Afro-Caribbean Immigrant Faculty Experiences in the American Academy: Voices of an Invisible Black Population

Afro-Caribbean immigrants have been an integral part of the history and shaping of the United States since the early 1900s. This current study explores the experiences of five Afro-Caribbean faculty members at traditionally White institutions of higher education. Despite the historical presence and influence of Afro-Caribbean communities and the efforts within education systems to address the needs of Afro-Caribbean constituents, Afro-Caribbean faculty members continue to be rendered indiscernible in higher education and to be frequently and erroneously perceived as African–Americans. The study examines the lived experiences of these individuals in the hegemonic White spaces they occupy at their institutions with both White and Black populations. Through their narratives, issues of stereotyping, microaggression, and isolation are addressed. The participants also offer solutions to address these issues by university administrators, department heads, faculty development professionals, diversity officers, policy makers, and other stakeholders. The voices in this study shed light on an overlooked, misunderstood, and under-researched population within our faculty ranks in the American Academy.     

Current conceptions of literacy – insights from work with children and older learners with sensory needs

There have been many efforts to conceptualise literacy, both in terms of its essence and component parts, but it has proved difficult to define. This paper considers work that is undertaken with children and older learners with sensory needs in order to promote the early stages of literacy. Recent government initiatives aimed at fostering literacy development have caused teachers of children with sensory needs to re-examine their practice. The paper discusses early literacy as part of children's attempts to communicate and describes children with sensory needs engaging in a range of activities that are termed 'literacy' by those working with them. By taking into account these activities, the authors endeavour to throw light on the broader questions around concepts of literacy.     

OFSTED's Spiritual Dimension: An analytical audit of inspection reports

The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) continues to judge schools in England and Wales to be generally unsuccessful in providing opportunities to pupils and students for spiritual development. This article reports on a study of OFSTED inspection reports for Norfolk state secondary schools. The study aimed to understand what was going wrong with spiritual development and how things might be improved. The study noted OFSTED's guidance to its inspectors on spiritual development, but then audited inspectors' assessments of spiritual development as they saw it in the field. After a close analysis of the reports the study concluded that inconsistencies in inspectors' reporting, particularly of spirituality across the broader curriculum, meant that both the mechanisms for assessment and for raising standards were not clear. The article discusses possible reasons for that lack of clarity and suggests that increased dialogue between inspectors and teachers might help raise standards in this area.     

The stability of kindergarten teachers’ effectiveness: A generalizability study comparing the Framework For Teaching and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System

To meet recent accountability mandates, school districts are implementing assessment frameworks to document teachers’ effectiveness. Observational assessments play a key role in this process, albeit without compelling evidence of their psychometric rigor. Using a sample of kindergarten teachers, we employed Generalizability theory to investigate (across teachers, raters, and lessons) the stability of scores obtained with two different observation measures: The CLASS K-3 and the FFT. We conducted a series of Decision studies to document (for both measures’ constituent domains) the number of lessons per teacher and raters per lesson that would justify the use of observation scores for high stakes decisions. Acceptable, stable scores for individual-level decisions about teachers may generally require more raters and lessons than is typically used in practice (1–2 raters and fewer than 3 lessons). The considerable variability of observation-based scores raises concerns about either measure’s appropriateness for making individual or group decisions about teachers’ effectiveness.     

Disruptive Behaviour in School,Personality Characteristics and Heart Rate (HR) Levels in 7‐ to 9‐year‐old Boys

Disruptive behaviour, as assessed by teachers, is reported as being consistently related to low base heart rates and low reactivity to mild stress. To date, most investigations have used mainstream school samples of boys within the 11‐16 age range approximately. It has been suggested that the predicted low base heart rates for antisocial children may be reversed in younger children. Present findings do not confirm such a trend in boys aged 7 to 9 years. Their responses were similar to those of older children. The implications for further research and the management of children in school are discussed.     

Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: the truth about false belief

Research on theory of mind increasingly encompasses apparently contradictory findings. In particular, in initial studies, older preschoolers consistently passed false-belief tasks-a so-called "definitive" test of mental-state understanding-whereas younger children systematically erred. More recent studies, however, have found evidence of false-belief understanding in 3-year-olds or have demonstrated conditions that improve children's performance. A meta-analysis was conducted (N = 178 separate studies) to address the empirical inconsistencies and theoretical controversies. When organized into a systematic set of factors that vary across studies, false-belief results cluster systematically with the exception of only a few outliers. A combined model that included age, country of origin, and four task factors (e.g., whether the task objects were transformed in order to deceive the protagonist or not) yielded a multiple R of .74 and an R2 of .55; thus, the model accounts for 55% of the variance in false-belief performance. Moreover, false-belief performance showed a consistent developmental pattern, even across various countries and various task manipulations: preschoolers went from below-chance performance to above-chance performance. The findings are inconsistent with early competence proposals that claim that developmental changes are due to tasks artifacts, and thus disappear in simpler, revised false-belief tasks; and are, instead, consistent with theoretical accounts that propose that understanding of belief, and, relatedly, understanding of mind, exhibit genuine conceptual change in the preschool years.     

Evaluation of the implementation, use and effects of a computerised management information system in English secondary schools

Very little empirical large-scale research has been carried out on the use of IT in the management and administration of schools despite of the fact that schools all over the world have adopted such IT based systems. The move in many countries towards autonomous school management will further require the use of these systems. Sophisticated computerised school information systems (SISs) will have to provide school-based information relevant to the development of policies in areas where schools used merely to follow governmental guidelines. If such systems are to be designed and used to full effect, knowledge is urgently needed on the implementation, use and effects of established computerised SISs. The large-scale research project in England, reported here, goes some way towards filling this gap in our knowledge.     

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.