Discusses a study that focused on assessing with children the story outline for developing an animated story about children's fear of the dark. Describes interviews and observations that showed children's reactions to fear of the dark and their response toward the planned visuals for the animation. (LRW)

Makes an evocative plea for accepting children where they are developmentally and maintaining a vision of future possibility. Claims that adults are being guided and informed by children, and adjust their behaviors accordingly. Advocates encountering the child with a willingness to learn from the relationship, with the result that the educator…

Valid assessment of physical activity must be unobtrusive, practical to administer, and specific about physical activity type, frequency, duration, and intensity. Assessment methods can be categorized according to whether they provide direct or indirect (e.g., self-report) observation of physical activity, body motion, physiological response…

Examined peer intervention in bullying among 58 first through sixth graders, using naturalistic observations on school playgrounds. Found that peers were present during 88 percent of bullying episodes and intervened in 19 percent. Interventions toward the bully were more likely to be aggressive. Interventions toward the victim or the dyad were…

Examined the temporal relationship between peer rejection and aggression as seen in videotaped encounters among 86 preschoolers from 6 preschool classrooms. Found that acts of rejection were reliably coded. Aggressive acts and acts of rejection tended to occur closely together in time. Found a clear temporal pattern in which children were likely…

A case study of learning transfer demonstrates the possible effect of influential observation on linear regression analysis. A diagnostic method that tests for violation of assumptions, multicollinearity, and individual and multiple influential observations helps determine which observation to delete to eliminate bias. (SK)

Indices of happiness and unhappiness were defined, and a corresponding observation system was developed and implemented with five students in an adult education classroom. Results indicate the definitions and the observation system reliably identified frequencies of happiness and/or unhappiness indices for each student across separate activities.…

Discusses the observation web, a technique used to reflect on activities that are used in the English-as-foreign-language classroom. The observation web is divided into 8 sections, each of which corresponds to a certain feature of an activity used in the lesson: linguistic, cognitive, progressive, informative, teacher-centered, student-centered,…

This study explores the gendered discourse of social-based computer-mediated contexts. Specifically, the critical ethnography explicates the patterns of discourse of male-based and female-based Internet chatrooms and discusses the findings of participant observation. (Contains 36 references.) (Author/LRW)

A group of Maine birdwatchers recognizes that the presence or absence of migrating songbirds is related to complex biospheric patterns. For schoolchildren, community groups, and environmental scientists, such local natural history observations can be a pathway to perceiving and understanding global ecological change and then to developing…

This article discusses a unique distance learning facility that allows people, while they are busy working with individuals in another corner of the room, to see what exactly is going on in a learning center and how children are communicating with one another. The article is divided up into the following sections: A New Window on Learning;…

The emphasis placed on prolonged engagement, fieldwork, and participant observation has prevented wide-scale use of ethnography in counseling psychology. This article provides a discussion of ethnography in terms of definition, process, and potential ethical dilemmas. The authors propose that ethnographically informed methods can enhance…

Providing support to beginning teachers is essential for two reasons: the need to retain qualified beginning teachers and the need for beginning teachers to become effective practitioners as soon as possible. Induction and mentoring programs have been effective in ameliorating some of the causes--including lack of support--of the high attrition…

Peer observation of teaching can be seen as a means by which the quality of the teaching and learning process in higher education establishments is both accounted for and improved. The majority of the literature to date has focused on the mechanisms for implementing peer observation systems and its links to enhanced professional practice. However,…

In this article, the authors discuss a literature-based activity that helps students discover the importance of making detailed observations. In an inspiring children's classic book, "Everybody Needs a Rock" by Byrd Baylor (1974), the author invites readers to go "rock finding," laying out 10 rules for finding a "perfect" rock. In this way, the…