Relations among child care quality, teacher behavior, children's play activities, emotional security, and cognitive activity in child care

Eight hundred forty children (435 girls) enrolled in full-time, center-based child care participated in the study. Children ranged in age from 10 to 70 months. Sixty-six percent of the children were European American, the remainder African American. Children's play activities and cognitive activities as well as their relationships with caregivers were observed within the child care setting. The study tested the prediction that variation in children's cognitive activities could be directly and indirectly explained by child care quality, positive social interaction with teachers, and children's play activities and attachment security with their child care teachers. The prediction was examined and at least partially supported in eight subsamples of infant-toddler and preschool age European American and African American children in subsidized and nonsubsidized child care. Specifically, in seven of the eight subsamples, 15 to 30% of the variability in children's cognitive activities could be predicted from positive social interaction with teachers, attachment security, and participation in creative play activities.     

Discipline cost indices and their applications

Differences in institutional reporting and accounting often reduce the comparability in expenditure data among institutions. This particularly affects interinstitutional comparisons of discipline unit costs, that is, expenditures per credit hour or expenditures per weighted credit hour. To overcome this comparability problem, discipline cost indices have been developed to permit accurate interinstitutional comparisons of relative costs among disciplines. This paper documents how discipline cost indices have been derived, using expenditure data collected from five peer institutions, and how these indices have been implemented in a research university's budget allocation process. Institutional researchers and academic budget planners are the intended audience.Presented at the Thirty-first Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, San Francisco, May 26–29, 1991.     

It's Déjà vu all over again: Assessment in Great Britain

The author gratefully acknowledges the Fulbright U.S.-U.K. Academic Administrator Fellowship program for making his work in Great Britain possible and Dr. Peter Findlay at Portsmouth Polytechnic in England for his editorial assistance.     

Disabled Readers' Performance on Tasks of Phonological Processing,Rapid Naming,and Letter Knowledge Before and After Kindergarten

The importance of early identification of children at risk for reading failure is clearly established in the literature. The purpose of this longitudinal retrospective study was to further define the relationship between the development of prereading skills and later reading outcome in two groups of children; a group of reading‐disabled children and a group of their normally reading peers. Children's alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, and rapid naming skills were explored at the beginning of kindergarten and again prior to first grade as a function of later reading outcomes. Results indicate that differences found between the groups in all measures at prekindergarten age diminish by prefirst grade with the exception of phonological awareness abilities. Findings have direct implications for screening children at risk for reading difficulties and the time‐sensitive nature of these tasks during the preliteracy period.