What Counts as Literacy for the 21st Century Youth

The writing practices of adolescent learners are far different from those of their parents and teachers. In 2020, adolescents engage in writing bursts through text messages and chats as they play games or share stories throughout the day with friends and family. It has been challenging for high school teachers to take advantage of these literacy activities in a meaningful way to improve writing skills. In this chapter, the authors focus on two adolescents who are in different grades and hold different views of what counts as writing practice. Still, it is clear that both believe in the importance of engaging in the work of writing to learn. The findings of our case studies suggest that one adolescent, a twelfth grader, sees writing practice as integral to his life. The other, a ninth grader, reports that he only engages in writing at school through formulaic assignments that are often boring and unchallenging. The authors found in their study that storytelling and digital technologies are tools for developing flow, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, engagement, and motivation.

Estimation Method of the Didactic Complexity of the School Textbooks on Various Disciplines

The article discusses the problem of evaluating the differential didactic complexity (DDC) of educational texts, which characterizes the difficulty of their perception and assimilation by pupil. It is shown that DDC is determined by: 1) the density of semantic information, depending on the abstraction degree of the terms used and their presence in the pupil’s thesaurus; 2) the complexity level of mathematical, chemical and other formulas; 3) the structural complexity of the text, depending on the average length of its constituent words and sentences. Multiplying the DDC of the text by its volume, you can find the integral didactic complexity of the text. For the evaluation of the textbook DDC expert selects one page fragments of text randomly, identifies the key concepts, “measures” their average information content, determines the share of formulas and their average complexity. In this case, the classification of concepts according to the abstraction degree is used, which takes into account the occurrence of a particular word in the thesaurus of a preschool, fifth-grader, ninth-grader and school graduate. The structural complexity of the text is also taken into account, depending on the average length of words and sentences. The analysis of textbooks for school graduates has shown that the most difficult disciplines to understand are biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics. As a result of evaluating computer science textbooks for 3rd, 5th, 9th and 11th grades it was found that their semantic information density and differential semantic complexity monotonically increase from 5.3 to 8.1 and from 5.7 to 10.4 respectively.

The Roots of Optimism

Starting high school is hard. One ninth grader recently described seeing her old middle school friends walk by her in the hallway “without a hi or a smile.” “I felt invisible,” she told me. To kids, minor incidents like this can seem like a sign of more bad things to come. As another teen said to me: “It makes me feel like I won't have any friends at my high school reunion.” As a scientist, I want to help kids stay optimistic during tough transitions in life. We've learned that if kids think that you can't change the kind of person you are—a “bully” or a “victim,” a “good” person or a “bad” one—then they believe small difficulties predict the rest of their life.

Audiovisual materials for oral expression development

This research had as its ultimate objective to analyze the effects of the use of audiovisual materials in the development of oral expression in 55 ninth grader of basic education at the Unidad Educativa “Vicente Anda Aguirre”, during the first part of the first term of 2018-2019 academic year. To achieve the objective, two evaluations were applied in two moments (pre-test and post-test). The assessments were developed based on Speaking skills through the Cambridge Preliminary English Text (PET) exam. Additionally, students and teachers were surveyed in order to obtain data related to the practice in the classroom. A booklet was designed which contained ten lesson plans. They were applied during the intervention period. The lessons focused on the use of audiovisual materials such as computer and internet, online tools, flipcharts, television and cartoons in combination with oral expression strategies such as: planning, execution, and evaluation. The data obtained was evaluated through the Cronbach Alpha test that allowed verifying the reliability of the results. After finishing the intervention with the study or experimental group, the post-test was applied, which allowed obtaining the results that were analyzed and contrasted with those obtained in the pre-test, using the T-Student test. The results obtained with the experimental group proved that the students improved their oral expression and experienced greater interest and motivation, through the use of audiovisual materials. Hence, it is recommended that teachers include in their didactic planning the use of audiovisual materials to improve students’ performance.

Course of Marie’s Treatment

Chapter 7 concludes the manual with the case presentation of Marie’s treatment. Marie, who was introduced at the beginning of the manual, is a 14-year-old ninth-grader with anxious inhibitions arising from her history of being bullied. She presented with a two-and-a-half-year history of severe primary social anxiety disorder, with comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia, and separation anxiety disorder, with episodes of dizziness and crying and inability to speak in any situation outside of her home or school classes. The authors describe how Marie’s treatment unfolded, the salient developments during the three phases of treatment, and how the particular use of understanding recurrent nightmares became a turning point in her treatment.

Technology-Enhanced Discovery

Exploration, innovation, proof: For students, teachers, and others who are curious, keeping your mind open and ready to investigate unusual or unexpected properties will always lead to learning something new. Technology can further this process, allowing various behaviors to be analyzed that were previously memorized or poorly understood. This article shares the adventure of one such discovery of exploration, innovation, and proof that was uncovered when a teacher tried to find a smoother way to model conic sections using dynamic technology. When an unexpected pattern regarding the locus of an ellipse's or hyperbola's foci emerged, he pitched the problem to a ninth grader as a challenge, resulting in a marvelous adventure for both teacher and student. Beginning with the evolution of the ideas that led to the discovery of the focal locus and ending with the significant student-written proof and conclusion, we hope to inspire further classroom use of technology to enhance student learning and discovery.