Pragmatism, Pedagogy and Philosophy A Model of Thought and Action in Action in Primary Technology and Science Teacher Education

This article reports on one outcome from a three-year study with pre-service primary teachers at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the influence of participants' prior educational experience and beliefs about the relationship between design & technology (D&T) and science on their lesson planning for these subjects during school placements. Data from the study support a three-domain model of pre-service teachers' thinking and action. When operating within the pragmatic domain, participants are primarily concerned with survival in the classroom, resulting in short-term planning which may contradict their epistemological and curricular beliefs. In the pedagogical domain, the focus shifts from the pre-service teacher themselves and their immediate survival to the learning potential of the activities they plan. There is evidence that some participants have progressed to operating within a philosophical domain, leading to clasroom practice which reflects and re-conceptualises pre-service teachers' core beliefs about the nature of, and relationship between, D&T and science. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Perception of ‘economic reality’ with Design and Technology

Conclusion It has been argued that Design and Technology teachers would be helped by clear distinction between the terms, industry, business and economic. This would help to avoid the confusion between particular ways of viewing business (eg. through an economic concept such as profit maximisation;) and the multi-faceted character of the activity under observation. By this reasoning, the economic dimension of Design and Technology resides in the analysis of needs and the evaluation of products according to the value of the resources used up, and the value and distribution of the resources and products created. The link with discussion of value judgements in the subject (eg. Riggs and Conway, 1991) is very clear. So also is the dependence of this analysis on the definition of needs and evaluation and, crucially, the perceived relationship between the two, in learning and classroom practice.     

Luft zum Atmen

Mehr Sicherheit im Umgang mit Trachealkanülen - Pflegende, die Patienten mit einer Trachealkanüle betreuen, müssen den Kanülenwechsel sicher beherrschen. Denn bei Komplikationen kann das Warten auf den Arzt katastrophale Folgen haben. Daher muss der Umgang mit den Kanülen zur Routine werden.     

Not all trade restrictions are created equally

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. This introduction has highlighted the importance of the entry/exit decision of firms in response to changes in trade barriers. However, it is typical in many of these models to use iceberg transport costs as a general form of trade barriers that can be interchangeable with ad valorem tariffs. I show that this is not always an appropriate conclusion. Specifically, I illustrate that profit for an exporter is more elastic in response to tariffs than iceberg transport costs, which affects the entry/exit decision of firms. This has implications for welfare analysis and empirical specifications.     

Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.