Can Early Childhood Curriculum Enhance Social-Emotional Competence in Low-Income Children? A Meta-Analysis of the Educational Effects

Research Findings: This meta-analysis examined 29 (quasi-)experimental studies that involved low-income children ages 3 to 5 who might be subject to risks of academic failure and other negative outcomes. Compared to the controls, children who learned with social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula demonstrated significantly improved social-emotional competence, with an effect size or standardized mean difference of 0.241 (95% confidence interval [0.194, 0.287]). However, the use of other curricula that lacked an intensive focus on SEL yielded nonsignificant effects on the social-emotional competence of low-income children. Type of curriculum, fidelity of curriculum implementation, and duration of intervention were found to moderate the educational effects. Practice or Policy: The findings of this meta-analysis contribute to the growing body of empirical evidence on the positive effects of early SEL curricula and explain how curricula can produce social-emotional benefits for low-income children in their early years.     

Indigenous knowledge in the science curriculum: avoiding neo-colonialism

Science education in Papua New Guinea has been influenced by neo-colonial practices that have significantly contributed to the silencing of the Papua New Guinea voice. This silencing has led to the production of science curriculum documents that are irrelevant to the students for whom they are written. To avoid being caught up in neo-colonial practices, Western science educators ought to consider the notion of cultural mediators. This position, I argue, infers an obligation to take responsibility for their actions and to consider postcolonial discourses as a way of understanding the relationships and dialogue between different ways of knowing.     

Primary School Children's Understanding of Severe Learning Difficulties

This paper reports two studies in which non‐handicapped (NH) children (7‐ and 11‐year‐olds) were interviewed about their understanding of severe learning difficulties (SLD). The NH children, 19 7‐year‐olds and 32 11‐year‐olds, had been involved in a year of fortnightly or weekly (respectively) link sessions with children with SLD. The NH children's understanding of SLD can be interpreted in terms of three conceptual changes, identified by Katz (1982) and Aboud (1988), occurring during the primary school years. These changes are: a shift in focus from concrete to abstract characteristics of children with SLD; increasing recognition of intra‐SLD group differences and inter (mainstream‐SLD) group similarities; and acknowledgement of the irrevocability of the key cues of SLD. These changes are discussed in the broader context of the development of social cognition.     

Parent Scaffolding in Children's Oral Reading

Parent coaching strategies during shared book reading were analysed according to the principles of scaffolding in a sample of 46 parent-child dyads during the latter half of grade one. The ways that parents responded to each of a child's oral reading errors or miscues were coded into levels of assistance that reflected increasing support at each successive level. In addition children's attempts at rereading miscued words were coded as successful or not. Parents often provided a string of feedback clues and analyses revealed that the level of support parents provided shifted up or increased when their child was unsuccessful in rereading a word after feedback. With increasing level of parental support children's success in rereading misread words increased. Moreover, children with weaker word recognition skill were offered feedback at higher levels of support by their parents. These results demonstrate how parents and children co-construct the feedback that parents provide when listening to their children read and the sensitivity on the part of parents to children's reading performance.     

Science Teachers’ Representations of Classroom Practice in the Process of Formative Assessment Design

Formative assessment has been recognized as an essential element of effective classroom practice; as a result, teachers are increasingly required to create formative assessments for their classrooms. This study examines data drawn from a long-term, site-based professional development program that supported a department of biology teachers in the iterative design and enactment of common formative assessment tools. We analyze teacher conversations to understand how teachers collaborated to design formative assessments. Results indicate that when teachers attended to problems of practice related to teaching evolution, increased transparency in their talk helped build consensus about the design of formative assessment tools. These results highlight the importance of encouraging transparency in teacher dialog when they are engaged in collaborative design of formative assessments.     

Abused, neglected, and nonmaltreated preschoolers'' ability to discriminate emotions in others: The effects of IQ

Sixty children between the ages of 3 and 5 participated in this study of children's ability to discriminate emotions in others. Twelve children were identified as neglected, and eight were identified as abused. Two additional groups of nonmaltreated children included one comparable on IQ and one with significantly higher intelligence. All children were given three tests: The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Borke Interpersonal Awareness Test and the Rothenberg Social Sensitivity Test. The results showed that normal children with the higher IQ were significantly better able to identify and discriminate other people's emotions from picture stories than were the other groups of children, who were not different from one another on any of the measures. Furthermore, when IQ was covaried in the ANOVAS, all group-differences disappeared. It was suggested that previous studies demonstrating inferior performance on measures of social cognition by maltreated children may have been due to the failure to control for IQ.