Journal for the Study of Education and Development: Infancia y Aprendizaje

This paper discusses the skills required for students to be able to access, comprehend and use documents independently, both in print and online. We start with a simple example in order to illustrate the demands posed by document-based school tasks on students’ reading literacy skills. We then propose a descriptive framework to broaden the construct of reading literacy so as to account for document processes, including search, evaluation and multiple-text integration. We review some studies illustrating the challenges of these processes for primary school students, and we discuss extant research investigating the effectiveness of instructional interventions.

Teaching is one of nature’s remarkable inventions. Despite over two millennia of academic discussion about teaching, it remains in need of a broad scientific footing. The cognitive and developmental sciences, writ large, are candidates for such a footing. The purpose of this article is to go beyond teaching as knowledge transmission and present an expanded cognitive developmental account of teaching’s remarkable complexity. A minimalist and maximalist approach for describing teaching are presented, with a preference offered for the latter. It can serve as a map for backward engineering so as to get to the origins and developmental trajectories of the map of teaching’s components. An expanded mind-to-mind coupling version of the complexity of normative adult teaching is presented which includes stage-setting with emotion-, motivation- and mind-reading, organizing teaching sessions, scaffolding, detecting knowledge gaps and intervening by knowledge transmission strategies intended to reduce the gaps. In a backward engineering move, research is presented on infants’ abilities for some of what is presented for adults. Teaching is also prosocial, with heart-to-heart coupling. It is inextricably intertwined with teaching, and is another part of teaching’s complexity. Teaching’s prosociality is analysed via the economic concept of non-rivalry. It is shown that teaching is a form of helping behaviour but is not altruistic. Directions for further work in this maximalist approach to the scientific study of teaching are presented.

This study analyses the integration of Mapuche-Huilliche students who participate in a school sport programme based on the teaching for understanding model in a situation of social risk. In this context, 41 students (aged nine to 12) participate, 24 of whom are from the aforementioned ethnic group. To collect data, participant observation was conducted for eight months and group and individual interviews were held. The results show that the Mapuche-Huilliche students recognize themselves as members of the same collective when participating in games associated with their ethnic group. Their main motives for participating in school sport are the teaching approach and the acquisition of social capital. Cooperative learning activities are shown to foster positive interactions with non-Mapuche students.

Acquiring information from the Web creates new educational demands even in elementary school. Children need to scrutinize source information (‘sourcing’) to choose trustworthy information. So far, few studies have documented young readers’ abilities to identify and evaluate source information. With two studies, we seek to gather more evidence on elementary students’ sourcing skills and use. In study 1, we investigate to what extent fourth graders can identify source information and evaluate informants’ expertise and intentions in simplistic, age-appropriate reading tasks. In study 2, we explore whether fourth graders spontaneously apply their sourcing skills when reading simplified multiple documents. Results suggest that fourth graders can successfully identify source information and evaluate informants’ expertise and intentions in simple and direct tasks but fail to apply this ability to more complex and implicit tasks. Implications for information literacy education are discussed.

This paper discusses the learning and development experiences of academics who make transitions between higher education institutions involving multiple communities. In these communities, they may act on the periphery as both newcomers and academics with established credentials that may have a significant impact on their participation. In acknowledging this, this paper uses Lave and Wenger’s concept of Community of Practice to better understand how these academics gain their legitimacy, and whether mentoring has a specific role to play in their development into full members of communities. Based on the analysis of the themes generated from 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews with academics who have experienced transitions between higher education institutions, this paper suggests that restricted access to a mentoring programme may lead these academics to question their status benefits and their development into full participants of communities. Referring to the examples of mentoring programmes used in other universities, this paper shows that among experienced academics, mentoring can contribute to their development and provide a range of psychosocial benefits from the increased level of support.