Helping Head Start Parents Promote Their Children's Kindergarten Adjustment: The Research‐Based Developmentally Informed Parent Program

Head Start enhances school readiness during preschool, but effects diminish after children transition into kindergarten. Designed to promote sustained gains, the Research‐based Developmentally Informed (REDI) Parent program (REDI‐P) provided home visits before and after the kindergarten transition, giving parents evidence‐based learning games, interactive stories, and guided pretend play to use with their children. To evaluate impact, two hundred 4‐year‐old children in Head Start REDI classrooms were randomly assigned to REDI‐P or a comparison condition (mail‐home math games). Beyond the effects of the classroom program, REDI‐P promoted significant improvements in child literacy skills, academic performance, self‐directed learning, and social competence, demonstrating the utility of the approach in promoting gains in cognitive and social‐emotional skills evident after the transition into kindergarten.     

Online Professional Development for K–12 Educators: Benefits for School Districts with Applications for Community College Faculty Professional Development

Hillsborough Community College's IT3-Professional Development Services makes available to educators in the school district of Hillsborough County a series of online courses focused on professional development. The program boasts a retention rate exceeding 78%, with over 500 educators served. The program is self funded and pays for itself and an instructor.     

Why Faculty–Student Interaction Matters in the First Year Experience

Increasing expectations are being placed on higher education institutions to ensure the economic relevance of research and knowledge creation as well as developing the skill needs of workers in modern knowledge‐based societies. In the UK, workplace learning has long been a feature of higher education in certain subject areas, and in the late 1990s the idea of work experience for all students re‐emerged as a significant issue. Various studies have considered the relationship between work placement experiences during higher education and students' subsequent transition into employment after graduation, but there has been less recent research exploring how the placement experience translates into academic development. This article presents some of the findings of a study on the effects, as perceived by undergraduates themselves, of work experience placements on aspects of learning as well as employability. The majority of placement students indicate personal and intellectual development and report increased levels of confidence and enhanced motivation towards study. However, national data show a continuing decline in the numbers of UK students taking up placements, and the study suggests that more general moves towards flexibility within undergraduate programmes may be contributing to this decline.     

Participants' Personal Perceptions of Mentoring

This study is an investigation of the views and perceptions held by one group of mentors, mentees and university lecturers about the recent policy changes in Initial Teacher Training (ITT) which have led to the closer collaboration between Higher Education Institutions (HEls) and schools under the umbrella of partnership.

It takes the form of a survey and uses a structured questionnaire and semi‐structured interviews as its source of data collection.

It then analyses and interprets the data obtained with the aim of using the information gathered to make recommendations for the future of partnership.     

New media and new politics with old cemeteries and disused railways: advocacy goes digital in Singapore

This article seeks to demonstrate the significance of new media in reconfiguring and expanding the politics of conservation in the rapidly urbanizing postcolonial city state of Singapore. The critical role of new media is examined, in providing new access and connectivity to the efforts of non-governmental organizations, particularly heritage groups in the republic in advocating for the conservation of lands around the former Malayan Railway line and Bukit Brown Cemetery in Singapore. In two case studies, activists and enthusiasts of all ages are seen to quickly build up and share an organic knowledge and memory base in cyberspace, through postings on Facebook and sharing of digital photographs and videos, recorded with digital cameras and smartphones. These actions are significant as collectively staking cultural ownerships of heritage sites about to be lost. As new media are promptly adopted as tools for social mobilization with the ability to circulate events, news and debates through Google+ to Twitter, new publics, new community leaders and new alliances begin to emerge in a scene once dominated by traditional and formal organizations. Like any other medium, new media possess affordances of its own and impact the meanings that are conserved and interpreted through heritage. With Singaporeans ranked in the world as the most frequent users of new media portals like Facebook, the authors explore the cultivation of a new form of citizenry via new media in pushing for the politics of memory, nature and heritage in the highly modernized cityscape.     

AgeLine: A Database of Social Gerontology Literature

AgeLine, an EBSCOhost database, focuses on literature on topics relating to people over the age of 50. AgeLine is geared to professionals in aging-related fields, such as health care professionals, social workers, and caregivers, as well as consumers. This column includes a sample search and a discussion of additional AgeLine features.     

Unapologetic women, "Comic Men" and feminine spectatorship in David E. Kelley's Ally McBeal

–This essay examines how the narrative structure of the Fox primetime television hit Ally McBeal opens the text to a feminist reading. Despite critics' charges to the contrary, I argue that producer/screenwriter David E. Kelley's teleplays construct a preferred feminine spectator position that appropriates dominant male gazes in three ways: the feminine setting of the law firm, the refusal of women characters to yield to the male gaze, and the “comic spectacle of maleness.” Ally McBeal's preferred feminine spectatorship stance is articulated through comic strategies in which gender ideals are questioned through mockery, thus opening a safe space for viewers to reject dominant patriarchal meanings and to experience a feminist epistemology.     

The Lack of Fidelity Between Cognitively Complex Constructs and Conventional Test Development Practice

Do current test development practices align well with the cognitively complex constructs being called for in the educational reform movement? What types of test development practices are needed to develop measures of cognitively complex constructs?     

Application of behavioral technology to small group discussion with university students

Tokens were given to university students in two separate experiments for participation in small group discussions. In the first experiment a multiple baseline design was used with two small groups in an educational psychology class. In the second, 10 small groups were assessed on group participation without and with a token condition. Results of the first experiment were inconclusive though favorable; the second experiment resulted in a significant difference (t=15.41; P<.001, df=77) in group participation when tokens were delivered contingent upon group participation. The results indicate that token technology can be an effective technique to increase small group participation when a variety of back-up reinforcers is offered. The results are discussed in terms of possible applications of token technology within a university setting.