Touch your toes! Developing a direct measure of behavioral regulation in early childhood

Behavioral aspects of self-regulation, including controlling and directing actions, paying attention, and remembering instructions, are critical for successful functioning in preschool and elementary school. In recent years, several direct assessments of these skills have appeared, but few studies provide complete psychometric data and many are not easy to administer. We developed a direct measure of children's behavioral regulation, the Head-to-Toes Task, and report performance of participants aged 36–78 months, including a group of Spanish-speaking children, from two different sites (N = 353; N = 92). We examined construct validity, examiner reliability, sources of variation, and associations between task scores and background characteristics. Results showed that the task was valid, reliable, and demonstrated variability in children's scores. A cross-classified hierarchical growth curve analysis indicated that girls, participants assessed in English, and higher-socioeconomic status (SES) children achieved slightly higher average scores than did boys, Spanish-speaking and lower-SES children, but effect sizes were small. Older participants achieved higher scores than did younger children, and there were no effects for site. Results suggest that the Head-to-Toes Task is an informative and easy-to-administer direct assessment of children's behavioral regulation. We discuss implications for its use in early childhood settings.     

Untangling the effects of shared book reading: Multiple factors and their associations with preschool literacy outcomes

Evidence strongly suggests that shared book reading at home and in preschool is important for young children's development of the foundational skills required for the eventual mastery of decoding and comprehension. Yet the nuances of how learning from book reading might vary across these contexts and with children's skills are not well understood. One hundred and thirty children participating in a longitudinal investigation of literacy development were videotaped reading a storybook with a parent. Children were also videotaped in their 33 preschool classrooms during the instructional book-reading portion of the day. Readings were coded for adult and child contextualized and decontextualized language relating to both decoding and meaning-making skills, and relations between this talk and emergent literacy outcomes were analyzed. Results demonstrate that parents and teachers overwhelmingly focus their book-related talk on meaning-related rather than code-related information, and that the relations between outcomes and talk depend in part on children's initial levels of vocabulary skills. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

合作体验学习法

合作体验学习法（Tribes Learning Communities）是北美学校教育改革比较成功的一种尝试,打破传统的教师为中心的课堂管理模式,创造以学生为中心的课堂氛围,将课堂重心从教师教转到学生学。本文介绍几种在这样的教学指导思想下的教学策略框架,供课改中正在探索的老师们借鉴参考。     

Opening the black box: user-log analyses of children’s e-Book reading and associations with word knowledge

Reading and Writing - Third to fifth graders read an interactive choose-your-own adventure e-Book. User logs recorded their reading behaviors and were used to investigate students’...     

桑螵蛸脂类提取物对铜绿假单胞菌的抗菌活性和抗生物膜作用（英文）

目的:探究桑螵蛸脂类提取物的成分及对铜绿假单胞菌的抗菌和抗生物膜作用。创新点:中国传统中药桑螵蛸一直广泛应用于肾病的治疗,在抗菌领域未见报道,本实验首次证明桑螵蛸脂类提取物对铜绿假单胞菌有明显的抗菌和抗生物膜作用。方法:采用气相色谱-质谱联用技术,测定桑螵蛸脂质提取物的化学成分及其相对比例。采用纸片扩散法和琼脂平板稀释法观察桑螵蛸脂类提取物对铜绿假单胞菌的抑菌效应并测定最小抑制浓度(MIC)。采用结晶紫染色法和扫描电镜(SEM)进行抑制生物被膜的试验。结论:桑螵蛸脂类提取物中含有16种化合物,最丰富的成分分别是倍半萜类化合物、单萜和微量芳香族化合物。桑螵蛸脂类提取物对铜绿假单胞菌的MIC为4 mg/ml,对铜绿假单胞菌生物被膜的抑制作用明显。     

The Discourses of Social Justice in Education

What the existing organization of schooling presupposes...is that in consumption terms, the world consists of equally powerful individual actors. Such, of course, is not the case in a hierarchically ordered capitalist system, where labour and capital, and indeed different forms of both, have differential access to resources enabling them to consume. By largely intervening only in provisional relations, the state fails to recognize the central dynamic of education ‐‐ that provision and consumption are not coterminous. In essence, state intervention does not go far enough. (Lynch, 1989, p.127)     

Radical feminism,humanism and women's studies

As it is not generally understood, radical feminism is first defined in terms of the concept of patriarchy. Feminists themselves now characterize radical feminism as involving sexism, views of the superiority of women over men, and the goal to establish a separate world without men, a gynocracy. Radical feminism is then contrasted with humanism and seen to be antihumanistic. Feminists themselves further claim that Women's Studies in universities and colleges is basically radical feminism. Thus, ironically, such studies which are supported for the purpose of ending sexism are, in fact, creating it. One solution is to establish Women's Studies on the philosophies of the feminists, who are moving toward what I term humanistic feminism.The author has published over twenty books (in numerous languages), ninety-five professional journal articles, regularly lectures in English, German and French at European and American universities. His special areas of research are emotion, philosophical psychology, philosophy of language and philosophy of education (specifically, teaching young people to be critical—five books—on philosophy for children).I wish to thank the following for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper: Dr. Carol McMillan (England), Dr. Ann Johnson (University of Wisconsin), Dr. Karen Kirst-Ashman (University of Wisconsin), Gisa Bohlen (Germany), and Carolyn Lesley Shibles (Wisconsin).