Dot-to-dot practice enhances Children's handwriting: The advantage of a multi-session training protocol

Handwriting instruction commonly involves the practice of non-linguistic writing-like patterns. Here, we compare the transfer to Arabic sentence-writing of different practice scheduling of the Invented Letter Task (ILT), a simple dot-to-dot connecting task, aiming to decide best-practice scheduling. Ninety-seven 7- to 8-year-old public-school Arab Israeli second-graders were assigned randomly, within-class, to five study groups: three single-session practice groups (different amounts, with 60/180/360 repetitions), a 360-repetition multi-session practice group (distributed across four days), and an untrained control group. Handwriting was assessed at pre-training, 24-h, and 4–5 weeks post-training. The findings revealed that by 4–5 weeks post-training all the practice groups wrote more fluently or accurately than the control group. The multi-session practice group's handwriting performance was advantageous to that of the other groups, being more fluent than the other groups and more legible than the control group. The findings suggest that practicing simple grapho-motor tasks may enhance handwriting abilities.     

Only tomorrow: Delayed effects of teachers attitude on motor skill learning

Motor skill tasks provide unique opportunities to examine the impact of teachers' feedback on learners’ performance, as the quality and quantity of motor behavior can be objectively assessed during the practice session (online-gains) and afterwards (delayed, offline-gains). We tested the learning and overnight retention of a newly instructed movement sequence in young healthy adults in three conditions of teacher-learner interaction, determined by the feedback afforded by the teacher: Indifferent-minimal (IM), General-encouragement (GE), Positive-social-comparison (PSC). All three conditions resulted in robust within-session gains in speed with no loss of accuracy. However, overnight, most trainees in the GE and PSC groups, but not in the IM group, expressed additional delayed gains. PSC group also exhibited feedback-induced increase in positive mood, which was correlated with their delayed gains. These results indicate that teacher-learner interactions during the learning session can affect long-term skill by modulating memory consolidation processes, even when within-session gains are unaffected.     

Professional Development on the Science of Learning and teachers' Performative Thinking—A Pilot Study

This pilot study investigated how a brief professional development session on the science of learning impacted teachers' attributions of usefulness to both scientific and performative concepts about teaching. Ratings were collected from teachers attending five events across the United Kingdom (N = 585) before and after receiving a 90‐min training session. Initial ratings of scientific concepts were positively correlated with age, while initial ratings of performative concepts were negatively correlated with years of experience. Immediately following professional development, the value teachers attributed to scientific concepts for understanding their practice increased, while their valuing of performative concepts decreased. A follow‐up study with a subsample (N = 153) revealed the impact was reduced but persisted 6–12 weeks later. Results are discussed in terms of the potential for a scientific understanding of learning to empower educators as expert professionals.     

Using a games console in the primary classroom: Effects of ‘Brain Training’ programme on computation and self‐esteem

It is known that computer games are motivating for children, but there is limited direct evidence of their effects on classroom learning. The aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the effects of a commercial off‐the‐shelf computer game on children's mental computation skills and on aspects of self‐perceptions. A pre–post design was employed. The participants were 71 primary school children (10–11 years old) from three classes. In School 1, a class of 21 children used a games console for 20 minutes each day, running a ‘brain training’ game. Two comparison groups were used. In School 2, 31 children used ‘Brain Gym’ techniques in their class over the treatment period. In school three, a class of 19 children acted as no‐treatment controls. The treatment period was 10 weeks. Significant pre–post gains were found in the games console group for both accuracy and speed of calculations, while results for the two comparison groups were mixed. The games console group showed significant gains in global self‐esteem, but not in other aspects of self‐concept. The comparison groups showed no significant gains in any area of self‐perceptions. There is a need now for upscaling to investigate generalisability.     

物理师范生说课技能培养的探索

随着新课程改革的推进,说课活动越来越受到学校及教师的重视。提高师范生的说课技能自然成为高师院校的一项重要任务。文章分析了说课技能对师范生的意义及作用,详细介绍了经过长期教学实践形成的课前预热、课中演练、课后升华的物理说课技能训练模式,总结了近几年物理说课技能培养取得的成效,特别强调了物理说课技能培养中形成的两大特色:低成本实验的应用以及"自主学习、合作学习、探究学习"在教学中的体现。     

Effects of stress controllability,immunization, and therapy on the subsequent defeat of colony intruders

Three experiments investigated the influence that various stress-controllability manipulations had on the defensive behaviors of rats when they were subsequently tested as intruders in previously established, aggressive colonies of conspecifics. In Experiment 1, naive subjects that had received a session of 80 shocks in a tube showed an enhanced series of defensive responses and received more bites than did a group of restrained nonshocked rats as colony intruders 24 h later. These two measures were also found to be positively correlated within each group. In Experiment 2, a group that was given 80 yoked inescapable shocks, in contrast to a group that had wheel-turn escape training and a restrained nonshocked control group, displayed more defeat and was bitten more frequently when tested as intruders on the following day. In Experiment 3, 60 trials of wheel-turn escape training were given 4 h prior to (i.e., immunization) or after (i.e., therapy) a session of 60 inescapable tube shocks. During resident-intruder testing 24 h later, both of these groups showed less defeat and received fewer bites than did an inescapably preshocked group but did not differ from a restrained nonshocked control group. These findings clearly indicate that stress controllability alters species-typical defensive responses, and their implications concerning other learned helplessness effects and interpretations are discussed.     

Behavioural Peer Tutoring: training 16‐year‐old tutors to employ the ‘pause,prompt and praise’ method with 12‐year‐old remedial readers

Abstract Eight 16‐year‐old, low achieving pupils were trained to tutor reading using the ‘Pause, Prompt and Praise’ method. The effectiveness of training such tutors was investigated through a tutorial programme in which these eight older pupils tutored eight 12‐year‐old remedial children who were retarded in reading. The programme consisted of 24 tutorial sessions conducted over eight weeks. Two matched control groups of remedial readers were also included in the experiment. One consisted of eight pupils tutored by a group of eight untrained tutors who tutored during the same sessions using the same materials. The second control group consisted of a third group of remedial readers who read silently, without a tutor. The experimental group of tutees, who had a mean pre‐test reading age of 8 years 4 months, made a mean gain of 6 months in reading accuracy by the end of the programme. The tutees of control group I who had received tutoring from untrained tutors made a mean gain of 2.4 months. The pupils of control group II who read silently without a tutor made a mean gain of 1.8 months. Analysis of covariance showed the gains of the experimental group to be statistically significantly different from the gains of the two control groups.     

The Behavior of Teachers and the Productive Behavior of their Pupils

This experiment investigated the effects of progress self-monitoring on children’s achievement and percepts of self-efficacy in the context of mathematical competency development. Children lacking subtraction skills received didactic instruction in subtraction and practice opportunities. Some children (self-monitoring) monitored their own progress after each training session, whereas others (external monitoring) had their progress monitored by an adult. A third group received no monitoring. Results showed that self- and external monitoring led to significantly higher percepts of efficacy, skill, and persistence compared with no monitoring. The two progress monitoring conditions did not differ significantly on these measures. The utility of self-monitoring procedures in actual classrooms is discussed.     

Using video self-modelling to increase active learning responses during small-group reading instruction for primary school pupils with social emotional and mental health difficulties

Effectiveness of a video self-modelling (VSM) intervention was examined with primary schoolchildren who attended a full-time special education programme for pupils with social emotional and behavioural difficulties and who exhibited inappropriate behaviour during small-group reading instruction. A randomised multiple-probe baseline design was used in this study in four subjects with a follow-up phase 6 weeks after intervention. Four children aged 10 were videotaped during reading instruction to determine levels of active learning and behavioural difficulties. Intervention took place at the teacher’s desk or table 3–5 minutes immediately before the child’s designated time for reading group instruction. During intervention, the children were shown carefully selected brief segments of their own video that had been recorded during the previous session. Results indicated VSM was an effective intervention for increasing active learning responses and for reducing behavioural difficulties during reading instruction. Optimum results were maintained for more than 8 weeks after intervention. These results support VSM as an effective antecedent intervention and add to the growing body of evidence-based practices for elementary school pupils who have social emotional and mental health difficulties.     

The influence of self-assessment practices on online training for investigative interviewing skills

This paper investigates how 192 trainees’ self-assessment practices and personal attributes related to their success in an online interview training program. Performance was measured pre- and post-training by evaluating the use of open-ended questions and positive interviewing behaviors. Personal data and a pre-training survey on self-assessment practices (i.e., SEFI, seeking external feedback through inquiry; SEFM, seeking external feedback through monitoring; SIF, seeking internal feedback; and SR, self-reflection) were also collected. Trainees with higher levels of SEFI had larger learning gains from the training, whereas trainees with higher levels of SEFM or SIF had smaller learning gains. Trainees with lower interviewing skills before the training, and those from policing backgrounds, demonstrated larger learning gains. Younger trainees evidenced a larger increase in the use of open-ended questions, while older trainees showed greater changes in prevalence of positive interviewing behaviors. The implications of the findings for the development of training programs are discussed.     

Effects of skill training on working memory capacity

In this study we examined the effects of skill training, in particular mental abacus and music training, on working memory. Two groups of participants—children who had received mental abacus training and their controls—participated in Experiment 1. All participants performed the following span tasks: forward digit span, backward digit span, non-word span, operation span, simple spatial span, and complex spatial span tasks. Children (mean age: 12 years) who had received training exhibited greater simple spatial spans, but not other spans. In Experiment 2, the same span tests were given to groups of children (mean age: 12 years) and adults (mean age: 22 years) who had received music training and to their controls. For adults, the experimental group performed better than the control group with respect to both the digit span and non-word span tests. For children, the experimental group performed better than did the control group in all of the span tests. We discuss our results in terms of the domain-specific effects of skill training on working memory.     

Training Mispronunciation Correction and Word Meanings Improves Children’s Ability to Learn to Read Words

Previous research has suggested that learning to read irregular words depends upon knowledge of a word’s meaning and the ability to correct imperfect decoding attempts by reference to the known pronunciations of a word. In an experimental training study, 84 children ages 5–7 years were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. Children in the intervention group participated in a 4-week programme in which they were taught to correct mispronunciations of spoken words as well as being taught the meanings of those words. Children in the control group received no additional teaching. The intervention group made significant gains in their ability to correct mispronunciations and to read and define the taught words; these gains also generalised to a comparable set of untaught control words. Children can be taught to correct errors in the pronunciation of irregular words, and this may produce generalised effects on learning to read.     

Enhancing parent-child relationship through dialogic reading

Dialogic reading (DR) has been identified as an effective strategy for enhancing children’s literacy skills in Western and Asian contexts. Given that storytelling is a shared experience between adults and children, parent–child relationships is hypothesised to be enhanced by DR. Despite this possibility, there has been no systematic attempt to examine the possible impacts of DR on the parent–child relationship. This study bridges this gap in the literature by studying the relationship between adults and children before and after training in the practice of dialogic reading techniques. Forty-eight Cantonese-speaking parents with children aged between 3 and 12 were recruited from schools. They were assessed prior to and after undergoing a four-hour dialogic reading training programme with a two-hour follow-up session using the Parent–Child Relationship Inventory. The results of this study suggest that DR has considerable potential for improving parent–child relationships. The findings are discussed in relation to the situation of Chinese learners in the Hong Kong context.     

Among Those Present

Abstract

Using a multiple-baseline design, investigators examined the effects of an in-service teacher training program on several teaching behaviors of elementary school teachers under both training and post-training conditions. Two non-equivalent control group designs were used to evaluate a principal-classroom-visits package, which was developed to help maintain teachers’ post-training use of the skills. Possible effects of observer presence on the post-training maintenance of the behaviors were examined. The in-service training program successfully produced changes in all of the targeted teaching behaviors. Under post-training conditions, after several weeks in which no observers were present, teachers used the skills at levels comparable to those of teachers who were observed weekly. Several teachers in each group retained use of the skills after training, suggesting that the principal-classroom-visits may be necessary as a maintenance procedure for only some teachers. Both the in-service teacher training program and the principal-classroom-visits were rated very favorably by teachers on evaluation questionnaires.     

Teacher candidates’ mastery of phoneme-grapheme correspondence: massed versus distributed practice in teacher education

Matching phonemes (speech sounds) to graphemes (letters and letter combinations) is an important aspect of decoding (translating print to speech) and encoding (translating speech to print). Yet, many teacher candidates do not receive explicit training in phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Difficulty with accurate phoneme production and/or lack of understanding of sound-symbol correspondence can make it challenging for teachers to (a) identify student errors on common assessments and (b) serve as a model for students when teaching beginning reading or providing remedial reading instruction. For students with dyslexia, lack of teacher proficiency in this area is particularly problematic. This study examined differences between two learning conditions (massed and distributed practice) on teacher candidates’ development of phoneme-grapheme correspondence knowledge and skills. An experimental, pretest-posttest-delayed test design was employed with teacher candidates (n?=?52) to compare a massed practice condition (one, 60-min session) to a distributed practice condition (four, 15-min sessions distributed over 4 weeks) for learning phonemes associated with letters and letter combinations. Participants in the distributed practice condition significantly outperformed participants in the massed practice condition on their ability to correctly produce phonemes associated with different letters and letter combinations. Implications for teacher preparation are discussed.     

The effects of specialized training on caregivers and children in early-years settings: An evaluation of the foundation course in playgroup practice

This study examined the effects of a 120-hour preschool training course on caregivers’ behavior and children’s development in early-years settings. Sixteen caregivers attending this training course and 17 comparison caregivers were assessed on a measure of caregiver sensitivity in the child-care centers in which they were employed. Sixty-eight children, two from each center, were assessed for social and cognitive competence. Both the training and comparison caregivers and children were observed before and after the former group attended the training course. Caregivers who received training made significant gains in positive relationship and decreased in levels of detachment. The children in their care made significant gains in complex social and cognitive play from pre- to post-training. The comparison group adults and children showed no significant improvements from pre- to post-test times.     

基于微信平台的翻转课堂在新入职护士实训教学中的应用

目的:探讨基于微信平台的翻转课堂模式在新入职护士实训教学中的应用效果。方法:将我院老年科46名新入职护士按电脑随机分组(为传统组23人,改良组23人),传统组采用老年病科常规技能实训模式培训,改良组采用翻转课堂联合微信实训模式培训,运用新入职护士自我评价;技能考核;轮转护士优服满意度评分,对微信翻转课堂模式的培训效果进行评定。结果:与常规技能实训模式相比,改良组新入职护士实训后自我评价比较、技能考核成绩、轮转护士的优服满意度评分有显著意义(P<0.05)。结论:运用微信翻转课堂实训模式进行规范化培训,可以提高新护士主动学习能力和学习效果;提升患者对新入职护士护理服务质量的评价,为医院培养老年护理骨干搭建优势平台。     

Contextual Variation and Memory Retrieval at Six Months

In 2 experiments we asked whether training in multiple contexts could eliminate context-dependent memory retrieval at 6 months as it does for adults. We found that 24-hour retention was disrupted when infants were trained in one context and tested in another but not when they were trained in multiple contexts prior to testing in a novel context (Experiment 1). After a long delay, however, training in multiple contexts did not facilitate memory retrieval in a novel context: An otherwise effective retrieval cue (the training mobile) did not alleviate forgetting 3 weeks later when it was presented in a novel context (Experiment 2). These findings demonstrate that multiple learning contexts can override the debilitating effects of an altered context on memory retrieval at 6 months, but only over the short term. The resistance of older memories to retrieval in novel contexts after long periods of disuse may be adaptive, insuring that potentially inappropriate or irrelevant memories will not be expressed.     

Bilingual Baby: Foreign Language Intervention in Madrid's Infant Education Centers

The first years of life represent a unique window of opportunity for foreign language learning. However, key questions are: How much and what kind of foreign language exposure is needed to ignite learning? We conducted a foreign language (English) intervention in four public Infant Education Centers in Madrid, Spain. Intervention children (N = 126, ages 7–33.5 months) experienced 18 weeks of daily, hour‐long, group English sessions with native‐speaking tutors, using a brain‐based method of infant language development. Intervention infants were compared to a matched Current Practice Comparison (CPC) group of peers in the same schools. Intervention children outperformed the CPC group, showing rapid gains on measures of English word comprehension and English speech production. Schools' neighborhood wealth was not a significant factor in learning. Follow‐up analyses show that the language gains were fully retained 18 weeks post‐intervention. Children's foreign language skills advance quickly in school using this research‐to‐practice curriculum.     

Delayed Disaster Impacts on Academic Performance of Primary School Children

Social disruption caused by natural disasters often interrupts educational opportunities for children. However, little is known about children's learning in the following years. This study examined change in academic scores for children variably exposed to a major bushfire in Australia. Comparisons were made between children attending high, medium, and low disaster-affected primary schools 2–4 years after the disaster (n = 24,642; 9–12 years). The results showed that in reading and numeracy expected gains from Year 3 to Year 5 scores were reduced in schools with higher levels of bushfire impact. The findings highlight the extended period of academic impact and identify important opportunities for intervention in the education system to enable children to achieve their academic potential.