of this finding, after taking into account the role of different elicitation types and code-switching as interpretable from data samples had certain implications which are specified in the study for teaching in Kenyan primary schools. The corpus for the study consisted of audio-recordings of English, Science and Number-Work lessons which were later transcribed. Relevant data samples were subsequently extracted from transcripts for analysis. Many of the samples have examples of cases of communication breakdowns, but they also illustrate how teachers maintained interaction with pupils who had yet to acquire an operational mastery of English. This study thus differs from most studies on classroom interaction because of its basic concern with the examination of the resources available to teachers for overcoming the problem areas of classroom communication.