A Quasi-Experiment Examining Expressive and Receptive Vocabulary Knowledge of Preschool Head Start Children Using Mobile Media Apps

This study examined the efficacy of using different types of mobile media apps to increase the receptive and expressive vocabulary development of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old preschool children living in economically disadvantaged communities. Children and teachers in four Head Start classrooms participated in the quasi-experimental study, which included an 8-week intervention in which the children interacted with one of two types of apps: one classroom used four scaffolding-like vocabulary apps for an average of 1.8 h per day (n?=?16) and one classroom used four open-ended vocabulary apps for an average of 1.3 h per day (n?=?15). Two classrooms served as comparison groups (n?=?18; n?=?14) which used apps that were chosen by the Head Start program with no specific instructional method for approximately 1 h per day. Children’s vocabulary was assessed pre- and post-intervention using the PPVT-4, the EVT-2, and iPad Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Assessments. Using a repeated measures analysis of variance with split plot analysis, children who used scaffolding-like vocabulary apps performed statistically significantly higher on the PPVT-4 than children who used open-ended vocabulary apps. There were no significant differences between groups on the EVT-2. The study contributed to the literature on teacher instruction of utilizing scaffolding-like apps to increase preschool vocabulary knowledge.     

Information literacy and flexible delivery: Creating a conceptual framework and model

Despite the growing recognition of the importance of information literacy education, there are few working models for curriculum integration within the Australian higher education sector. Librarians, in conjunction with faculty at Central Queensland University, developed a framework that assist in the planning and evaluation of information literacy programs.     

Individual performance across motoric self-regulation tasks are not correlated for pet dogs

Inhibitory control, the ability to restrain a prepotent but ineffective response in a given context, is thought to be indicative of a species’ cognitive abilities. This ability ranges from “basic” motoric self-regulation to more complex abilities such as self-control. During the current study, we investigated the motoric self-regulatory abilities of 30 pet dogs using four well-established cognitive tasks – the A-not-B Bucket task, the Cylinder task, the Detour task, and the A-not-B Barrier task – administered in a consistent context. One main goal of the study was to determine whether the individual-level performance would correlate across tasks, supporting that these tasks measure similar components of motoric self-regulation. Dogs in our study were quite successful during tasks requiring them to detour around transparent barriers (i.e., the Cylinder and Detour tasks), but were less successful with tasks requiring the production of a new response (i.e., A-not-B Bucket and A-not-B Barrier tasks). However, individual dog performance did not correlate across tasks, suggesting these well-established tasks likely measure different inhibitory control abilities, or are strongly influenced by differential task demands. Our results also suggest other aspects such as perseveration or properties of the apparatus may need to be carefully examined in order to better understand canine motoric self-regulation or inhibitory control more generally.     

Israel's legal deposit law in global context

Nearly half a century after it first came into effect, Israel's legal deposit law has been amended to make its provisions in accordance with and appropriate for the digital age. Other considerations guiding legislators were the necessity to adjust the law in response to laws (particularly Basic Laws) passed since the original deposit law was enacted. This paper traces the legislative history of the law through primary documents and compares it to similar laws passed in other countries over the past decade. It concludes that while the deposit of electronic materials was the primary justification for the new legislation, the legislators failed to craft the language of the new Books Act to reflect this goal. While some elements of the new law are a vast improvement over the older legislation, the Books Act is not suitable for meeting the challenges of preservation and documentation of cultural heritage in electronic formats.     

Working with teachers to promote children’s participation through pupil‐led research

Enabling children and young people to act as researchers is increasingly viewed as useful in supporting their increased “participation” within settings where they live, work or receive services. This paper reports upon a project conducted by two educational psychologists (EPs) with two primary school class groups, in which the children and their teachers were provided with direct teaching and guidance to develop and undertake their own school‐based research projects. The work of each class group produced significant developments of educational provision across the whole school, showing that the EPs’ work had directly enabled the children to “make a positive contribution”. In addition, teachers and psychologists observed several social, cognitive and personal benefits to the children brought about by their engagement in the processes of questioning, data gathering, analysis, knowledge generation, and dissemination. The authors emphasise the potentially valuable contribution of EPs in promoting children and young people’s understanding and application of research skills, and in working directly alongside teachers within the classroom. Furthermore, the project represents a successful example of EPs and teachers engaging in joint direct work with children.     

Equity-based sustainability and ecocentric management: Creating more ecologically just sport organization practices

Recognizing the shared responsibility all entities with a vested interest in keeping the Earth habitable possess, the authors propose ways in which sport organizations can take action by incorporating ecocentric management principles within their organizational practices and thus become more ecologically just. First, by drawing upon the tenets of the systems thinking paradigm and the four levels of thinking model, the underlying beliefs and values guiding current practices within sport organizations are identified. Next, the authors offer a series of propositions to suggest that by adopting an equity-based perspective, recognizing the interdependent relationships between humans and the natural environment, and acknowledging the manner in which sport organizations hinder the opportunities of the natural environment to thrive, sport organizations can contribute to the health of the planet and all of its inhabitants through their own organizational practices. Additionally, sport organizations can also serve as ecologically just exemplars for organizations in other industries to emulate.     

Comparing cognition by integrating concept learning,proactive interference,and list memory

This article describes an approach for training a variety of species to learn the abstract concept of same/different, which in turn forms the basis for testing proactive interference and list memory. The stimulus set for concept-learning training was progressively doubled from 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 . . . to 1,024 different pictures with novel-stimulus transfer following learning. All species fully learned the same/different abstract concept: capuchin and rhesus monkeys learned more readily than pigeons; nutcrackers and magpies were at least equivalent to monkeys and transferred somewhat better following initial training sets. A similar task using the 1,024-picture set plus delays was used to test proactive interference on occasional trials. Pigeons revealed greater interference with 10-s than with 1-s delays, whereas delay time had no effect on rhesus monkeys, suggesting that the monkeys’ interference was event based. This same single-item same/different task was expanded to a 4-item list memory task to test animal list memory. Humans were tested similarly with lists of kaleidoscope pictures. Delays between the list and test were manipulated, resulting in strong initial recency effects (i.e., strong 4th-item memory) at short delays and changing to a strong primacy effect (i.e., strong 1st-item memory) at long delays (pigeons 0-s to 10-s delays; monkeys 0-s to 30-s delays; humans 0-s to 100-s delays). Results and findings are discussed in terms of these species’ cognition and memory comparisons, evolutionary implications, and future directions for testing other species in these synergistically related tasks.