Recently, Bakhtinian philologists have charged scholars of education with misapplying Bakhtin's scholarship in their field. In this critical essay, Eugene Matusov reviews two recent edited collections relevant to this issue: Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman's Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning and Bonny Norton…

This is a brief response to some of the issues raised by Gorard and Fitz in their paper, "What counts as evidence in the school choice debate?" published in the "British Educational Research Journal" v32, n6, 2006. Gorard and Fitz claim a "basic arithmetic error" (p. 807) in giving equal weighting to all LEAs (Noden,…

In a series of publications, the author and his colleagues have obtained scores from students in higher education on different questionnaires, and they have described the relationships among these scores using the statistic known as Wilks' [lambda]. Burt (2005) has criticized that the use of this measure is inappropriate, arguing (1) that the…

P. J. Kellman, P. Garrigan, and T. F. Shipley's theory of 3-dimensional object interpolation asserts that existing data, as well as logical considerations, support the view that an identical contour interpolation process underlies the interpolation of partially camouflaged and partially occluded objects (modal completion and amodal completion,…

Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-empiricists have underestimated the difficulty of providing evidence against the amodal approach to concepts and higher cognition. I highlight three key…

Research should be judged by the questions asked and the critiques offered.

In order to better understand the worth of aesthetic experience in encountering poetry, fresh perspectives are helpful. This paper introduces the reader to modern stylistics: that is linguistic examinations of "the speaker's meaning" in literature and notes such "scientific" approaches to poetry do find common metaphysical ground with leading…

In this paper I aim to show that the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing and, therefore, that writing transforms our cognitive abilities. I do this from the perspective of cognitive integration: completing a complex cognitive, or mental, task is enabled by a co-ordinated interaction between neural…

"Scholarship Reconsidered" by Ernest Boyer generates a flurry of theoretical and applied activity. Much of the research centers on the concept of the scholarship of teaching as researchers explore what constitutes scholarship, which is often misdirected. Through lexical statistics and rhetorical analysis, the text is examined according to its…

This article presents a critical analysis of empirical studies assessing literacy and other domains of academic achievement among children with cochlear implants. A variety of recent studies have demonstrated benefits to hearing, language, and speech from implants, leading to assumptions that early implantation and longer periods of implant should…

The Soviet school system proved to be very effective in solving specific problems related to eradicating illiteracy, expanding the network of educational institutions, training work force, forming the scientific and technical potential of the country, developing national/ethic educational systems, and ensuring that education was accessible. By the…

In this article, the author discusses the advantages and the disadvantages of using surprise elements in teaching mathematics. According to the author, there are three key ideas concerning the element of surprise: (1) The ethical aspects of teachers' manipulation of their students in order to construct surprise; (2) Every mathematical task…

The role of businesses in public schools in the United States has expanded during the era of standards-based reform. This article provides a critical analysis of (a) the argument fundamental to that business influence across the spectrum of involvement; "schools should be run like businesses" and (b) the assertion that "if done so,…

In a collaborative effort in teaching literary analysis, two professors aimed to make the usually seamless act of reading visible and ideologically bound by emphasizing the constructed nature of interpretation. A course was pieced together that asked questions about literature, that assumed that both students and teachers are subjects constructed…

Text-linguistic studies, e.g. the use of French determinants as compared with German, are not fruitful in teaching foreign language as such, though they may be of relevance in other grammatical studies, and particularly in teaching literature. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)