The May Center for Early Childhood Education: description of a continuum of services model for children with autism

Children with autism have complex learning and behavioural challenges which typically require comprehensive educational and therapeutic services. In recent years there have been many developments in the philosophy, methodology, and scope of intervention for this population. Factors such as early intervention, criterion‐referenced assessment, the combination of applied behaviour analysis and developmentally appropriate practices (DAP), parent training, and public school inclusive education have been noteworthy. This article describes a comprehensive continuum of services model for children with autism developed by a human services agency in Massachusetts which incorporates these and additional empirically‐based approaches. Service components, methodologies, and program objectives are described including representative summary data. The article concludes with a discussion of educational, therapeutic, and research issues which address “best practice” approaches toward children with autism.     

Children and Place: Stories We Have, Stories We Need

Given existing curricula, instructional and assessment practices, teacher preparation programs, and multicultural education approaches, schools can be unhelpful places for students who are not at least middle class and politically white. Critical theory offers a range of conceptual frameworks for understanding and addressing these injustices but teachers find the ideas difficult to learn or to practice in classrooms. Increased attention to the use of stories is suggested to support individual and collective transformation and growth for teachers, students, and communities.     

资深专家谈图片编辑

在美国的中小城市,一些中小报刊对版面图片的要求一般不是很重高,图片编辑的工作重心以处理商业图片为主要内容,商业图片的要求比较多,大多用在广告上面,读者所能看到的图片大多是以广告的形式体现在报刊中.     

Literacy,social justice and inclusion: a large-scale design experiment to narrow the attainment gap linked to poverty

This paper describes the development and use of a tool designed to support educators to use a broad range of professional knowledge to enable inclusive literacy teaching that delivers social justice and narrows the attainment gap associated with poverty. The tool encourages teachers to formally recognise and act on a wide range of evidence about students as learners and to design their literacy curriculum and teaching according to this evidence. The research operationalised a Capabilities approach to inclusion and a design experiment methodology, working with 48 schools, 650 teachers and 12,783 students. A paired sample T-test showed a significant improvement in standardised age scores and that the ‘tail of underachievement’ shortened for all social groups. Goodman and Kruskal's gamma showed a weakening of the relationship between poverty and attainment. This gives cause for cautious optimism that attainment gaps associated with economic disadvantage can be narrowed if educators act on a wider range of evidence in literacy teaching, and if education researchers develop and trial tools to support them.     

Learning Through Benchmarking: Developing a Relational, Prospective Approach to Benchmarking ICT in Learning and Teaching

This study discusses benchmarking the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in teaching and learning between two universities with different missions: one an Australian campus-based metropolitan university and the other a British distance-education provider. It argues that the differences notwithstanding, it is possible to develop a useful and rigorous benchmarking relationship between such institutions that draws on previous benchmarking research and improves the approach by benchmarking key processes, not just outcomes. By defining a process used to embed ICT in subjects and using this as a focus of the benchmarking, a relational and prospective approach to quality assurance for ICT can be clarified, one which promotes coherence amongst the benchmarks that can be used for the purposes of improvement.