CHILDREN'S AFFECTIVE ORIENTATIONS IN PRESCHOOL AND THEIR INITIAL ADJUSTMENT TO KINDERGARTEN

Children's prior attitudes toward school may be an important entry factor to consider in their initial adjustment to kindergarten. This short‐term longitudinal study examined children's affective orientations and other school‐related perceptions and approaches to learning in late preschool and then 1 to 2 months after entry into kindergarten. Child, parent, and teacher reports were obtained, and classroom practices were observed. Findings showed that children who anticipated liking school demonstrated more positive approaches and adjustment in kindergarten than did less enthusiastic children. Children's approaches to learning in the classroom, reported by teachers and parents, were similar across the transition from preschool to kindergarten, despite notable differences in practices. Recommendations for practice include attending to children's affective orientations, involving multiple informants in school readiness assessments, and fostering communication among teachers in school transition activities.     

“No Excuses” Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement

Many most well-known charter schools in the United States use a “No Excuses” approach. We conduct the first meta-analysis of the achievement impacts of No Excuses charter schools, focusing on experimental, lottery-based studies. We estimate that No Excuses charter schools increase student math and literacy achievement by 0.25 and 0.17, respectively, for approximately each year of attendance. These are large and meaningful gains. Moreover, these effects are substantially larger than those of attending other kinds of charter schools. We discuss policy implications and offer necessary caveats.     

Early years learning,play pedagogy and social class

Despite 50 years and more of ‘progressive education’ in the United Kingdom, classed patterns of educational success and failure stubbornly prevail. So how, where and when does it all go wrong for the many children who continue to fail or underachieve? Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein, this article centres processes within early years education which are claimed to help launch children into careers as either educational successes or failures. Our data suggest that children more or less happily play their lives away in the progressive play pedagogies of early years education, in the process learning their position in social and ability hierarchies that help define their future careers inside and outside schools. That such hierarchies prevail is the fault of neither teachers nor parents. Indeed, it is what early years education settings are legitimised to do: sieve and sort, and make children ‘school ready’, pliant and prepared for a lifetime of learning to succeed or fail.     

Attachment and Temperament in the Early Life Course: A Meta‐Analytic Review

This meta‐analytic review examines the association between early attachment (assessed at 1–5 years) and child temperament (assessed at birth–12 years), and compares the strength of this association with recently documented meta‐analytic associations between early attachment and social competence, externalizing behavior, and internalizing symptoms. Based on 109 independent samples (N = 11,440) of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, temperament was weakly associated with attachment (in)security (d = .14, CI [0.08, 0.19]) but modestly associated with resistant attachment (d = .30, CI [0.21, 0.40]). Temperament was not significantly associated with avoidant (d = .10, CI [?0.02, 0.19]) or disorganized (d = .11, CI [?0.03, 0.25]) attachment. Across developmental domains, early attachment security was more strongly associated with social competence and externalizing behaviors than internalizing symptoms and temperament.     

Quadrotor vehicle control via sliding mode controller driven by sliding mode disturbance observer

Over the last decade, considerable interest has been shown from industry, government and academia to the design of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) autonomous aerial vehicles. This paper uses the recently developed sliding mode control driven by sliding mode disturbance observer (SMC-SMDO) approach to design a robust flight controller for a small quadrotor vehicle. This technique allows for a continuous control robust to external disturbance and model uncertainties to be computed without the use of high control gain or extensive computational power. The robustness of the control to unknown external disturbances also leads to a reduction of the design cost as less pre-flight analyses are required. The multiple-loop, multiple time-scale SMC-SMDO flight controller is designed to provide robust position and attitude control of the vehicle while relying only on knowledge of the limits of the disturbances. Extensive simulations of a 6 DOF computer model demonstrate the robustness of the control when faced with external disturbances (including wind, collision and actuator failure) as well as model uncertainties.