Head Start Teacher Perceptions on Organizational Support of Adult–Child Interactions

Early Childhood Education Journal - Head Start (HS) teachers are central to providing constructive adult–child interactions that prepare preschool-age students for school and future...     

Justice,belonging and trust among Israeli middle school students

Contending that justice experiences at school transmit messages about the wider society and affects students' attitudes and behaviour, we investigated the effects of students' sense of distributive and (school) procedural justice on their sense of belonging to school and on their social and institutional trust. The study was carried out among about 5000 eighth and ninth graders in a national sample of 48 middle schools in Israel in the 2010–2011 school year. The two‐level data—individual and school—were analyzed by HLM7 (Hierarchical Linear Model). Findings basically support our hypotheses: sense of distributive justice, especially, with regard to teachers'–students' relation positively affected students' sense of belonging and their trust in people and formal institutions; and school (aggregate) sense of procedural justice added to these positive effects. However, these attitudes were also dependent on sectorial affiliation (Jewish secular, Jewish religious, Arab), which explained a considerable portion of between‐school variation in student attitudes.     

Body Donation,Teaching, and Research in Dissection Rooms in Spain in Times of Covid-19

The state of alarm due to Covid-19 pandemic in Spain stopped all educational and most university research activities. The Spanish Anatomical Society (SAE) Consensus Expert Group on Body Donations piloted a study based on a questionnaire to know the status of body donations and dissection activities during the lockdown, as well as the future implications of Covid-19 pandemic for body donation programs and anatomy teaching. The questionnaire results show that Spanish Universities refused body donations and stopped all dissection research and teaching. The Covid-19 expected influence on anatomy teaching was referred to the increase in teaching workforce and resources required to apply the new safety measures to future practical activities, as well as to prepare and adapt teaching material for online-only programs. The application of reinforced safety measures was expected to be perceived by the respondent's students as a gain in teaching quality, while the transformation of the anatomy courses in online-only programs will be perceived as a quality decrease. The respondent's concerns about future institutional implications of the pandemic were related to increased costs of the adaptation of the facilities and the reinforced preventive measures, as well as the eventual decrease in donations. The complete lockdown applied to dissection rooms was not justified by scientific evidence and represented a break of the confidence deposed in the institutions by the donors. A consensus is required for the adoption of a renewed, comprehensive protocol for present and future body donations including the evidence Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to create.     

Education for sustainable agriculture: a typology of the role of teaching farms in achieving learning goals and objectives

Teaching farms have recently gained popularity, but they are often expensive venues per student credit hour. It is therefore important they are used effectively. This research explored why faculty members use teaching farms, their goals and objectives with regard to the farm, and how they integrate teaching farms into curriculum. Twenty interviews were completed with faculty representing 15 institutions. A combined inductive and deductive approach was used to analyze data. The result was a typology of the roles of teaching farms in achieving educational goals and objectives. Four types of roles emerged: enhancement, competency, exploration, and foundation. Three of the four types reflect one of three models of higher education prevalent in the US. Our research suggests a better understanding of educational theory and pedagogy, combined with a firm appreciation of the different models of higher education could significantly enhance the quality of the learning experience provided on teaching farms.     

Toward Effective and Compelling Instruction for High School eCommerce Students: Results from a Small Field Study

This paper describes an instructional development effort to create effective and compelling instruction for eCommerce students. Results from a small field study inform the development project. Four high school students in an eCommerce course completed the standalone tutorial developed to teach them how to create a web page in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The four participants were also interviewed in an attempt to determine what motivates them to learn. Researcher observations of completed web pages indicated that the tutorial helped the four participants learn introductory HTML tags and, except for one revealing instance, they mastered the content without instructor assistance. Future work to develop an automated system for determining and correcting learner misconceptions evident in dysfunctional hyperlinks would provide additional support to learners. Lastly, this paper discusses implications of the field study results for the design and implementation of effective and compelling instruction.     

Digital Europe 2030: Designing scenarios for ICT in future governance and policy making

The article outlines a set of visionary scenarios on how the European society could develop by 2030 by using advanced ICT tools and modelling techniques and integrating them into governance processes and policy making mechanisms. These scenarios have been designed through a foresight exercise conducted by the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) as part of the CROSSROAD Project, a support action of the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme. After presenting the conceptual framework and methodological approach followed, the scenario design framework developed and the resulting views of what the European Information Society might be by 2030 are presented. The article follows with a discussion of the implications of the scenarios design in terms of key areas of expected change and grand challenges to be addressed. It concludes by identifying policy challenges and proposing possible future research directions in the domain of ICT for governance and policy modelling needed to build a truly open Digital Europe twenty years from now.     

The role of letter knowledge acquisition ability on children's decoding and word identification: Evidence from an artificial orthography

Background

Letter knowledge is crucial in the first stages of reading development. It supports learning letter-sound mappings and the identification of the letters that make up words. Previous studies have investigated the longitudinal impact of early letter knowledge on children's further word reading abilities. This study employed an artificial orthography learning paradigm to explore whether the rate of letter learning modulates children's reading and word identification skills.

Methods

In an initial training phase, 8-year-old Spanish children (N = 30) learned nine artificial letters and their corresponding sounds (two vowels and six consonants). The letter learning rate was set according to the number of attempts needed to name at least seven letters (i.e., 80% correct). These ranged from 1 to 4. In a second training phase, children visualized words made up of the trained letters while listening to their pronunciations. Some words included a context-dependent syllable (i.e., leading to grapheme-to-phoneme inconsistency), and others had an inconsistent syllable (i.e., phoneme-to-grapheme inconsistency). The post-test consisted of a reading aloud task and an orthographic-choice task in which the target word was presented with a distractor equal to the target except for the substitution of a letter.

Results

Children showed a high accuracy rate in the post-test tasks, regardless of whether words contained context-dependent or inconsistent syllables. Critically, the letter learning rate predicted both reading aloud and identification accuracy of words in the artificial orthography.

Conclusions

We provide evidence for the vital role of letter knowledge acquisition ability in children's decoding and word identification skills. Training children on this ability facilitates serial letter-sound mapping and word identification skills. Artificial orthography paradigms are optimal for exploring children's potential to achieve specific literacy skills.