Enhancing academic engagement: Providing opportunities for responding and influencing students to choose to respond

Although educators often provide opportunities for students to engage in active academic responding, in many situations, students either cannot or will not respond. In the current article, we analyze the reasons students fail to respond. Practical procedures educators can use to prevent can't do problems are provided. Won't do problems are conceptualized as choice behaviors. Both applied and theoretical research on choice behavior provides the basis for recommendations designed to enhance the probability of students choosing to engage in active accurate academic (AAA) responding. Such procedures can increase skill development and achievement while decreasing inappropriate behaviors that are incompatible with AAA responding. School psychologists may utilize this information during the initial stages of collaborative problem solving (e.g., consultation) to help conceptualize problems. This conceptualization may then guide the assessment and intervention processes. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 42: 389–403, 2005.     

Sound Localization and Sensitivity to Interaural Time Differences in Human Infants

The role of interaural time differences in infants' sound localization was investigated. One experiment on free-field sound localization corroborated previous findings that the minimum audible angle changes substantially toward the end of the first half year after birth, and 3 experiments explored interaural time discrimination in that age range. The first of these 3 experiments used an adaptive psychophysical procedure, showing that infants responded appropriately in a sound lateralization task that provides a direct measure of interaural time discrimination. The other 2 experiments improved on the psychophysical procedure by taking into account the ceiling level on performance in the task. Infants aged 16, 20, and 28 weeks had thresholds in the range of 50 to 75 microsec, with no apparent age difference. These thresholds were much lower than would be predicted from studies of free-field sound localization, indicating that sensitivity to interaural time differences is not a limiting factor for the precision of sound localization in this age range. Instead, age-related changes in free-field sound localization may reflect the need to integrate across different localization cues and to calibrate the changing values of cues due to head growth.     

Progress and performance in National Literacy Strategy classrooms

This paper presents evidence from an ESRC funded research study into the implementation of the Literacy Hour in small rural schools in England. It supports evidence from national UK data that progress in literacy was made during the first year in which the Literacy Hour was operative. However, evidence from this small‐scale study shows progress being different in each class. Evidence is also presented to show that reading scores provide only a partial picture and that progress in writing may be evident in different classes. It is argued that following the Literacy Hour is not enough but that how teachers teach and the tasks they set during this classroom time have implications for the kind of progress made.     

Latino Maternal Literacy Beliefs and Practices Mediating Socioeconomic Status and Maternal Education Effects in Predicting Child Receptive Vocabulary

Research Findings: This study investigated the association between Mexican American maternal education and socioeconomic status (SES) and child vocabulary as mediated by parental reading beliefs, home literacy environment (HLE), and parent–child shared reading frequency. As part of a larger study, maternal reports of education level, SES, HLE, and reading beliefs along with child expressive and receptive vocabulary were collected for 252 mothers and their preschool children from 2 demographically similar school districts in 1 county. Correlations were moderate and positive, with higher levels of maternal education related to family income, HLE, book availability, and children’s expressive and receptive vocabulary. Consistent with long-standing evidence, maternal education and SES were predictors of children’s vocabulary, albeit indirectly through maternal reading beliefs, HLE, and reading frequency. Practice or Policy: Findings extend current knowledge about specific pathways through which social class variables impact children’s language. Policy implications, directions for future research, and study limitations are noted.     

Telematics Applied to the Training of Teachers: a survey via video‐conferencing across Europe

In January 1996 the European Union funded three projects within the Telematics Programme DG XIII_c to focus on Telematics in Teacher Training. One project with the same title, T3, will apply telematics within teacher training for over 4000 teachers in seven European countries over three years. Part of the work within 1996 performed a needs analysis for multimedia communications across the partner teacher training institutions in seven European countries using enhanced desk top video conferencing.

Teacher educators were informed of case studies already developed in the UK and aspects were demonstrated to them. Their views on the transferability of such activities to their courses and countries are documented in this paper. This research took place using the medium of enhanced desk top video conferencing. This application of Telematics is seen as an extension of the common practice of interviewing by telephone, permitting more information to be shared between teacher trainers in the seven teacher training institutions. The research showed that all countries would use the Telematic applications described and many were able to contribute complementary cases of their own.     

Numerical discrimination by rats using sequential auditory stimuli

Three rats were trained under a discrimination procedure in which responding was reinforced only following the repeated presentation of three bursts of white noise (S+). S? consisted of presentations of either two or four bursts of noise. All animals responded significantly more in the presence of S+ and, in two cases, showed lower response rates to both “2” and “4” stimuli. Responding by the third animal revealed differentiation between S+ and the stimulus “2,” but no reliable suppression to stimulus “4.” The present instances of discriminative control by the stimulus “3” replicate Fernandes and Church’s (1982) demonstration of control by sequential auditory stimuli in the rat. Moreover, because the present procedure involves adjacent S? values both greater as well as less than S+, these results extend our knowledge of the rat’s abilities with sequential auditory stimuli: Rats are capable of making intermediate numerical discriminations based upon something other than a simple many-versus-few dichotomy.     

The coping mechanisms of children with school refusal

There are a variety of ways in which the children of today cope with the stresses of modern life. This paper examines the mechanisms used by a sample of children who had established school refusal and found their mechanisms of coping to be quite different from those of a control group. The findings raise the question as to whether there is a connection between social isolation and poor socialisation in the aetiology of school refusal, and suggest a possible mechanism by which such problems are compounded by enmeshed family relationships. This work also indicates that some protection against the need to refuse school can be gained by establishing good social relationships, focusing upon improving coping strategies and increasing the young person's sense of belonging.     

Understanding social bonds during science inquiry using V-Note software

Cultural Studies of Science Education - Amy Goods’s software review article V-Note: A video analysis tool for teacher | researchers stimulated our interest in adopting this software to...